imagery « buildingapoem

One of my favorite poems that I didn’t write is “The Art of Blessing the Day” by Marge Piercy. It is framed in a way that uses some of the language of religion to talk about the beauty of the thing-ness of our lives and the events that don’t automatically get celebrated formally. It is in fact about poetry itself, in the widest sense, which is the sense I much prefer to the very narrow sense we get taught in school.

The Art of Blessing the Day

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let’s not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends’
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

***

I think Piercy gets to the heart of the matter when she says:

The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.
The work of the poet (not unlike one of the tasks of the lover) is to pay attention to the details. God is in the details. We have only to look, and we have to look. We look at everything outside ourselves, and then, if we dare, we can start to look at all the things that are inside ourselves, and then we look out again.

And then we write.

Marge Piercy. The Art of Blessing the Day. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999.

ice-dam-icicles

On or about January 20, 1982, I officially started writing poetry. I had written a few poems before that, either at school or at a small library writing class one summer, but on this day off from school for a teacher in-service day (whatever that means), I looked something up in the dictionary and found my attention snatched by the illustration of an “irregular octagon.” Those two words sounded so good together that I wrote a long poem about them, which is, thankfully, lost to the ages. Then I wrote a few more poems. Then I decided I was a poet.

Some of those high school poems were good in terms of imagery, although I was unsurprisingly addicted to rhyme. I started experimenting with free verse in college, often to good effect. But it was not until the 1990s that I started actually reading poetry that was written by other people. This progression is very common in beginning poets.

One of the great values in reading other poets is figuring out why they made the kinds of choices they made. Was it the sound and taste of the words? Was it laziness? So I am going to offer you two new poems and see if I can trace my own choices.

Yesterday was ridiculously cold, so I started thinking like this:

My toes are become wild icicles, shedding

Heat with every beat of my muffled heart,

The cold sidewalk so lonesome it must steal

A degree at every step I take. I do not think

About the heaviness of my bag, my watering eyes,

Or how dark the night was. I only feel the absence

In my boots, the negative space like a Vulcan greeting…

Well, now this has gone in a direction I did not expect, especially since the wildness is the interesting part of that first line. But “wild” to me tends to bring the connotations of jungles and passion, heat and brightly colored birds, which is the opposite of icicles and lonely sidewalks. How do I bring the poem around? Also the structure “I do not think of X, Y, and Z” is one I often use—is this laziness? It is a way of pointing to other details of the scene that we expect, what I might call the “pedestrian” details, literally, the details of being a pedestrian in a cold city. The darkness of the previous night takes the potential physical heaviness and tearing up and shifts to a more abstract negativity, possibly connected to the loneliness of the sidewalk.

Then things changed. I did feel like my middle toes were missing, but I don’t know if that works here. Also it takes me much farther from the wildness of the first line, which is frustrating. What are wild icicles? I love the sound of the phrase but I don’t know what it means or how to get back to it. Let’s try a complete 180.

Or how dark the night was. The wild icicles,

Hiding in the darkness of my boots, predict

Summer brightness, glorious jungle greens,

Toucans, monkeys, flowers like explosions

Of feathers and alien stars, which, this morning,

Are difficult to believe in.

Somehow I have to get back to the fact that I can’t feel about a third of my toes, and don’t expect to anytime soon (noon? March?).

Are difficult to believe in. Faith is hard

In winter, as hard as the long and deadly

Icicles hanging from the eaves of every house,

Waiting to pounce and pierce. Today, only

My forward momentum drags me stiffly

Toward the possibility of spring and the hope

Of something hereafter.

Now I’ve got to figure out how to end this sucker that doesn’t sound either too depressing (winter will never end) or too optimistic (four months of winter will go by in a flash! You’ll see!). We could go for closure, repeating shedding or muffled heart, but I don’t know what to do with that. Something about faith? Or the seven cardinal virtues? I have always quite liked fortitude.

Of something hereafter. Perhaps fortitude is

What we need: the will to withstand the cold,

Hard days and long, thin dark nights, fortitude

And the patience of burrowing, hibernating animals.

So we are left with this. I am undecided about whether I like it or not or how much. Thoughts?