I began a poetry class today with no wish to write poetry. Instead, I long to listen to poetry recitations. And read more than a few poems. And hope keeping company with poets will infect my prose in a good way.
While there, I learned my passionate-for-poetry professor desires that poetry once again be written in everyday language so that it will, once again, connect with everyday people. “Some call marijuana a gateway drug,” he said, “So I call Billy Collins a gateway poet.” All I can think of, sitting in my chair, is that his words smack of addiction rather than the mild infection I signed up for.
Yet my professor’s use of that word everyday — not once but twice — made me wonder if Billy Collins is not a pot-like poet at all, but more like a meat and potatoes poet. And if so, Billy and I will get alone just fine.
Painting a room is much like writing my everyday life on this sliver of white space; I’m finished only when I’m willing to walk away from it.
Usually it’s because I’m satisfied with the result. But when not, I’ve learned to leave well enough alone — that is, until I know how to improve upon it.
Downstairs in my living room, I lived with a smudged and streaked ceiling for three years. After three failed attempts at getting it right, I realized I didn’t possess the skills to make it better. So I lived with it, looking up at it ever so often, as if wishing upon a star.
A few weeks ago I knew it was time to try again. I had just finished the dining room and had spent the last seven months painting for others. So, with my husband’s help, I emptied the room of all its furnishings and spread drops cloths all over the floor. And painting quickly, with a very wet roller cover, I covered the ceiling with paint and smoothed out the lines, trying not to look back on what I had just finished.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s painting or writing — it’s hard to move forward without a backwards glance, and not get caught up in fine-tuning what’s not ready for finishing touches. As it dries, a freshly painted ceiling will appear streaky when it’s not; and when I give in to temptation to roll-over those phantom streaks, I end up making streaks where there were none.
When I write, if I don’t continue to dash forward on my thoughts — instead editing away on what’s all ready there — I not only get derailed but often eliminate what ultimately could be an important thread. But it’s hard, so very hard to keep moving across this digital page, to see where my thoughts will take me, to encounter emptiness and white space.
I don’t have white spaces in my house. Unless one counts woodwork. Bathroom tile. And crisply painted white ceilings.
It’s a pity I had no time to unpack the week’s “unforgettable” moments.
Instead, my off-line journal holds four disjointed pages of thoughts, when in a normal week there would be twenty-one packed full of “don’t-wish-to-forget” or “wish-I-could-but-can’t forget” moments. But all that deeper reflection must come later — because I want to get down everything I can about this miraculous, love-sloshed week.
Like last night’s expressions of love that came by way of a fancy steakhouse downtown, in celebration of my future daughter-in-law Amy’s twenty-fourth birthday. If only I’d had the presence of mind to snap Amy’s photo. But perhaps with these words, I’ll remember how especially pretty she looked in her evening finery — how she bubbled with joy.
And like every single minute since last Saturday, thirteen minutes after Noon — as I’ve expressed and been privileged to witness other’s countless expressions of love to our family’s newborn parents and child — daughter Kara, son-in-law Joe and granddaughter, Reese Caroline.
Sometimes the love expressed — like those that came out of dark, sleep-deprived moments in the middle of the night as I jarred myself awake to help a very tired and sore new mother and child — seemed more like expressing oil from olives. Though I’m told there is no “second press” of olives — that all olive oil comes from the first pressing — at times, this week, I felt as though my expressing of love came by a second and third pressing — until I thought I had nothing else to give. But most the time, my love rose boundless to the surface like bubbles in a just opened bottle of champagne. Whether bubbly or hard-pressed, neither vintage of love was better as both came from the same source. Yet it amazes me that when it comes to love, when we think we have nothing else to give, we’re wrong.
But whether my own or others it makes no difference — deep expressions of love leave me weepy. So forgive me while I slosh as I wonder in words — on a night, mind you, when I should be sleeping, since I’ve come home to grant space to others who wish to express love to my newborns –why we are so stingy with our love? Why do we do things for any reason other than love? Why is it that we too often do things merely out of a sense of obligation? What weight does fulfilling an obligation carry — especially in eternity?
Living this week, as I have in a celebratory bubble of love, I see that only what we do out of love really and truly matters. And as I write this, I see that everything we do traces back to love of someone or something. And though I confess to not thinking so clearly in my sleep-deprived state, it seems we go astray those times when our love of things gets in the way of our love of people — whether the things are money or pride or whatever. The ‘right thing” is always to love someone rather than something. And even when the something is grandiose, like a desire for world peace, even then there should be people and their well-being standing behind it.
This old-song of Jackie DeShannon’s makes a good everyday prayer in my sleep-deprived mind tonight. And with it, I’m tucking myself back in to bed.
Painting a room is much like writing my everyday life on this sliver of white space; I’m finished only when I’m willing to walk away from it.
an everyday life 