Wonder

I took the photo above in eastern Finland. It was late October, and I was at a country home not far from the Russian border. 50 miles or so. It felt surreal to be there, knowing the fraught history Finland has with Russia. But it also felt like home. That staircase built of stone was part of an old root cellar. My mother’s Finnish immigrant father constructed a staircase identical to it, to connect the basement of his Michigan farmhouse to the yard. He dug the basement a good while after the house had been built. I’ve often felt wonder about that—the logistics of it, the progression of his thinking and efforts. It makes me think of the progression of my own life. I’d like to understand, I mean really understand, what this life is about.

I’ve been writing creatively for more than fifty years—my own version of excavating a cellar. I’m in my seventies now, and I think sometimes about stopping, declaring a truce with whatever drives me to the desk, but then I’m there again, words whispering in my head, stray images peeking around a corner. It’s not just a desire to put words into lovely order—it’s to make some kind of sense. I have most wondered about things spiritual.

Still with me?

My emphasis here is wonder, not certitude. I was raised going to Sunday School, was confirmed in the faith—wondering, all along, about such things as the Garden of Eden, and talking serpents. Really? I stepped back from it all during my first years away from home, as many young people do, but that doesn’t mean my mind was closed.

I started my writing life as a poet.

Why? Well, poetry is essence—at its best, it’s pure thought, what we might call the soul speaking. I have to give my first creative writing teacher credit for my turn to poetry. I came to college ready to write novels, like the ones that had kept me up reading late into my adolescent nights. Then my teacher walked into the classroom the first day and read a poem that didn’t even rhyme. I was, to put it into the vernacular of that time, blown away. I still have, in a three-ring binder that I’ve been lugging around all these years, some of the actual poems I handed in for that class.

My teacher, who lumbered around town on a Harley, would return them with comments on a separate sheet of paper. Over the years, I threw away the comments, but the poems went into the binder.

Prescriptions

This photo is of one I wrote on February 7, 1973, titled “prescriptions.” Take a moment—click the picture. Just holding that sheet of paper makes me marvel at how technology has progressed. I did my undergraduate work on a small, clunky manual typewriter that I’d bought from a neighbor I babysat for. Small beginnings. She said her typing days were done and gave me a deal: $25, or thereabouts.

Now read the poem. I’ll give you an assist. It’s Adam and Eve. There I am, a week shy of age nineteen, wondering about God and humanity, about culture and spiritual practice, but disguising it behind cuteness and a wry distance. Adam and Eve are lured by the infamous serpent down its “serpentine path.” I was thinking, why would “the doctor” who’d been sent to help leave the hapless pair at the mercy of something not wishing them well? I didn’t have an answer. It took me a while to figure out that the best poems don’t. They leave room for wonder.

As far as the craft of poetry goes, this is a middling effort. It’s one of the first poems I wrote, and, now that I knew that poetry didn’t have to rhyme, I was experimenting. I had read or seen somewhere a “shape” poem, also known as “concrete poetry,” in which the shape of the words on the page mirrors the subject of the poem. I set out to write one. Hence, that cross shape.

I look at this poem now quizzically. It was the start of the semester. Given how reactive people can be to matters of faith and spirituality—defensive, even dismissive—I’m amused at my chutzpah in submitting a poem like that to a teacher I had just met. I had no idea what he thought about religion, how my juvenile wonderings about it might color what he thought of me. I wanted to be thought well of. I still want to be thought well of—more than that, to fit in enough to contribute something positive to our collective life.

Easier said than done. Writers tend to travel a lonely road, a different road. A sad reality of our collective life is that attitudes, and our haughty judgmentalism, are poison. Look at Washington, D.C. The different political alliances and allegiances in our government have all but put up barb wire, their smoking campfires wafting into an eternally dark night above the chambers. How I wish the sun would rise.

I needn’t have worried about my teacher. He and I later found each other on the internet—in fact, he’ll likely read this. I knew little about grown-up life when I wrote “prescriptions.” The poem is simplistic, but it suggests to me that I was starting to explore spirituality on my terms, trying to make sense. By the time I finished college—had worked entry-level jobs for a decade—then went to graduate school to study poetry seriously, I’d learned exactly how sweet-and-difficult life is.

In my working life to that point, I’d styled wigs (on living heads), helped people try on what seemed thousands of shoes, waited tables, answered phones, typed and filed. Sound familiar, perhaps? Young adulthood is such a mix. I’d gotten married after my B.A, lived on a shoestring for eight years, then divorced. I’d gone back to church along the way, still wondering but accepting my natural questioning as part of my journey. By then I saw the talking serpent in the Garden as a folk tale, people of genuine faith trying to explain the lives they were living.

All that time, I kept writing, kept wondering, even in my sleep.

By grad school—I was then in my early thirties—the demons I saw were larger than a talking serpent. One night, I had a dream so vivid, I woke up remembering every detail. It was a complicated time for me—I was growing and learning, like finding water in a desert, but I was alone, feeling the pain of a failed marriage. What was life about? What was I about?

The dream revealed a wondering considerably more complicated than my wondering had been at eighteen. I wrote the dream down as a poem. Two things you should know: Nightshade, also known as belladonna, was used by women during the medieval period to dilate their eyes to be beautiful. Some form of belladonna, interestingly, is what eye doctors drop into our eyes today, to dilate them.

I eventually had the pleasure of seeing the poem published in the online journal Ascent. It’s a long string of surreal images, like dreams are. Later, I’ll highlight a few of them. To introduce the dream, I used a poetic device: a woman (me, and not me) drops belladonna into her eyes and is thrust by it into a surreal scene. I’ve taken liberties, of course. Having had my eyes dilated countless times, it has never caused a mind-altering experience. By the time you get to the dark, deserted street, you’re in my actual dream:

——-

Nightshade

Blink, the tincture says, and be beautiful.
I close my eyes, open them to an explosion of stars—
the same stars medieval women saw, blinking belladonna
to be beautiful. A second blink of that devil’s berry,
and my pupils widen. I’m alone, on a deserted street
in a darkened town. Beyond the streetlight’s reach,
a movie house shines, the red on its lighted poster
turned to rust, the star-crossed lovers in the frame frozen
in embrace, that brace against the inevitable.

A man I seem to know steps from the dark,
wearing his solitary eye. Remember me? he says,
and slips an arm around me. So intimate—
and yet he holds his head exactly cocked so that I
cannot touch, I cannot see the empty orbit.
We walk—fields of flowers spread
on either side, tall dawn-bruised carillons of bells
ascending dull stalks. Behind
the broken screens of a dim hotel, a derelict
plays chess with a pint of peach brandy.
The man I seem to know sighs, pulls me close, leans
his chin against my forehead. You think me blind,
he says, but I see everything . . .

I’m hunkered, then, beneath a slant of ceiling,
on the top bunk of a desolate bed looking down,
legs naked and dangling. My heart throws off
its grave clothes, for at the foot of the bed stands my love,
my first, my broken vow, his back to me,
but still as if at any moment he’d be pleased to turn
and take my hand. He stands and gazes,
gazes, across a sea. Deep fog rolls to land.
When at last it clears, as if by the sweep of a hand,
a body floats into the shallows at his feet.
My hands rise to a shriek—
It’s my body, my hair, a floating fan.

I fall into a hell, land shivering on my knees
in the house of the dead—walls of stone, dark, damp,
and children tending corpse-strewn biers. Why am I here?
I say, and a woman like a man, medals gleaming
in the light from her torch, answers.
Do you want the job, or don’t you?   
I do—I follow where she leads, up a pitched stone
staircase that grows narrower as we climb.
I stop. My children—what about my children? 
The broad back moves away, unwavering.
You can’t take children there.

We climb, narrower, narrower, until
she steps aside and I pass through a membranous gap
in the wall to a mountaintop. A storm brews—
something roils in the clouds, tortuous, undulating.
On the steep of the slope, children pray, two boys and a girl,
in white robes. Their eyes turn to me as one
as a volley of lightning fires down, a serpent of light
swims through the air. The hair on my neck
electrifies as it nears. Blood in my ears, heart in my wrists,
cold fear coming to birth. Somehow, sheer will
or terror, I brace, I drive it back—the force
of thought. The sweep of its tail in retreat knocks a third
of the stars from the sky, tumbles a discordant note
through the music of the spheres.

——-

I woke up breathless, at the end of the dream. What did it mean? From a God figure with one eye, an eye that sees everything, to my ex standing with his back to me. From a formidable woman offering a dangerous and thankless job and denying me children, to approaching horror and destruction from above. How had my spiritual wonderings produced all that?

I had no idea then that I would in fact never have children. But something in me, around me, seemed to know. After I’d written the poem, I shared it with my sister, and she said, “It’s like Dante.” Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy, describing Heaven and Hell and a climb up the Mount of Purgatory. “Yes,” I said. “It was like that.”

Did you notice, in the poem? The stairway carved from stone?

Climbing it during the dream felt like being born must—traversing the narrow passage, wondering, as we all, no doubt, must as we leave the womb, stepping free, then sudden light above, facing the unknown. In the dream, I’d accepted a job, had it thrust upon me by that no-nonsense matron with all her medals. I wish I knew what, exactly, the job was. The best I can guess is that it’s what keeps me returning to my desk, picking up a pen. With the three children in robes by my side—the number three seeming to me magical, like Father, Son, Holy Spirit—in utter fear, I repelled the serpent so hard it knocked stars from the sky.

There are still serpents to battle, many of them born of closed human hearts, that thing in us that keeps us putting up barriers and looking after only our own. Like the divided houses of Congress, like the nations of the world, constantly at odds. This world’s work is not done. It would be nice to think that my spiritual work is done, the searching. But I’m not so naïve. These days, I watch always for calm, for peace. I think back to an older gentleman I saw at the Communion rail one Sunday back when I was still a young woman. I had returned quietly and contemplatively to my pew, and there he was, alone, unhurried.

Now, at this late stage of life, I aspire to be like him, so trusting in some hidden Goodness that I don’t care whether I’m first or last, as we wait for “the doctor” of my “prescriptions” poem to come again. Sit with me. Rest with me, and meet him:

——

The Last Man

The last man at the rail
doesn’t care.
His hands are steady
in the window’s light
as he reaches up for the cup.
He is vividly he,
and a song of silence fills me
as he sips,
this last man I have never
seen before,
this patient man
with slow and graceful rising.

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