It's all pink and gold this minute. And so many birds: one that doesn't sound possible, like a big smooth rock banging another big smooth rock. And the handprint on my window is visible but fading because the sun's angle is right, but rising. And the tea is on. And though I worked all weekend, I am underprepared for all sorts of things today. Including getting dressed. And it's the last week of classes in a term that hasn't been warm enough in the mornings to have class outdoors. So I should've told them to bring sweaters and coats. Because I don't want to be inside.
***
It occurred to me recently when Jerry Harp happened to read a poem about an encounter with water moccasins the day after I'd dreamt of snakes, and when Michael Martone made a reference at dinner the other night--"essentially drinking their blood"--to Trojan battles or something like that after I'd heard it before phrased precisely that way--"drinking their blood"--years ago from a poet who tried to teach me what is good about teaching poetry,
it occurred to me that if you have a literary life and if your "literary" is of the mythic sort, there is often only the mythic reference to look to for meaning--the recurring (and that's how myths are made) mythic frame of reference. That is, chances are, there will be a lot of snakes and a lot of blood (and a lot of Hume and a lot of Blake) all over the place, and it's no coincidence when they recur, not really, though it--coincidence--always seems to announce (like a little sacred reiteration of something important, something reminding you) "hey there is a God."
And funny I didn't notice before: not a sign of God, but a sign of more signs, the merest function of a common language. How else do you expect people like you to talk to you?
***
I know. This is no revelation to you. I should've worked this out like about four years ago. Or when I was ten and couldn't believe in what all the fainting was about.
***
I said give me an image for "fairytale childhood" (this, from a poem by a student who sits nearby)--and make it concrete (they say blanky, they say teddy bear, they say handlebar tassels)--and make it one that generates all the associations we have in the poem (they say milk, they say Betsy-Wetsy)--loss of innocence, eroticism, romantic fantasy, waiting, (they say nothing)--what about "girl" I say, why not that--? No, they say, we don't see it. One stays after to ask why don't I read the way you read. I say I am teaching you to read and write how I read and write but there are other ways, your way for example. I don't say I am teaching you a language, that's all. Because I don't think of it.
***
He said what's good about teaching poetry is drinking in that young hot energy for the work and the showing up power and the unjaded questioning of you and not themselves. At least until they start to get it. And that's what I've been doing with you, you know? Drinking your blood? I didn't say, because I didn't get it, hey I thought they drank the blood of their enemies?
***
Fluency, signs of more signs: I can imagine their infinity, the same recurrances--coincidences--moving through "milk" and through "blood" so as to make them inextricable in a poem (fixated on nursing/vampirism), the same making them nearly the same as the ones recurring in the handprint on my morning window and the red paint handprints on the walls of the vandalized room I photographed weeks ago. It is only where I see something meaningful announce itself that fluency ends. God has a way of putting a stop to the play of signification. There is no questioning God. Only the face of God.
***
Annunciation: I am on the porch, typing, watching little winged things drift past the evening sun which in a minute will set past the treeline and the houses in front of me. Romulus watches birds and waits for one to land near. Those are grackles, I think, but I don't know for sure and would be no more convinced if one said "hey, there are grackles." Or even if one said "cats and birds are enemies."
***
But I am reluctant to give up the sacred, the idea that repetition is announcement, is reminder towards rememory, is ceremonial poem, occasional poem, mythic poem: elegy as well as funeral. And not because I am consoled--I am not consoled--but because giving up the ghost in the word negates the beauty of what is repeatable and repeating as well as the beauty of past things imposing on me now wrapped in a blanky on the porch as I have been before when the sun is past the houses in front of me, and the coherence of things I photograph to which I have no words I can apply, and my conviction that on the expressive face of it I get up in the morning to see what I can make of what comes next. That's yet a conversation.
***
