Voodoo

There’s a game I play once a week called Universal Charity Shop Roulette. I generally leave the house feeling out of shape, discombobulated, and I walk to the shop and buy a paper, tobacco – whatever it is a need – and then as I walk home I pass the magical charity shop and find myself pulled in. Standing in front of the bookshelves, filled with books standing three rows deep, I ask the universe to give me what I need, and without fail the books I need to read will be there. It’s uncanny how this works every time I do it. Today I found Essays in Love by Alain de Botton, Eclipse by John Banville, Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers and The Fahrenheit Twins by Michel Faber; I sense there is something in each of these books I must absorb, especially the first one. I will miss this shop when I leave here… there’s definitely some freaky kind of voodoo going on in there.

Thank you for the kindness and support you have shown me during the last few days. It’s helped being able to pop over to this blog to see who’s said hello. Today’s poem for Poetry Thursday is by Sharon Olds, and I dedicate it to R.

Ecstasy

As we made love for the third day,
cloudy and dark, as we did not stop
but went into it and into it and
did not hesitate and did not hold back we
rose through the air, until we were up above
timber line. The lake lay
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of snow
brilliant white, and even though we
did not know where we were, we could not
speak the language, we could hardly see, we
did not stop, rising with the black
rocks to the black hills, the black
mountains rising from the hills. Resting
on the crest of the mountains, one huge
cloud with scalloped edges of blazing
evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back.

~Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living

Trying to remember

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up on all other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte, The House of Belonging

Words sent to me when I needed them, which I turn to again tonight as I try to find my way past the reflection to see what is really going on inside me. I need to be kinder to the woman I see there; I need to let her come out of her cage and join the world again… perhaps she is more ready than I think she is.

Poetry Thursday: Denise Levertov

The Change

For years the dead
were the terrible  weight of their absence,
the weight of what one had not put in their hands.
Rarely a visitation – dream or vision -
lifted that load for a moment, like someone
standing behind one and briefly taking
the heft of a frameless pack.
But the straps remained, and the ache -
though you can learn not to feel it
except when malicious memory
pulls downward with sudden force.
Slowly there comes a sense
that for some time the burden
has been what you need anyway.
How flimsy to be without it, ungrounded, blown
hither and thither, colliding with stern solids.
And then they begin to return, the dead:
but not as visions. They’re not
separate now, not to be seen, no,
it’s they who see: they displace,
for seconds, for minutes, maybe longer,
the mourner’s gaze with their own. Just now,
that shift of light, arpeggio
on ocean’s harp -
not the accustomed bearer
of heavy absence saw it, it was perceived
by the long-dead, long absent, looking
out from within one’s wideopen eyes.

~ Denise Levertov, Selected Poems

The photograph is from a series taken by my bloggie friend Susanna – when I got back from Seattle this amazing image was waiting for me on my doorstep!

Poetry Thursday: Naomi Shihab Nye

I discovered the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye only recently, when Delia sent me her poem, Kindness. When I was browsing through the poetry aisle in Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle I found the book that Delia had taken the poem from and promptly bought it, along with three others by poets I love. The poem below is one I would have liked to have written myself, in gratitude to the women and men whose words have provided a raft when I felt I was drowning. I read this poem last night as I lay in my bed half delirious with insomnia. These words, like your comments to me yesterday, helped so much.

You know who you are

Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.

Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.

Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
Everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
Light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn’t work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying “This is what I need to remember”
and then hoping you can.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under The Words