December 13, 2001: salt beginnings
water-knot
I am not
a poet
I do not see poetry everywhere;
only in the places where words congeal
in puddles left by human endeavor
or workings of hands invisible to see.
I am a person, a woman, a target demographic
the narrator of your dreams and the hand
that smooths your hair on your pillow.
I tell my only story over and over again,
trying to get it right, trying to make
its restless craving to be retold lie down--
I am not a poet.
If I write in praise of the flash of a white throat
or in praise of the rage that cleanses,
write about the silence after the bells cease ringing
or the ferry slicing away over the Sound,
I am still not a poet.
Poet is a dead word, what they engrave on your headstone,
what well-meaning relatives write in your obituary. A poet
is pinned down, helpless,
not a person who can ride the red skies down to the water
and dance with the drums on the beach.
A poet is relegated to dusty libraries
where the dry words ache for the rivers of voices
that never arrive.
I am alive, and so not a poet.
If I play with words, if poems spill out of me
if I leave my hands unattended, if my mouth
spouts beautiful nonsense and my mind spins lines hooked as nets,
I am still not a poet. If my nerves hiss
at an awkward line, the half-beat missing,
if I can see the poem lurking behind the half-formed stanzas,
I am not a poet but a student schooled in my letters.
If, floating in the ocean, toes in winter and arms in summer,
rising and subsiding, face turned to the sun, I sing
wordlessly upwards in praise of current and tide,
giving myself over entirely to water, back to my salt beginnings,
I am not a poet, but
I might be
poetry.
I am experiencing the urge to roadtrip right now.
Call in to work, grab a friend or two, and head straight north, across the border, stopping for gas and road food and at all the scenic turnouts (because that's what they're there for, after all).
I thought, once I came back from the midwest, that I would never want to roadtrip again. I thought that two thousand miles in three days would be enough, for a while. and it was, but that was three months ago, and my feet are trying to tell me that it's time to go again. Could I go to a beach and be bitten by a cold wind? Could I go to a city where I knew nobody and try to find as much cool stuff as possible before i had to drive myself home?
I've never been north of Vancouver. I wonder what's up there? Anything at all? Maybe there's an island I haven't been to, yet. Maybe there are things waiting for me to stumble across them.
This time, I don't want to go out of discontent. I want to go because something is telling me that I need to travel, I need to see new things, because I'm getting altogether too comfortable where I am. I want to go because I am happy, not because I am sad or angry.
There is so much to be done right now, though. So much to do, to get through the lightless time. But I'm taking off the entire week between Christmas and New Year's, so I may have time to take off in there, somewhere.
Soon. Oh, soon.
