I want to be brave, to tell the truth. Salinger's dead and his quote that led me through the first phase of submission--submitting to my novel just to the idea of it again and again telling the truth--comes to me comes to me comes to me again. I think about poetry, the first language I have spoken began when I was 11 and my voice first was took, but I think about my journals, too, I got them all out this morning from a box they littered my floor but looked like gold, like the backroom of the Queen's palace, the one other side of her sitting room beyond her grand parlor even on the other side of the place she goes to sleep, kept hidden where no one else gets to see, only herself, her magic potions dust and curtains kept there, the fire by her bed, the lace and all that is bitter and sweet, the lover she sometimes lets enter and slumber by her side.
And Wordsworth showing up again and again, in meditation yesterday in the morning and later notioned back to his willowy romance by the end of the day and so It sings and sings again we have given our hearts away a sordid boon & always the inaudible line that taunts me beyond there: Will you return, none too soon? And I get it I hear You this, this Thing in me, this Impulse driven me as long as I have record, long as I have me to look back upon--so I never took it seriously? So that I never did? I know what it means to have to delve the depths of me, to have to go beyond to see what I can see. Cmon fucking Innisfree?? How much that wrenched act detests me and yet that is it, is always the movement, the Decesnt-tion lingered there in my soul & on my meditation chair Fleurs de Mal and it no wonder he too bemoans this, The Irrereparable: this long Remorse. And then I laugh!! I laugh with fangs caught dead in this winter cold the freeze meant to flame provincial heat, my teeth meant to gleem. Of course his Muse is Sorceress, of course the wound distinct likened to the back- ended pain, archerer with no arrows left but sleeping adeptness swift and certain should ever it be praised: Wake Up! Woman. O sorceress, O Goddess, both blessing and cursed both wicked, and full of hymns. I got the green journal out, had to dig a long long while it was all the way to the bottom of the box. And of course there what I am looking for is the essay first wrote, green journal one that came from Kelly in the late summer of 2002, out of college when first I decided for good, this is it this is it so shall I be...so am I a Writer.
And instead what I tumbled upon not even knowing it was there yet again the force of Him. And so this is what I am left with, always to reconcile: where are the Voices, where are the sleeping hymns? No no no Kelly not where, but what. O woman, deep down in Who I Am. And tale of my own martyr, my own post held: Victim. My own sin. In meditation this morning it was this Truth meant to tell. It's like the memories of fires that burnt me are still that close. I want to tell about everytime I put it down, threw away my purple boots, threw away my leather jacket, left it all out by the dump.
I want to tell about why and how I keep picking it back up.
Journals and letters and poems and so much heart, even when I let it go it's still all there--I think about volunteering at the Family Support Center in Kent so long ago. The first teaching job they had to force me in to I didn't study education and especially not ESL. That night in the country back of farmland that stretches all the way to Delaware and Mr. Ochoa and his little family and later how they took me home for chicken she fresh slaughtered, in Maryland eight or nine of my students together living in a place with a dirt floor. Clothing hanging on nails where the walls were able to take them, cracks from the metal rammed in run to the floor. And this is Poetry...Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth...This this is the heart of the World. And it hurts me to go in so deep and it hurts me not too, too. So you're right, CB the Muse is the Guignon. You dont confuse ink with virtue? What do you think extracting beauty from evil is?? Little tramp whose virtue is the death march...She who sings and swallows wide and whole the death march and the aching pain, the great awful tearing comes with birth. And I, victim too, bc I hate the fact that it all hurts so much. Not what matters most, what matters at all, what is true. It is more difficult to love God than to believe in him. Who, friend, who does that make the Devil then? And sluffed off your shoulders this responsibility with the arrogant gesture left to those who have some reason to confuse good deeds with fine language. Ahhhhh, ooooo the wit of man: how dutiful responsibility becomes apocryphal.
I dont know how...ahh but no, see, I like you lie, still. It's not that I dont know how, it's that I hate to be charged with having to put it all to words.
No comments:
Post a Comment