Who are the people that have made the biggest impact on your life? For each of us that list is different. There will be the usual suspects like parents, teachers and coaches, but let us go a bit deeper. Who is really on that list of yours?

For me it was one of my first patients. She had bone cancer that began in her breast. Today, she may have been saved, but this was the 60’s. Her only solace was pain killers. She had such dignity and calmness. I have always remembered that. God bless her sweet soul. May she rest in peace. Her name was Jane.

You taught me how to live while dying, Jane. I was just too young to know it then.

The next one is a nurse’s aid I worked with named Betty. She was much younger than me and street smart, very kind and funny. We made an instant connection. She was the first black person I was close to. She was a single Mother and worked very hard at holding her family together. I admired Betty. She threw a baby shower for me when I was expecting our second child. Betty died too young of complications from the dreaded diabetes. I loved Betty. She held me in her arms as my Mom lay dying of a brain aneurysm. She wiped away my tears. I have never forgotten that moment. She was so fine. Thank you, Betty. I loved you.

Then there is Yvette. She too was a nurse’s aid and worked at the nursing home where my Dad was a resident. Dad was at the end of his life’s journey. I was at his side constantly. She knew I was deeply grieving, but I never told her what a comfort she was. She too was a black lady, and as she bathed my dying Dad, she began to sing the sweetest gospel song I have ever heard. It was so beautiful and serene it brought immediate beauty to the moment. She was so soft and gentle . . . her sweet words so comforting. Thank you, Yvette. You changed me. I have not been the same person since being in that room with you that miraculous day. I am sorry I never told you.

Father Steve. Yes, Father Steve, you are on my list. I would never thought it possible when first encountering you. You worked your slow magic on me and in the process changed my life. I always knew you were a holy man, but the big revelation came when you visited me in the hospital after my knee surgery. You came to see me twice and stayed both times over 30 minutes. You were so genuinely interested in my husband and I.

I can still picture you leaning against the wall, talking calmly as you were in no particular hurry. We talked about family, gardening, social events, St Charles. Always St. Charles. You described so many hopes and dreams for our church and school. You were very interested to learn I was in the very first second grade there. A lot of people found you stiff and unfriendly but from that day forward I knew different. You were a one-on-one guy! You gave me the courage to return to confession after a  very long time. You had no judgment, you just “slowly brought me through it.” Thank you, Fr. Steve, for all you do for us and for giving me the courage to receive this beautiful sacrament once again. We are lucky to have Fr. Steve.

I will never forget Morris. He was a patient I cared for on my unit. He was desperately ill with end stage Aids. This was in the late eighties and long before the “aids cocktail” offered today. All we could do was treat his symptoms and make him as comfortable as possible. Morris was (to our knowledge) the first patient with aids at my hospital. When I received my list of patients for the day, Morris was on it. My first thought was of him, and how I wanted to comfort him and not make him feel uncomfortable in any way. Truthfully, I was afraid. I had never actually cared for a patient with aids and it was a little frightening. Upon entering his room, I saw a young man not much older than my own son. He was thin, weak, feverish, covered with sores and was very frightened. We hit it off immediately.

He began to talk and told me he had many friends but had been abandoned by his family years ago. He broke my heart. His partner never left his side. Their devotion and love for one another was deeply touching. I was to care for Morris many times over the next couple of weeks. When he went home to be with our Lord, with his partner at his side, the room was peaceful and serene. I remember thinking that he was no longer suffering and that his life had been all too short.

Thank you. Morris, for teaching me about love and that Aids is more than a disease. It is not “that patient” down the hall, nor does one’s disease define who we are.

He was God’s child; he was perfect, and beautiful.

Here is what matters: they will wait forever for your response. They are the pattern on the forest floor when the first leaves decide to fall into dark green. They are the energy left inside a memory that lifts its curtain when you sigh in the late afternoon. They are what happens just before a seed opens in the soil.

They are in your hands now. They move across your skin and rest in the hollows of your body.

They like you.

They are the only ones you need.

They are waiting.

Alone. You are the candle tonight. Pick up your pen. You need no one. You need nothing but the haze dropped down from the sky. Walk outside without your shirt just once, on a night full of cold blades, and then smile. Later, you can pick up the pen, but for now, just stand there and smile. If you are lucky, a wind gust will come, literally from the emptiness of space, and knock your breath back into nowhere. And if you are not so lucky, just smile, because you can be sure someone, somewhere, is inside, trying to stay warm, and they will never find it. To turn blood into starlight,  the fire must come from within.

Death, yes, death will come with blue fingers, licked cool and soft to the touch, but today you will write alone and you will be happy—happy that you are alone—happy knowing that you can write even to the edge of death itself. You meet death alone, even tonight, like a distant star. Put down the pen for a moment and say hello to yours. There is no getting away and you know it. One star is yours alone, and it knows your name. Since its light died millions of years ago, it wants you to stay silent.

The stars, shining after death, already know the meaning of silence. You do not need to learn it.

Lima is a town, not unlike many others, with problems such as unemployment and the accompanying increase in crime.

Lima, Ohio is not just a place. It is home to so many people with the good sense to be born here, and possess its wonderful midwest values and no-nonsense work ethic. No, Lima is not a place, but home to good, kind people. These are the people, the neighbors, who send meals and cards to you after learning that you are having a rough time.

Lima is a community filled with glorious wheat fields, rows and rows of sweet summer corn and the best home grown tomatoes in the land. Lima is where so many of us grew up, went to GREAT schools (mine, LCC, sends over 90% of their graduates on to college). Lima is marching bands, summer parades, lovely parks, reserviors, and farmer’s markets. Lima is home to “set up housekeeping,”  raise your children and, if you are real lucky, walk in your home and look into the beautiful face of your sweetheart who you grew up with and married right here in your home, Lima.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

     Albert Einstein, What I Believe, 1930

. . . and this question from Nick (four years old): Where do the colors go at night? Suddenly, everything you thought you believed begins to unravel. You find yourself, after a long journey, finally standing in the center of where you have always been: inside a poem, finally alive, no longer seeking, but finding. Language will take you where you want to go if you simply listen. Hollis Summers, professor and writer from Athens, Ohio, once said, “A poem is everything I know about being alive.” Alive, the writer must learn to live in a room full of darkness searching for colors that only come when spring arrives. Alive, the writer must ask the questions that language itself may not be capable of answering. Alive, the writer becomes a conduit for answers to questions that may never have been asked in the first place.

Is there really a place where the colors go at night? Is God hungry? Are you strong enough to kill that monster? I have been listening to these questions, and I do not have all the answers. I tell him the colors are tired after a long day of delighting our eyes. He wants to know about delight. I tell him de light is good. He wants to know what we should give God to eat. I tell him milk is a great place to start, because it is white, the color of God, and they make it all the time, even in our sleep. He wants to know about killing monsters. I tell him the biggest, scariest monsters fall hard when you use language they do not recognize. I tell him this is how we dream in color. I tell him this is what I know about being alive. I tell him this is poetry. . .

The Filth That Is You

     How much fun is it to work outside in the dirt?

     Now, I am not talking about a little dirt … here and there. Oh no. The kind of get down dirty I refer to is slogging around in the dirt, becoming literally covered from head to toe, including hair, shoes, face and all parts in between.  The soil and filth about which I, and others (you know who you are), refer.

     Oh the pure joy of it! Could there be anything better for us grime-loving earth lovers of dirt? I really don’t think so. I like it best when it is not too wet, nor too dry, but somewhere in between. It can be loose, not too tightly packed, but not sand.

     Yes! To be in that abject manner of impurity, so dirty you don’t want to stop, come in the house and clean up; yet not dirty enough to have satisfied the filth that is you. Some onlookers may stare, most likely thinking, “Now, how did she get so dirty?” To us dirt lovers, we take not a notice. We prod dirtily ahead knowing that we are in one heavenly state of uncleanliness.

     I am soiled, stained, and yes, muddy. That is the mantra of the dirt lover.  Dirty, yet joyful, content in the knowledge that they are doing exactly what they have been born to do. Their destiny fulfilled, their sense of raw defilement satiated. How much fun is it to work outside in the dirt? Just about the closest thing to heaven here on earth and every grimy, filthy, mud hole in between.

He Built It Himself, with His Pen

     I am not talking about Joseph Bastow, the man who now lives in a house made of stone somewhere in Michigan and frequently writes for this site. I am talking about the Writer (Actually the Poet, but that is the subject of another story), who was born in the house that you see here.

     Unlike human beings, Joe had a mother who was made of the most intensely beautiful ink, and a father who was made of languge not of this earth. Shortly after their wedding, which took place on a blank page in Heaven, they bought this house. Soon, little baby Joe was born. His mother nursed him with the alphabet. They were very happy. It is a sweet house, no stones or bones, and there are lots of beautiful activities that occur inside.  Come on, don’t be shy. Let’s take a peek.

     If you look through one of the front-door windows, you will see Joe as he sits near the fireplace. He strokes his beard, stares at the flames, waits for the magic to come back to his pen. Occasionally he walks around and runs his hand along the wall, and then he scratches his nose and beard. When he does so, he catches the faint smell of graham cracker and candy cherries on his fingers. He smiles and sits down again, for the smell, you see, has begun to help him to write once more. He touches the pen to the paper, and he writes for an hour or so, but to him it is complete rubbish. He wants to find that voice again. It is a voice he knows well, but he is reluctant to give in to it, almost as if he is tied to a leash of his own creation.

     Even for a truly ascetic monk, sometimes it is difficult to have faith, and it is no different for Joe. As he questions his faith and all of its multitudinous structures and formalities, he becomes one of the most religious people I know, especially when he writes. So after abandoning the voice for long enough, he returns to the objects of his faith and finds the neighborhood around him dripping with the sweet ink of the voice:

Angels plug in Christmas
tree lights across the street. Baby Jesus is
a cardboard cut-out in Mary’s arms
suction cupped on your front
door. Inside, carolers bleat . . .

There, in the language of object juxtaposed with veneration, he finds reason to praise. Maybe he has not recognized it himself, but in finding the voice at all, he elevates us, and gives us, the most fleeting of all, reason to praise.

     Reason to praise. Maybe this is why I have frequently called him a religious man. Outward appearance, here, means nothing. Only in the infinite spaces inside the unseen, where the eternals wait to be called forth, does the writer find himself and, simultaneously, elevates the spirit of humanity. Joe does this in a house made of his own faith. He built it himself, with his pen. 

     Some people never begin.  

 Note:  the most fleeting of all is a reference to poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Language is the Midwife of the Unknown

Poets are  in constant artistic motion, moving backward in time to go forward with words. The poet is a crustacean, a crab in heat, and is equally comfortable on both land and sea. We all need to become crabs. If you cannot accomplish this, just go catch some crabs, nurture them, and you will feel better. If you are not willing, or able, to go there, here are some guidelines to ponder when you consider crabs and poetry:

1. Consider the integrity and movement of the line.

Lines of poetry can and should be able to stand alone and hold intrinsic meaning. Certainly some lines are better than others, but it’s the same with crabs, so what the hell. For example, if you look at “Insinuating Revival,”  written by Joe Bastow, you come across this line:  ”the chimney — you want me.”  A good line of poetry moves a poem and carries some rhythmical pattern forward for both reader and writer.

A great line of poetry, like this one, stands alone, and creates intrinsic meaning of its own nature. First, you have the obvious phallic nature of the chimney, combined with the sexual overtones of “blowing smoke up” from the preceding line. However, this is then combined with a classic second movement–similar to the movements of a classical piece–”you want me,” and combined with the chimney, creates a line that resonates long after leaving it behind, especially for the patient and careful reader.

 2.  Use language that re-mythologizes the everyday world. 

As previously noted in the post in “Myth and the Poetry of Creation,”  good poetry hits the world head on and creates a new mythology of experience.  A dog barking annoyingly in the distance can become something much more significant to the eye and language of the poet. In this way, all of experience is open to this re-mythologizing of the world. It is important to note that the poet is not engaged in the act of recognition and framing of the world–no, far from it. The poet, here, is engaged in actually creating a new segment of the universe. The willingness to go to this place, experience it somehow in a mindful way and then return with a means to communicate a new truth is the life-work of the artist.

3. Remain infatuated with the tangible and in love with the unknown.

The poet begins with the objects of the world. Some call it the palette, the medium. The world grabs us by the tail, to borrow slightly from Yevtushenko, and infatuation nestles in to do its work.  A lot of good poetry is written at this interchange–object, infatuation, language–and there will be more incredible poetry written at this level. However, there are those who are willing to take the great leap–most do it without knowledge of it–into the unknown, into love itself:  “For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal”  (2 Corinthians 4:17-8). The act of creation is an act of love, and to create something that lasts, something eternal–something which outlives the creator–this is the real poetry. Poetry that returns to the eternals to make sense of modern living is essential right now. Infatuations are exciting, but ultimately puerile in nature. Think high school romance, and you are there.

We have had enough of this drivel in poetry lately. The unknown, the unseen, what we crave–the poet must fall in love with this other, this mystery, and be willing to fall in love with that part of the self where the unknown intrinsically lives, and waits, for language to breathe life into it. Language is the birth-mother of the unknown.

Distant, Impossible Nebulae

     Leash. A dog reacts to a beacon near Jupiter that directs souls into the afterlife. This is the poetry of the creation-myth, the longing to explain the life-death cycle in words. Imagine centuries from now a book being sold in almost every store called Dog Beacon. In some cases, Dog Beacon would be used to form liturgical rites of worship and prayer. You can hear believers singing in unison:

He’s synchronizing again

with some distant, impossible nebulae as a dog-beacon

for those who have just met their end

and can’t find the window to the Great Passing Through.

Not again, dog. I bark at it to stop. Not again.

This would be sung in a high Gregorian chant, and then silence: worshipers bow their heads to contemplate their own mortality. The sermon, of course, would follow: “I bark at it to stop. Not again. How do we respond to death? We bark. We deliver the Miloszian version of canine theology, and we bark at all of creation. . .”  They come in for answers, these believers, church-goers, and instead they find this poem. Leash.

     Leash, posted on this site by Joseph Bastow, is language that re-mythologizes our everyday world, and in the end, existence itself. The hot, almost unbearable heat of summer is something quite ordinary for all of us. The need for water. The barking dog. Why the incessant barking? The weight of a day like this showers this poem with a temporal heaviness that cries out for transcendence, and it delivers.

     What you have is a new way to experience the world, and for the world to give back experience. Now, a barking dog is more than a sound that annoys: It is the gyres of creation creaking together in the heat of summer, the sound that souls make as they separate from the flesh and begin to travel at the speed of light out past the known reaches of existence itself.

     When in doubt over the existential, I will read Leash. There are other ways to contemplate and remember a summer afternoon, but if forced to choose between a glass of water and this poem, I will take the trip to Jupiter every time.

     We love photographs. We try to hold these pictures in our minds, and the pixels help, but how to hold on to the spirit of a place remains a mystery. If we could really feel a memory, feel it cold or burning in our hands, something which affects our flesh, maybe then we could be time travelers or call death’s bluff.

     The role of the poet is to create a place in the palm of the reader’s hand where the improbable is true, tangible, transparent. Can you feel the smell from the first time you walked inside a dairy barn? Do you remember finding a day’s worth of adventure in a small patch of grass? Do you still feel your first kiss on your lips, and do you wonder if the same stars you watched as a child are still burning somewhere in the galaxy’s cradle? The poet must remain in infatuated with the tangible and in love with the unknown. There is no other way to hold in your hand the invisible, the love that sustains and creates art.

Glowing with Thought Itself: Linguistic Neurons

     They are tired. The day was meaningless, full of thoughtless transactions, stolen newspapers and wasted smiles. The police were called and people were taken away. Coffee was consumed in quiet corners.

     November. A perfect day. Staring at the swollen sky, the poets dreamt of stoplights in space. It was time to hope for one and to believe with reverent abandon.  Intelligence in a vacuum. Everything depended on the ability of a thought inside the skull to exist at the same time as a beam of light in another galaxy from another sun, in a future so distant even the breath our children, passed through unborn lips to unborn lips, may not reach. Probably should not. Really, should not.

     Well, it must reach this infinite place and then go on past the infinite to come back to us again as light and touch this coneflower in the poet’s hands. Imagine a true appreciation so great that a petal is suddenly glowing not with sunlight, but with thought itself: linguistic neurons.  

     Well, here you are, if you are there. They, the ones who go here, just came back. Now go write down what they say. A perfect day. The way. . .

Antiquity as Birthright Juxtaposed by Experience

     . . . And there is whale song in your ears. Unlikely as it may seem, we should study their songs and learn not to take from them but give in to this music, add meaningful notes, and discover how to think of language as something beyond the cerebral, the communicative, the citation on experience. The ancient act of symbol, movement of stars and the act of creation, even procreation, speak beyond the limits of perception. Language can be the spleen of experience, our minds sifting through the images we take and create, antiquity itself juxtaposed with our present lives in this constant interchange. Think, antiquity my lineage, my beauty, my poem, and the spleen begins to filter: I give you the color blue, and you give me 

the curved outline of earth adjusted with prayer; 

I give you my anxious heartbeat, and you give me 

my father’s eyes lit by green leaves and sawdust; 

I give you cold whale song, and you give me

a wee word in the tide of baptismal water, the ocean, birth.

     We were born for exploitation and exchange, born to art, wed to creation. A sacrament of touching pen to paper is not a taking but simply beingness, synthesis, song.  

The Tattered Wall Divides the Tangible from the Unknown

     Some say time is a river. I agree in part. Time is a liquid, and it flows: you can pour, drink, and be immersed by it. Time ebbs and flows, and you are filled, and emptied, by time. Like any body of water, you can drown in time. If you are lucky, you rise above time, as in prayer, your spirit set free to become light. Even for an instant, this journey replenishes and brings the mind in contact with language not of this earth. The poet  remembers how to create art when scenes of distance, light and shadow give testimony to the infinite, and unconscious of breath or blood, begins to learn language for the first time.

The Smallest Detail Gives Rise to Insight and Nourishment

     There are people who can turn a system upside down. They are artists really, working on the palette of the American landscape.

     The concept of a free refill at a fast food joint comes to my mind. Here is how it works. The establishment offers a free refill. Only some people take them up on it. The rest are timid and lame for not even taking this simple freedom as their own. However, out on the fringes of fast food artistry, there are consumer artists who take it to a whole new level. They return weeks later with the same cup, and simply request what is theirs: A free refill, only delayed. Possibly months have passed: a new war has started, people have died, a new cancer has begun to fester and then be cured.

    The poet works with the same delayed refill as a starting point. Life is lived and then memory begins to work its games with the mind. The poet, when filling the palette, is essentially asking for a refill of experience. Emotion refilled in tranquility. Take it now, they say. No, the poet says, I will be back in few months. I need to walk my dog. Welcome a new child into the world. Stare at a cloud. Catch a fish. Later, when it is time to ask for the refill, the words are charged with the flavors of time itself.