Seers and Dreamers
I want to get back to dreaming, you know? This morning I put on red lipstick and my black sunglasses and we, my daughter and I, drove to the Italian Centre in my Cinquecento and bought pasta for our pantry and then sat in the cafe and drank a splendid coffee in the bright sun under blue sky on the patio which resides on the edge of a parking lot. I’d put on all my jewelry, all my rings, earrings, even. We took no photos but I came home thinking maybe the world isn’t that that terrible. Maybe we’ll make it through. Maybe we can be gorgeous at Italian grocery stores at the end of the world. Maybe we can dream little dreams.
I came home and set up this still life (didn’t actually drink the wine though…yet). And then I went to my poetry shelf, to keep up the happy buzz and took a book outside and sat in the sun and read and jotted down a bunch of phrases that made me excited.
The book? I keep missing C.D. Wright who left us in 2016. Once in a while you’ll google an author you love to see if they have another volume coming out, but this won’t happen. I took her book with the gloriously long title off the shelf instead: The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All.
And these are the phrases I copied out into a notebook, which almost seem to make a poem themselves, or maybe they’re a call to action, or maybe they’re just words with zest (just!), or maybe they're a reminder to create sparks whenever you can, and to listen to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, (which she mentions at one point), and to write and share and enjoy the work of others, and fall in love with it and wax poetic about anyone whose work you happen to love, or anyone really — their gestures, their annoying beautiful tics that you will miss when they’re gone. So:
“Poetry is speech by someone who is in trouble.”
“…I advance determined, if not precisely ready, to do battle with what an overly cited Jungian describes as the anesthetized heart, the heart that does not react.”
“Are we still seers and dreamers.”
“Of those who can afford to be gentle I’ll say it again…”
“Poets will have to summon a fierceness equal to the current environment. We will have to meet irrational force with savage insight.”
“Mostly, poets will fail. The structures will fail. Words will fumble and fall. But in so failing and fumbling poets refuse to be accomplices.”
“Poetry faces the end without obfuscation. But much is to be said for “going down fighting.””
She quotes Arthur Sze on poetry: “…it is a crucial vehicle by which we apprehend the urgency and precarious splendour of existence.”
I could go on. But perhaps it’s nice to end on the splendour of existence. To remember that.
