I'm going to read a few short sections
from a longer poem, called "This World Without Miracles."
And the speaker is a woman.
It's about solitude-- learning to live with that.
Waking in the dark-- the dark takes on a kind of radiance
and gives the trees an elegant human shape.
I hear cars approach from miles away and celebrate
the personality of engines.
I imagine I hear our neighbors breathe
across our acres, the bird-hearted pulse
of the raspberry bush in bloom and the armor of one mosquito,
squeezing through one wire square of bedroom screen.
The day before you left, weeding the garden,
you look like Adam surveying the world his first day out
of Eden.
I want to be that thin, familiar rib you can't yank out.
I want it not to be that easy to rid yourself
of what is most to be desired, complex, misunderstood.
Who can say desire is not practical?
The body fits.
We wear it right out of the store, or collide
with it in the street, or in the night, as if by accident.
A friend writes, it occurs to me I may be alone
for the rest of my life.
This does not terrify me as it used to.
After the divorce, I thought my privacy a kind of punishment,
having left her.
Now I can appreciate my empty time as a great luxury
and fill it just by looking at things.
In a room alone, my paintings seem to contemplate me,
seem to have more of a right to be in the room than I do.
Not objects only-- the thin chill of air in early evening,
the angle of sunlight narrowing on the floor.
Never before to discover I can enjoy myself so much
is as much a shock to me as falling in love.
Would I bore myself--
or worse-- would I knock on the door of my own house
to discover, simply, no one was home,
or the person living there I didn't like?
Always with others inappropriately present,
always that double vision--
all the time I spent seeing through their eyes.
Their presence soften the edge of my perception.
Now I feel I am learning how to grow
into the space I was always meant to occupy,
into a self I can know.
Navigating inch by inch with a knowable landscape provides,
I am like the astronaut, spinning deeper into space,
deeper into his mind, hurtling towards darkness
to celebrate the light his world contains.
A poet has just committed suicide.
There are reasons--
I tell my students anxious faces--
you may not know.
The slow poisons working as the car idles
start long before we turn the engine on.
I say, I think despair sets the mechanism going,
skin is palimpsest, the child's face sunk indelibly
into the face of the adult.
There are no questions, one cough.
I have disturbed the order of our class.
I sit at the head of the table, rocking
on the hind legs of my chair, like a woman
teetering on the ledge of the city's tallest public building.
I'm afraid I've said too much.
One hand is raised.
A voice-- a first tentative gesture.
The rescue nets flutter open, make room.
I feel like the man in the desert, approaching--
always in his mind an oasis, not yet knowing himself a survivor.
One by one, he carries on his back
as if a man could lift a weight like that.
All he remembers of the shapes of the world--
a dish, an antelope, a pillar, a stare,
the snowflakes architecture or repairs.
And holding each, he feels, in their contours,
the beginnings of tenderness and fear.
I was raised to practice such economy of feeling,
the way my street at night drew in its houses and trees
like a breath.
I wanted to be the air between the mountains
of my parents sleeping forms.
I wanted to be the air you could breathe.
I live here where I live.
I live in my body, which is not a man's, but fear
is a man does his isolation, the journey in the dark
were his desert is.
I know that colors occupy the darkness, the inconsistent
clots of red, spasms of violet, as the forest changes
season on the hill below.
And I know my blood cannot reverse its current,
or expect the sky to drop its miracle of water or of manner
right into my mouth.
I cannot carry every memory, so like the snail,
I am learning patience-- my household on my back.
Only my body can move with grace--
in its single room, in its fixed space--
that moves as I move, east or west, its small space with room
to spare.
Living with my hunger, I can name the fear.
Four walls are four walls anywhere.