Poetry

When I was younger, I memorized a lot of poetry. I liked to read it, and when I came across something which I particularly enjoyed, my hippocampus would leap into action and sponge it all up without missing a beat. I maintained vast stores of everything from Shel Silverstein and Lewis Carroll to Shakespeare, Eliot, and Keats, seasoned liberally with Hafiz and Rumi as I got older.

Between sheer laziness and a bevy of head injuries ranging from the genuinely accidental to the recklessly acquired, I have lost many things since then – including most of my favorite poems. It recently occurred to me, though, that I miss this little quirk of mine. In much the same way that I can burst into a song centered around any given word, I miss the opportunity to revive a lagging conversation or to brighten someone’s day with whatever colorful and unexpected verse should decide to step forward and demand its repeating.

Valentine’s Day has come and gone for the year, and with it, I continued a favorite tradition of memorizing a Shakespearean sonnet and delivering it to anyone (who suffered the grave misfortune of) calling my cell phone. This year’s sonnet was number twenty-six:

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage
To witness duty; not to show my wit.
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare in wanting words to show it;
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
‘Til whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously, with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my totter’d loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
     Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
     ’Til then, not show my head where thou may’st prove me. 

The process of committing it to memory was slower and slightly more arduous than it used to be, but even though my grown-up brain has given away some of those really amazing tricks our minds are capable of when we are children, it took only half an hour of rote repetition to cement it.

After several minutes of celebratory dancing, I decided to begin rebuilding my internal poetry database from the bottom up.  I get a lot of blank journals for Christmases and birthdays, but they mostly languish on my bookshelf, unopened, as my Desire to Write has been broken for a long time, now.  I’ve selected one to sit stubbornly at my bedside and await the inscription of one poem per week, which will then be read and repeated until it is as familiar to me as, say, my Facebook page – or any of the million things which distract me daily with not even a fraction of the worth.

I have already chosen next week’s poem.  ”Sonnet XVII” by Pablo Neruda is held dearly to my heart as one of the most beautiful I have ever read – and what better endeavour than to fill my life with love and beauty?

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved:
In secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms,
But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
Thanks to your love, a certain solid fragrance
Risen from the earth lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way

Than this: where I does not exist, nor you;
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand;
So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Empty

Lately, I have been asked – or commanded, rather, but in that polite way God will often try once or twice or a dozen times before He gets fed up with your stubbornness and has you swallowed by a giant fish, or turns you into a pillar of salt – to give up a lot of things. I’ve found the strength and the courage to let go of some of them willingly. (Read: I’ve managed to make it look like I was willing, as opposed to sullen and resentful.) There are other things I continue to hold penuriously to my chest, childlike in my obstinacy, counting down the last moments of comfort before I lose them…

And I will lose them.

I feel like I know, at the edges of my consciousness, what’s coming. Each day feels like another resigned step toward the inevitable… but I also know that the misery will pass, like so many other things, and that I can’t wait for it here. I just have to keep searching for the sun.

I looked my demons in the eye
Laid bare my chest, said
Do your best – destroy me.
You see, I’ve been to hell
And back so many times,
I must admit, you kind of bore me…

(Ray LaMontagne – “Empty”)

Hard Work

Sometimes, when people have gone through the photo album on my phone, they’ll look at me strangely and ask, “Do you actually do any work at your job?”

I don’t always have a good answer for them…

From “19 Varieties of Gazelle”

“Arabic”

The man with laughing eyes stopped smiling
to say, “Until you speak Arabic,
you will not understand pain.”

Something to do with the back of the head,
an Arab carries sorrow in the back of the head
that only language cracks, the thrum of stones

weeping, grating hinge on an old metal gate.
“Once you know,” he whispered, “you can
enter the room
whenever you need to. Music heard
from a distance,

the slapped drum of a stranger’s wedding,
wells up inside your skin, inside rain, a thousand
pulsing tongues. You are changed.”

Outside, the snow had finally stopped.
In a land where snow rarely falls,
we had felt our days grow white and still.

I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue
at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my
shame. To live on the brink of Arabic, tugging

its rich threads without understanding
how to weave the rug… I have no gift.
The sound, but not the sense.

I kept looking over his shoulder for someone else
to talk to, recalling my dying friend
who only scrawled
I can’t write. What good would any grammar
have been

to her then? I touched his arm, held it hard,
which sometimes you don’t do in the Middle East,
and said, I’ll work on it, feeling sad

for his good strict heart, but later in the slick street
hailed a taxi by shouting Pain! and it stopped
in every language and opened its doors.

(Naomi Shihab Nye)

An Exercise in Self-Discipline

In my linguistics class, there is this girl.

And believe me – there is always one of these girls.

I tried so hard. I bit my tongue. I told myself that her awkwardness, her loudness, her persistent obliviousness to the fact that everyone in the class was tittering maliciously at every ignorant thing that came out of her mouth; all of these things were part of the way God made her. I didn’t even make so much as a peep when we were discussing the sad statistic that, on average, one language becomes extinct every two weeks, and she raised her hand to inflict impart this particular gem:

“But couldn’t it also be considered a good thing when a language goes extinct? I mean, it just means that they’ve found a better way to communicate, and their language just isn’t useful anymore. Why keep using a dying language when they’ve realized that everyone speaks English because it’s more useful, so they should just learn English so they can talk to everyone else?”

I didn’t argue, I didn’t mutter anything rude under my breath, and I didn’t even make that derisive little scoffing noise that drives everyone nuts and takes so much stupid effort to reign in. (I didn’t manage to harness my internal monologue quite as well, but I can only work on so many things at once.)

Finally, praise Jesus, I made it through every agonizing, stupid-comment-filled minute of the period and hauled hiney to my next class, which is a general literature survey that starts fifteen minutes later in another building. As you can probably guess, I had barely chosen a seat and settled into it before she walked in…

This semester will give me stomach ulcers. I just know it.

Language Jokes

Last week, I was explaining the concept of the Muslim shahada to my best friend and his family. I recited it for them in Arabic, and Michael – with his typical deadpan, unexpected humor – asked, “Do you speak Arabic with a French accent?”

I braced myself. “No. Why?”

“Because I’m pretty sure you just said wa Muhammad ras-ooh la la!”

Gratitude

Lately, I’ve tried to practice being grateful for the little things.

Sunsets, kisses, beaches, flowers, good inkpens, bandanas, fishing, unbroken bones, clean water, crochet hooks, laughter, late-night conversations, pumpkin pie, “The Lion King”, good books, music…

…little tree frogs in unexpected places…

…and best friends.

It’s true that if you thank God for every good thing, no matter how small, it will become easier and more natural to thank Him even for the bad things.

You’ll also find that those “little things” you take for granted and sometimes forget to be thankful for are, in fact, not so little at all; and as you consciously draw your attention to them and to the patient, generous God who put them into your life, you realize that they are the joy of your heart and the very things which make that life worth living.

Hot Range

For the last two summers, every group outing to my de facto sister-in-law’s lakefront property has been accompanied by a .22 rifle and a very persistent boyfriend. To date, I have not fired it. I like to watch, and I like to take pictures, and I like to cheer for the boys while they take turns perforating a jug of water, but I do not participate. It’s not so much (or at all, actually) that I am afraid of the gun; rather, I don’t like being bad at things, which translates into refusing to try a new skill for the very first time while being watched by other people. This stubbornness is particularly annoying to John, who has a fondness both for weapons and cute girls wielding them. It’s a pride thing, I know; I’m working on it.

Yesterday I wrapped my skinny arms around a hi-point .45 ACP carbine, and as I squirmed uncomfortably and whined “I can’t do this!”, I found myself in an unyielding bear hug from behind. John’s grip welded my hands to the gun, and he refused to let me give it back.

“Remember when you posted that photo to your Facebook of some skinny girl with a gun, and the caption said ‘I am compensating for the fact that most violent criminals are bigger and stronger than me’? Well, this is your chance to mean it. This is important for you to know, okay?”

It was almost that precise moment when I realized just how often I catch myself panicking and insisting that I can’t do something, and my resolve wavered. After all, I am probably the most obstinate person I know; not to mention the fact that I would spend my last breath insisting to anybody that he or she could do absolutely anything in the world, and never to believe otherwise.

So I pulled the trigger.

And it felt good.

Extrication Training

There’s nothing quite like taking a pair of hydraulic cutters to the a-post of a wrecked car, baby.

21

Well, here I am. I made it!

Despite the sometimes overwhelming speculation that I would die or be incarcerated before I even managed to reach the legal drinking age – commonly interjected, in tones of woe and lamentation, into my enthusiastic narration of certain reckless exploits – I have, in fact, officially survived to the ripe old age of twenty-one. I know, I know; everyone else is just as surprised.

There were pies and cakes and sticky buns and pumpkin muffins. I got to take a nap. Michael and Kyle and I played with our bubble wands, which were the best WalMart impulse buy ever, before the evening Mass and covered Father Mike’s car with soap rings; and after Mass, my mother treated me to a spectacular ham and cheese grinder.

On a side note, speaking of spectacular things, the love of my life happens to be an impossibly brilliant gift-giver and bought me a ukulele for my birthday. How freaking cool is that? (My high school tech director commented, “I can think of no one more suited to become a ukulele master.” I have no plans to disappoint.)

I also received sidewalk chalk, bass guitar strings, a US military-issue Russian language primer from the 1950s, the three most perfectly-drawn bunnies to exist in the known world, and a particularly talented cover of the Beatles’ “Happy Birthday”, among many other delightful things.

As far as the coveted “first drink” goes, my mother and I had plans to get margaritas (like the girls we are) during my birthday dinner at Applebee’s, but in a mysterious twist of fate, their water main broke and they were closed all of Saturday night. In my opinion, having grinders at Mancino’s with my family and John was much better.

By the end of the night, I had caught my death of cold during an unexpected appearance at a bachelor party (where I was propositioned with a plastic red cup full of dubious alcoholic matter, which I promptly passed off to someone braver than myself), but that is neither here nor there.

I received perhaps the best gift of all on Sunday, when John and Brad and I went to the Sunday traditional Irish music session at McFadden’s. We don’t make it down there very often, but when we do, it’s always an amazing time.

I had my first raspberry mojito and my first uke lesson. Let me tell you, it was pretty comical to be standing in the corner of a fairly well-populated bar, learning to play “You Are My Sunshine” on the ukulele. I was happier, still, to bring my fiddle into the company of such fine musicians and learn everything from them that I could. I couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful night; especially when we ended the session with “Be Thou My Vision”.

There are no words to explain the way God has blessed me for these last twenty-one years. I could try – and I have – but it would just sound strained and cheesy. Trust me. Suffice it to say that I have the best friends and family that anyone could ever ask for, and my life has been filled with laughter.

…and this is only the beginning!