Here's to good women

May we know them.
May we be them.
May we raise them.

-- Seen out and about. What a perfect prayer.

Therapy

I've sought out counseling maybe a handful of times in my life.  Usually, it only lasts about three sessions, when I can tell that the therapist is so into the stories I'm telling, he (almost always a he) has nothing helpful to offer.

This time, I'm pleasantly surprised that throughout our 45-minute sessions, there are usually at least 2 moments of NEW insight or learning FROM the therapist, not just from stream of consciousness conversation.  Totally great.

Last week, she recommended the work of Daniel Siegel, author of Mindsight, Parenting from the Inside Out, and the Mindful Therapist. He offers the "hand model" of the brain: Imagine the base of your palm is the oldest brain - ruled by fight or flight for survival; the thumb curled into the palm is the emotional brain - triggered by old traumas, overwhelmed moment by moment; and your fingers curled over your thumb is your neo-cortex, the newest part of the brain -- logical, reasonable, and intermittently overruled by the older brains.  These also map to the "gut" brain, "heart" brain, and "thinking" brain.

And he also talks about the vertical and horizontal integration of your brain - old/newer/newest brains and the left/right hemispheres.  He recommends meditation, of course, for all of this.  Meditation, the thing I know I should do that I just can't bring myself to do.  The thing that I can recognize would be good medicine for all that ails me.

So until I do that, I'm to notice what path I'm on - how upset I'm getting in any moment, especially when it's disproportionate to the "trigger."  Why so mad so fast? Who am I really angry at?  What does my emotional brain need?  Where is the need coming from?  Even if it's irrational, what part of me needs it?  And then you figure out how to reassure that childish self, like mom never did. Hence the parenting from the inside out.  I like it.

And then this little doozy: I'd heard of "good enough parenting," but did you know they quantified it?  33% of your kid's needs.  Or 1 out of every 3 interactions.  Isn't that ... a pressure-reliever?

My ongoing task is to figure out why I avoid having hard conversations to the point of thinking about divorce, even though I know that in the past, once we have a conversation, everything goes really well. There's the basic fear of confrontation.  Wanting to pace out my criticisms so as not to be a nag. Not trusting my never-ending judgmental nature. (Yes, I judge my judging.) Not believing I'm worth listening to. Not trusting him to want to listen. Not trusting him to stay and change.  Because growing up, I couldn't bother Mom with my needs, since she was overwhelmed and just barely hanging on. And Dad wasn't around long enough to ask.

So there was no modeling of healthy requests.  Just passive aggressiveness everywhere.

I'm doing better than my parents did, and I'm proud of the gains I've made. But oh, so very far to go.

Ego Refinement

A very wise friend talked with me about the dichotomy of ego.

In the negative, we identify with our work and the things we DO.  We assume it's our brilliance and not luck or grace or the wave of right place/right time/right positioning.  We think it's about us, that the universe needs ME to make things happen.

In the positive, we are self-actualized. We understand the balance between effort and grace, practice and luck, positioning and the wave.  We surf.  We glory in meeting the universe in the crest between our skill and its momentum.

Of course, this is also the Tao.  And Toy Story. And Hermes. All who know how to ride the wave of luck and power and momentum toward a goal that's aligned with the way things are, or could be with nudging.

(Hermes the trickster, the companion, the lucky, the guide to the underworld, when you are most who you are because you no longer DO.)

Connection Paradox

Something that I've been turning over in my little brain for a while now...

I believe meaning in this life is all about connection.  It's the push and pull of cosmic forces - the Big Bang blows apart after everything comes together too closely. Then the explosion sends everything speeding outward, yet molecules connect. Matter forms.  Gravity works.

And from the perspective of our perception, time is continuous, yet moments that matter come in chunks.  It's the space between seconds and minutes and hours and days that make up our memories and our decisions, which make us who we are.

And from another vantage point, it's our boundaries that make healthy lives possible - balancing our need to connect with our need to operate as independent, self-motivated agents.

So everything's connected, yet separation makes meaning.

And then you fold in Xeno's Paradox.  If you separate all things by half, close the distance by half, do this over and over, you are infinitely disconnected from all things.  Maybe what he describes is the physics of healthy living.

And there's one more piece that fits somehow.  Complexity happens at the edge of chaos and can generally be described as order that arises as more of the sum of constituent parts.  Maybe complexity is what makes the leap over Xeno's chasm.

Rilke - I live my life in widening circles...

Joanna Macy reads her translation of Rilke's poem from the Book of Hours:

I live my life in widening circlesthat reach out across the world.I may not complete this last onebut I give myself to it.

Fierce Leadership - Susan Scott

http://www.fierceinc.com/leadership-books

An Excerpt:

“Congratulations. You are a leader. It’s a heavy load, but someone has to do it. The primary focus of your organization is growth. To help in this regard, it is your duty to lead change, manage, and motivate a multi-generational workforce and execute initiatives that impact the top line and bottom line simultaneously, while delivery short-term results.  You must demonstrate agility, speed, inclusiveness and risk, and mitigate the impacts of globalization, off-shoring, a recession, global warming, and the price of oil, et cetera, et cetera.

Some time ago, the beloved founders, who kept balance between order and chaos, cashed out, either by dying or by cashing in their chips.  Since then, forces of darkness have been vying for the top spot.  You are all that stands between them and the destruction of the collective organizational soul.  If you fail, darkness will cover the earth, the stock value will plummet, and chaos will reign.  Hence, a few suggestions;

1.  In order to hold off the Forces of Darkness, you will need to stay awake and locate your body parts.

2.  Names and ideas will come to you.  The ideas you should write down and act on immediately, or, if you don’t have the authority, fight for.  The names are of people you will need to make available to industry because they are sucking the joy and life out of everyone and everything they touch, or they are people you should promote and to whom you should give heaping handfuls of freedom and encouragement to break the rules.

3.  You will not single-handedly cause or prevent success.  Surround yourself with people who model accountability, ferocious integrity, personal authenticity, the capacity to connect with others at a deep level, sheer courage, and a commitment to champion the common good over narrow self-interest.

4.  Your central function is to engineer intelligent, spirited conversations that provide the basis for high levels of alignment, collaboration, and partnership at all levels throughout your organization and the healthier outcomes that go with them.

5.  People may not wish you well, so pay attention to your emotional wake. You are not invincible. Be kind. Everyone is carrying a heavy load.

6.  On the other hand, don’t suck up to anyone, ever, or you will turn into lickspittle and you soul will refuse to accompany you into the building.  Just keep describing reality from your perspective without laying blame and you’ll be fine.

7.  Don’t even consider recommending a reorganization.  Anyone who requires more than one reorganization over the life of his or her career will forfeit a year’s income (including bonuses and stock options) and possibly serve jail time.

8.  Do not, under any circumstances, tell a lie—of either commission or omission.  Do not stretch the truth, exaggerate, or make shit up to get out of trouble or make yourself look good, not only because that would be bad on many levels, but also because it will come back to bite you in the butt when you’re least expecting it, at the worst possible moment, with the biggest price tag attached, and possibly appear on YouTube.

9. Do not attempt to project different images depending on whom you’re with.  People can spot authenticity from fifty paces.  Show up as yourself consistently. Unless, of course, you are a jackass.

10. Bear in mind that while no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can.  Take it one conversation at a time.

Good luck!”

THE SIMPLE TRUTH (poem) by Philip Levine

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat,” she said,
“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays here for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Just keep being

A wise thought from my brain today, wise in the way that seemingly obtuse statements are actually pretty deep:

• Be in the relationship you want.

Lately, I've been too scared or tired or gun shy or broken to speak my truth.

But it's just as tiring to close yourself down as it is to open up and remain open.  How others react is not my responsibility. I cannot and should not rob them of the opportunity for growth just because I don't know or trust that they can handle what I have to say.

There's a movie I love that probably five people in the world saw and remembered: The Secret Lives of Dentists.  Beautiful screenplay, devastatingly simple plot, gorgeous acting.

The Shakespearean flaw of the main character, played by Campbell Scott, is that he won't confront his wife, who he suspects is having an affair, or even let her confess to him.  He says to his imagined doppelganger, played with devilishly wry comedic effect by the incomparable Dennis Leary, "If I let her tell me... we'll have to act. The whole machinery will shift into gear."

If he can just hang on, then maybe she'll work it out on her own, and their life together can continue.

There's a flip side of this strategy to pretending nothing's wrong until it's true: let there be nothing wrong until there isn't.

What's the worst that would happen if I communicated like I want to be able to communicate after we're better at it?  The only way that goes wrong is if I place attachment or expectation on what others' capabilities will be in response.

In the workplace, a colleague reminded me that the overachievers shouldn't judge others by our own standards, since the world certainly doesn't.

And the same should be true of my relationships.  I shouldn't hold myself to going 25 miles per hour just because that's what others are capable of traveling, from an emotional capacity standpoint.

And the line from Iyanla Vanzant's "In the Meantime":  

Usually two people start out together.  One pulls ahead, the other drops to the rear.  In some cases, the one in the lead can reach back and pull the other up to speed.  In most cases, the one who reaches back gets slowed down, sometimes to a halt.  Find your center and stay grounded in it.  Know that you can still love a person who is running behind you, but if he/she starts walking, it is your responsibility to yourself to keep running.

Chaos (poem) by V.B. Price

The space-flinging, time-singing
unborn
Goddess First-Of-All,
Chaos the Free:
She casts the stars,
the comets, moons, the dust of light,
casts the flocks and flowers, any way they go.
She needs
no control.
She strolls,
cloud flowing,
at her own pace,
fearless as motion
being what happens
just as it does.
She's so unlike us
utterly
in Her essence,
so unlike us
She can stand
the freedom
of everything else,
stand it
and give it,
and praise it
as it follows itself
always
back to her.
That's the migration
we can't resist:
Our best is Hers
when we become
so unlike ourselves,
so free,
that we can stand
not to know
where we're going,
can stand
not to make safe
the freedom
of those we love,
always ripening in ourselves
the peace that is
where it's going.

True, terrifying, and so embarrassing...

"Your body keeps an accurate journal regardless of what you write down" 

The Real Work - Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

The Secret - Denise Levertov

Two girls discover   

the secret of life   

in a sudden line of   

poetry.

I who don’t know the   

secret wrote   

the line. They   

told me

(through a third person)   

they had found it

but not what it was   

not even

what line it was. No doubt   

by now, more than a week   

later, they have forgotten   

the secret,

the line, the name of   

the poem. I love them   

for finding what   

I can’t find,

and for loving me   

for the line I wrote,   

and for forgetting it   

so that

a thousand times, till death   

finds them, they may   

discover it again, in other   

lines

in other   

happenings. And for   

wanting to know it,   

for

assuming there is   

such a secret, yes,   

for that   

most of all.

Quotes from E.B. White

"It's hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.  But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The thought of writing hangs over our mind like an ugly cloud, making us apprehensive and depressed, as before a summer storm, so that we begin the day by subsiding after breakfast, or by going away, often to seedy and inconclusive destinations: the nearest zoo, or a branch post office to buy a few stamped envelopes.  Our professional life has been a long shameless exercise in avoidance."

To Have Without Holding (Poem) by Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Eve, After - Danusha Laméris

From THE MOONS OF AUGUST

Did she know
there was more to life
than lions licking the furred
ears of lambs,
fruit trees dropping
their fat bounty,
the years droning on
without argument?

 
Too much quiet
is never a good sign.
Isn’t there always
something itching
beneath the surface?

 
But what could she say?
The larder was full
and they were beautiful,
their bodies new
as the day they were made.

 
Each morning the same
flowers broke through
the rich soil, the birds sang,
again, in perfect pitch.

 
It was only at night
when they lay together in the dark
that it was almost palpable—
the vague sadness, unnamed.

 
Foolishness, betrayal,
—call it what you will. What a relief
to feel the weight
fall into her palm. And after,
not to pretend anymore
that the terrible calm
was Paradise.

2013

It must be transition time again, because here I am, feeling the need to show up again on the page.

And finding myself here, finding so many words that I found important enough to want to keep them here, the way some people collect rocks, or sea shells, or other pretty fragments of a bigger world that will fit in our kitchens or the fraction of shelves we allot them to remind ourselves of what we love about being part of this gorgeous oneness that blows us over with its variety and endless fractal depths, I find myself making a mistake.

I think - oh my - all the latest posts are from 2011 and 2012 - and here it is a whole year later!  Good thing I have time to sneak in one post from 2013.

And the wrench twist correction:  I missed it. 2014 has already begun.  2013 happened without my active participation.

Except that it was a whole year filled with new things:  a son.  Two young children.  A new family.  A death of my second-ever dog.  A new dog.

And work. Lots of work.  Lots of growing into my capabilities, feeling them wear to fit me, like the best jeans.

Life is moving so fast now, I don't know what I think about it.  I discover life doesn't care what I make of it, or whether I do.  It happens, it passes, it's over, like too many dinners home in front of the tv.  Comfortable, mostly.  Thoughtless in a way that hurts no one but wastes far too much that is precious if you stop to think about it.

A year with a new baby proves how short a year is -- and how long.  From utterly helpless to walking and feeding himself.  From shadows of passing glimpses of personality to whole days of sparkling being.

And my own journey?  Perhaps I learned as much.  But the results are not nearly as visible or startling or praise-calling.

Where I am feels a lot like a crucible.  Can I change enough to find a path toward a happier place in me?  Is the change worth more than the fear of doing what's not comfortable, what makes me vulnerable, what forces me to hope for change in others that may never come?

I'm always waiting to be rescued, not like Rapunzel in her tower or Cinderella from her own home, but like Tam Lin.  He got stuck.  He was himself but stuck in a forest that grew too small for him.  And it took his love to dare to hold him long enough for 20 heartbeats to pass. To hold him even when he tried everything to make her let go - transforming into monsters, then fire, then ice.  Confronting her with everything that made her afraid, and hurt, and burned, and iced out.  But it was worth it to her to hold on.  He was worth it.  Change was worth it.  Growth.  Intimacy.  And it worked.  He could trust her afterward.  She stayed.  He could relax into his best self, could grow into a bigger self, having been freed from his forest constraints.  And I imagine him relieved. So grateful to be retrieved.  Grateful that she knows now that he is monsters and fire and ice.  Overwhelmed to know she is capable of holding and loving all of him.

I used to talk about it as wanting to find someone whose lap was big enough to crawl into and just cry.  I've actually gotten that since even the thought of it made me weep with longing.  It only got me so far, healed so much.

Now I want the daily partner who signs up for the cycles -- from human to monster to fire to ice and back again.  Sometimes hourly.  But I wonder how realistic that is (1) how healthy that is (2) and how inadvisable for anyone I'd trust to do it (3).

I'm starting to long for the endless afternoon intimacies of my high school romance or my first college friends.  The way lunch turned into lounging philosophy gossip gabs that led to movies and dinner and debriefs and drinks and late night confessions and indulgent dark of night extensions and barely regretful early morning breathless goodbyes before racing straight to work.  Where there was no space to question who you were or what you wanted because you never needed or wanted or noticed distance because it was all so fun, so easy, so boundary smudged.

In comparison, I feel prickly, all sharp edges. More urchin than porcupine.

What's the right balance for me in between?  Never been good at balance.  I used to intentionally roll off the balance beam because I was afraid to fall off.  It's why I was more scared to dangle 3 feet off the ground on my first and only attempt at rock climbing than to jump out of an airplane, which I'd do regularly if the probability of dying didn't ... well ... skyrocket each time.

Maybe I just miss friends.  Maybe our world has moved past friendships and the time they take.  The investment.  The wine-soaked nights that air out every last strand of relationship in each person's life braid.

How redeemable is your life at any one point?  How bad does it have to get to try?

Body and Soul (poem) by B.H. Fairchild

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins
to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties
and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking
Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say we’re one man short, but can we use this boy,
he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game.
They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing
the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,
the thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under
a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,
let’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,
joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad
last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,
talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little
angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter
and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead
and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs
right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two
but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure
that they pause a moment before turning around to watch
the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
They’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases,
but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,
so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here.
And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look
at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one
is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chambers,
high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen.
As if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.
They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced
man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway
because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with
three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,
leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch
who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something
out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something
that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards
the kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed,
and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field
where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt
dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,
the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher
is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours
into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised
Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,
Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets
and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them
though it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is
Mickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts.
But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan
the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,
I think I know what the truth of this story is, and I imagine
it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers
just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh
why in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him,
after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,
especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks
and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything
meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,
who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer
who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home
with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house
singing If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time
with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab
Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum
as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not.
And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.
And they did not because sometimes after making love,
after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and
listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,
so distant, they glanced over at their wives and notice the lines
growing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives
felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples
and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness
were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon
ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there
in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary
that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves
looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not
because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it
at the feet of a fifteen year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,
and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not
a fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless
well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge had also encountered for his first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde
and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgotten.

Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook (poem) by Vera Pavlova

[abridged by me. Full version available here.]

My writing: hard-boiled. My life: scrambled soft.

•

The cud of thinking: by the evening my jaw aches.

•

There are moments when I feel the universe expand.

•

Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

•

Time is like a diatonic scale: it consists of major and minor seconds.

•

Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

•

Went to bed with an unfinished poem in my mouth and could not kiss.

•

How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry? I understand them.

•

More and more often, I come around to the conclusion that my dad is the sole true censor and critic of my poems: seriously drunk, in the kitchen of our country house, he squints after each poem I read to him and says, “Crap. Next.”

•

Suddenly you realize that only what you have put into poems can be considered lived through. That is how you become a poet. And at that point you begin, consciously or otherwise, living the kind of life that is fraught with poetry. That is how you cease being human. The former happens abruptly, the latter gradually, both irrevocably.

•

From the memoirs of Akhmatova’s last physician: she died at the moment when her cardiogram was being recorded. Her death has been recorded in the form of a straight line. Ruled paper ready-made. Go ahead and write.

•

“The ovaries of a newborn girl contain up to 400,000 egg cells.” All my poems are already in me.

•

In a poem a word is not equal to its meaning as it is defined in a dictionary, because either the meaning in a poem is totally different, or it is the same but a thousand times more precise.

•

Drafts in my notebook are written in a barely legible scribble; fair copies are in impeccable calligraphy. My handwriting is much better than my muse’s.

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I write to equalize the pressure from without and from within, to prevent being squashed (by misery) or being blown apart (by happiness).

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—Do you understand that understanding is impossible?
—I do.

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In a poem, poetry is a guest. At times the guest stays long, but never for good.

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I’ve asked myself: Did I get ahead of the calendar? Counted the poems I wrote this year: 366 of them.

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“You are my first and my last/Bright listener of the dark raving.”—Akhmatova to her lover Garshin in “The Poem Without a Hero.” After they broke up, she changed the line to “You, not the first nor the last/Dark listener of the bright raving.” (From Lydia Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals.)

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“Understanding is insanity for two.” (V. Podoroga)

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I put words into poems the way I pack a suitcase for a trip abroad, choosing only what is the most necessary, the most presentable, the lightest, and the most compact.

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Madness is inspiration idling in neutral.

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I live my life moving forward on rails that I lay myself. Where do I get the rails? I dismantle the ones I have gone over.

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My diaries are letters from my former self to my future self. My poems are replies to those letters.

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Prose: a soccer game shown in its entirety.
Poetry: the same game shown only in scoring or near-scoring episodes.

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Reader: So you want me to feel as if I were reading a letter addressed to someone else?
Poet: I want you to feel as if I had read a letter addressed to you by someone else and am shamelessly quoting from it.

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Inspiration is an intercourse with language. I can always tell when language wants me. I never say no to language. For me, it is always good with language. And for language? I am afraid for language it is never as good as it is for me.

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“Accusing an erotic poet of depravity is as unfair as accusing a tragic poet of cruelty.” (Evgeny Baratynsky in the preface to his poem “The Concubine.”)

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As I am learning to speak English, I catch myself saying in it not what I want to but what I can say. Then I realize that much the same happens when I speak my native Russian. Only in poems, at times, I manage to say what I want. On such occasions, I feel I am speaking not Russian but some other language that is truly my native.

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A fisherman told me: “Writing poetry must be like digging for earthworms: you grab the critter by the end and pull. Pull too hard, and it’ll break; not hard enough, it’ll get away.”

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If poems are children, poetry readings are pta meetings.

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You must not write in verse about what you do not know or about what you know for sure, only about what you vaguely suspect, hoping that poems will either confirm or dispel your suspicions.

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From a letter of a young poet: “I write when I feel bad. When I feel fine, I don’t write.” With me, it’s the opposite: when I write, I feel fine. I feel bad when I do not write.

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I write about what I love. I love writing even more than what I write about. And what do I do it for? To love myself, if only for a brief while.

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“Is there any need for poetry? The question in itself is enough to realize how bad the situation with poetry is at present. When everything is fine, no one has the slightest doubt that there is absolutely no need for poetry.” (B. Pasternak)

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An ideal poem: every line of it can serve as a title for a book.

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—I have the gift of finding lost things, such as a tiny screw from sunglasses in thick grass of a lawn. I have a method of my own: I relax and wait until the lost object calls out to me: “Here I am!” Things like reading glasses, a notebook, an elastic hair band ... I can recognize them by their voices!
—But isn’t that the way you write poems?
—How true! Except that with poems I never know what’s been lost. All I know is that a) it’s something urgently needed; b) something that is somewhere near, probably in the most visible of places; c) others have failed to find it; and d) it’ll be such a joy when I do!

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The longer a poem, the weaker the impression that it has been dictated from above: Heaven is not verbose. Besides, the more you talk, the more you lie.

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A full stop at the end of a poem is an exclamation mark seen from above, driven into the page up to its cap with one precise blow.

Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour

God Went to Beauty School (poem) by Cynthia Rylant

He went there to learn how

to give a good perm

and ended up just crazy

about nails

so He opened up His own shop.

“Nails by Jim” He called it.

He was afraid to call it

Nails by God.

He was sure people would

think He was being

disrespectful and using

His own name in vain

and nobody would tip.

He got into nails, of course,

because He’d always loved

hands—

hands were some of the best things

He’d ever done

and this way He could just

hold one in His

and admire those delicate

bones just above the knuckles,

delicate as birds’ wings,

and after He’d done that

awhile,

He could paint all the nails

any color He wanted,

then say,

“Beautiful,”

and mean it.

Scheduling

I found myself yesterday thinking this little gem:

"I wish I didn't schedule so many activities so that I could have more space in my calendar to schedule more activities."

And how, I wonder, does one do that?