to a poet that I love

Delighted with myself and with the birds, I set them down and give them leave to be. It is by words and the defeat of words, Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt, That for a flying moment one may seeBy what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. – Richard Wilbur, from the poem “An Event” (from his book Things of This World)

Dear Richard Wilbur,You passed away this fall, just a few weeks before I read this poem for the first time. I never met you, a great regret of mine. I don’t know that I would want to tell you something about the reading of this poem, what it meant to me, how it changed me, because I think the poem knows—and you its creator knows—that such conversation would fall immeasurably short. Words, and their defeat. The flying moment, the “drunken fingerprint across the sky!”So I want to thank you for that very thing, the defeat of words.When I first determined that I would be a writer, after I had read East of Eden, before I had read Peace Like a River, I believed words could be caught, slippery silver fish in a rushing stream. You wade in with your jeans pulled up over your knees, barefoot, sliding on the worn down places in the rocks, catching bits of grass between your toes. You press down, commanding gravity to hold you, and you slice the water with your hands and come back with a rainbow of scales thrashing in your fist.I never got beyond the catching in my imagination. I have no idea if I thought you release them back, or if I thought you took them home triumphant.The words never obeyed me. I pressed my feet into the river bed and I fished for them and they darted past me. I sat in front of the computer sure that words would emerge if I wedged my mind into creative crevices and when they didn’t I was furious with myself. I am a writer! I shouted. I am a poet! But words do not have ears, no matter how many ways I try to make them into living creatures. Words do not obey, no matter my metaphors. No, words are like and unlike the black birds of your poem –

“they tower up, shatter, and madden spaceWith their divergences, are each aloneSwallowed from sight, and leave me in this place”

Mr. Wilbur, how did I not understand?Your poem is a gesture, a promise that the life words echo is infinitely too rich for the “nets and cages of my thought.” Your poem gave me permission to believe that part of the work of being in the world is to abide alongside beautiful things, things that move and change, like the fish in the stream or the trickle of rain on my left shoulder when I stand in the right spot on the porch.We need this permission, to abide alongside the beautiful, to permit it to change without needing a pen to pin it down. We need permission to stand among the things that change in the world, and in ourselves, and know that the living of those things will defeat the words we try to put to them. Only then, I think, can the words take their place as what they are –Gestures, echoes, signposts along the way of what we have loved.Mr. Wilbur, thank you for defeating my words, which gave them back to me.Love,hilary

so much refracted light

For the past six months, I lost my words. I reminded myself, put on a weekly to-do list, but when I sat down, the words seemed hazy and far away. I kept a list of things to write about, I tried rising early in the morning or staying late into the night. I tried to coax them with prompts and questions, I tried to bully them with deadlines and numbers and visibility.But when I looked for the words, I found myself sitting in an empty, white room. The room was bright, seemingly lit from within, as if the walls were light, and there were no words accompanying me. I searched my pockets for even the most steadfast ones, metaphors and images I've stored up like breadcrumbs from better poets, and even those were gone.I was alone with the light, and I had no way to explain the experience to myself. I had no way to mediate it, no way to keep it at arm's length, no microscope to place between me and it, the quiet hum of the light itself.--When I first began to write in earnest, it was in a Harry Potter notebook in the sixth grade. I wrote the tiny stories of sibling injustice and lunchroom betrayal, the way that someone convinced me while we were decorating a bulletin board down the first grade hallway that I should tell them who my crush was, only for them to turn around and tell the person. I wrote in pink ballpoint pen, staining the edge of my left pinkie finger where my hand rubbed the words as I went.--And now it has been months of sitting alone with an unmediated light. Each time I sat down, telling myself, the words will come if you just try to write, I encountered the same silence, the same empty, humming room, the same me but without the words to sit between.I couldn't think of a single elegant sentence, even in the very season I most commanded the words to arrive.--So what can I tell you about the wordless season? What explains why I was sitting in a room full of light - why that seems the best metaphor - when the words weren't with me?It is easy for me to choose words over the experience that lies behind them. I can spend twenty minutes planning how to express one minute of living. I can ignore the feel of the sunlight because I've decided that I must find the perfect image to give to someone else of that sunlight.And so, when the words become sparse on the ground, then I am lifted back up out of myself, out of my need to make the words capture the moment. Then I become unselfconscious, as Madeleine L'Engle said, and I become able again to just feel the sunlight. No metaphor of its warmth, or the color it casts on Jack's playhouse in our backyard. No artful half-finished phrases marching down the page. Just me, the sunlight, the backyard.I was telling someone the other day that I think beauty is light refracted from the face of God. The beautiful here is not merely an echo, a dim fog, a shadow of something better. No, I think it is light bent and angled out and back from God's own self. For in him we live, and move, and have our being, it says in Acts, and this is a great mystery, but it is a mystery we are swimming in, a mystery that surrounds and buoys us up even if (even when) we cannot understand it.And though we often feel the air cool with passing shadows, though the light is too often veiled by ordinary and extraordinary living, this light bends but does not break. And when the words do not come, still there is a light, and still there is sun and a small red playhouse in a backyard and still there is oxygen entering our lungs.Beautiful, this refracted light.--I hope that the words are returning. I hope that I have become more willing to wait for them, to admit that there is far more we cannot say than what we can. I hope that even when I don't have a metaphor, a sentence, a poem -I still feel the light surrounding us. I still breathe it in. I still know its source.Love,hilaryP.S. My first book comes out in April! You can find information about preordering it at my publisher's website here. And you can still enter the giveaway on Goodreads here!

on a lemon tree

I read Rainer Maria Rilke to my plants. They're two small bushes, lime and Meyer lemon. This year is the first I ever thought seriously about growing something, tending to it, watching over it. I have been too good for too long at letting plants die in their original pots. We bought rose bushes last summer I never planted. They scorched in the July Texas sun, and every so often I would feel a sadness come over me when I looked at them. That's how it feels, I would almost say out loud. Overwhelmed, and scorched by the sun, by the heat of the rush and bustle. I learned later that it was also the slow creep of depression, settling in along my veins, my brain quietly putting its seratonin production on bedrest. Without knowing it, my body rearranged itself to survive. It is a miracle that they do this; it is a miracle that so often we do not notice until much later.So this winter, so new to the feel of a daily pill and a gulp of water, so unsure of how to permit myself to walk slower through a quick world, I bought these plants. I positioned them near a south window. I let them drink in the winter sunlight and overheated our living room by pulling up the blinds for hours at a time. The lemon tree flowered quickly, filling me with a strange sense of achievement. Of course, when I stopped to think about it, what had I done? But I didn't worry myself with it too much. I watered and I lifted the blinds and I took credit for the first tiny lemon that sprouted. I felt a sense that the season would turn around for me. I would get better, heal quicker, return to my usual pace.And then I forgot to water the lemon tree. The lime tree is vigorous, pushing upwards with new leaves almost daily, though it is stingy with blooms so far. But the lemon, in all its exuberant growing, had five or six tiny lemons on it immediately, small and green and perfectly shaped.And I forgot to water it, and those beautiful tiny lemons, signs of my imminent return to some mythic normal, fell off. A branch or two turned brown, the green shrinking back further and further into the main stem.I wept and fretted. I brought the trees outside. I repotted the lemon tree. I watched in apprehension to see what would happen.The tree is still alive, and it's still flowering. I can't get those first lemons back. I can't take credit for its living; though I'm some part of the story of its first losses.What is this all about?When the first lemons fell, and I felt the salty taste of despair in the back of my throat, I remembered having read that reading to plants, or playing them nice music, can help them grow. I reached for the first book of poetry I could grasp - the collection of Rilke, a daily reading. I opened to that day. And it said:

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathingthat is more than your own.Let it brush your cheeksas it divides and rejoins behind you.Blessed ones, whole ones,you where the heart begins:You are the bow that shoots the arrowsand you are the target.Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall backinto the earth;for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.The trees you planted in childhood have growntoo heavy. You cannot bring them along.Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 4

It's Rilke who said that so much of everything that is most true, most important, is unsayable. And poetry is the gesture, the promise, that though we cannot say the unsayable, we can glimpse it, we can approach it.I feared the loss of the lemon tree. I feared the loss of a myth of returning to normal. I feared slowing down permanently in a world where the pace quickens, quickens, quickens.I read to the trees still, read to myself while reading to the trees. I read it out loud to the backyard and the fading Texas sun. And now it's been a few months of learning the companionship of depression and its unpredictable arrival. I do not know that I will come back to a place I've been before. I do not know that I wish to.Love,hilary

what freedom might be

It's alleged that Robert Frost once said, when asked what freedom was, that it was "being easy in your harness." I remember the cold tiles under my feet in the room where we had poetry class, that winter my junior year of high school. We huddled over words that we were almost too young to encounter, but just old enough to know what we were meeting was - must be - a kind of scarce beauty. My hand curled over the page to scribble title, words, the stray phrase that I memorized by the repetition of the pen along the thin blue lines and empty white spaces.We were working on villanelles, difficult poems with difficult rhythm, a scheme of lines repeating, tumbling over each other. At first, we were tasked with repeating the lines exactly, no flourish or artistry. I remember how our feet and eyes shuffled at the apparent strain on our creative spirits. "But," I remember thinking, "how will my poem be free if I have to repeat all these lines, over and over? Isn't that why they call it free verse?"My teacher knew my question and answered it aloud. "Robert Frost said, 'Freedom is being easy in your harness.' The villanelle, this week, is your harness. Our task is to learn to be easy in it."--I am thinking these days about what it might mean to be free. I suppose most specifically I think about this in the strange intersection I am often in, between school and motherhood and my own writing, in the spaces where I most often feel constrained by my life. I always want to stretch an hour to be just a bit longer; I always want just fifteen more minutes for the thing I am doing now or the thing I know I need to be doing later. More than once this week I caught myself checking the time while my son slowly, deliberately rolled his blue plastic ball towards me, grinning wildly. I was thinking about how to make the afternoon last just a bit longer, because there was laundry and there was reading and there was some other thing that I had written on a list somewhere that felt much more important than my son and his blue plastic ball.I wonder if I have filled my head with so many boxes to check as a way to stave off the possibility that it might be as simple as riding a bit easier in the constraints of my life. It might be as simple as laughing and rolling the ball back towards my son.--The week of the villanelles in poetry class I struggled to write a single word. Each one felt too insignificant to bear repeating; nothing felt worthy of being written down so many times. I deleted so many sentences. I ripped pages out of notebooks. I very nearly turned in a blank sheet of paper.--I just began a ballet class. On Monday nights I leave behind the hum of the world and enter a hum of concentration, beginning in my feet and tracing its way up my back and along my arms and up into my head with its flyaway hairs caught in a headband. We are asked at the end of each barre exercise to go into sous-sus and often to then bring one leg up into coupée or passée. All of this is in a delicate few seconds where we suspend our bodies on the balls of our feet, lifting ourselves farther and farther up. "Find your balance" the teacher tells us. Some days I never find it, my hand hovering over the barre and grasping it too quickly, afraid I will fall. Some days I feel it instantly, the living wire of tension holding me up suddenly lights up and I can even smile as I feel myself aloft.But most days it is a few, hard-won seconds of balance, a few, hard-won seconds of that perfect hum of tension, that feeling of having suddenly reached a point where it is easy, where the limits of head and feet, of arm and leg are met fully and somehow this produces balance. In those few seconds, I am free. And then most often I tremble, my foot shifts just slightly, and gravity pulls me back.--Ballet and a villanelle, and wasn't this a post about freedom? Perhaps it still is. Perhaps Robert Frost was not wrong to tell us that freedom is being easy in your harness. Perhaps freedom is exploring the limits of the repeating lines of a poem and the few seconds of balancing yourself on one leg. Perhaps freedom is most often a few, hard-won seconds, a few hard-won lines of beautiful words. Perhaps there is no good way to describe it, and my longing for achieving freedom (as if it could be grasped, as if it could be possessed once forever) too often leaves me without it.--I did write a villanelle. It was the hardest I have ever worked on a poem in my life. It was the first time I heard my voice peeking through my words. A few, hard-won seconds of freedom - it was still the birth of something beautiful.

for when the poem makes promises

I'm a haphazard writer, at best. These days I turn to the keyboard and I find that I have little to say, that everything coming to the surface is about the waiting, this endless waiting, or about the hurry-up-and-slow-down dance we've been doing. I keep thinking that I have nothing new, that there is nothing new under the sun, to gift or to give, and I want to sigh like Anne of Green Gables, exhale all the sorrows of the ages into the world, breathe in the goodness, breathe out the worry, begin again.My wordpress dashboard tells me that this day two years ago we began here, a wild love for people and God and words and the way those things are in each other and through each other. Two years. The two years of agony and wonder that only a life lived full can bring at the same time.And there, the silver thread running through, the minnow in the shining water, is poetry.It is the beginning of every metaphor I have given in the past two years, the end of every sentence. It is the heart behind the heart I present, the asked unasked question that shivers in the dark. It is the stolen moments at work when I type to remember how to write at all, to stitch limbs with words like so much dissolvable surgical thread, hoping the body, the poetry, will heal itself. It is itself, too, spurning my company in an instant for the sticky sweetness of the afterword, the last punctuation, the ghost in the air.I started this blog with the idea that love is wild, and maybe that is the prayer which is the poem which is not either thing, but I want it to be so I can be writing about poetry, so that I can be a poet, a prayer. Love is wild. Is it?The poems command me to say yes, that it is an untamed thing, living like fire, the other breath in our lungs. Love is basic, built from what builds our bodies and yet, like our bodies, beyond its elements. Love is hormones firing in the brain and then pushing out into the kiss, the skin cells meeting, the silent late night sorting of the recycling. Love is basic, built up from the periodic tables we live in, then reaching so far away from us it takes a poem to pull it back in, takes words, takes the Spirit's speaking. And a listening ear.Poetry is that listening ear against the galaxy, against the spinning chaos, against the noise that becomes the music that still is chaos.Poetry is my surgical thread, the minnow I imagine at the bottom of the pond that most days looks too ordinary to notice, poetry what turns my gaze back towards the world in horror and awe.Poetry pulls the wild love out of me, of you, makes more of us wherever it is, sitting in dusty chapbooks abandoned by the world.Day by day, stitching us whole.Love,hilary

for when the poem hurts your pride

This is for the poems that stand defiant on the other side of the fence from you, sure that they have evaded your grasp, and you are tired, limb-tired, arms hanging off your shoulders like skinny stockings, and you are too tired to understand them.This is for the poems that read me better than I read them, aloud in my office in the eerie stillness of an evening working too late, my halfhearted defiance against the ordinary. The poems that sat contented to watch me struggle in pronunciation or in prayer, poems that I imagine laughed at my third or fourth reading where I adopted a British accent in the hope that would uncover the meaning in the page.Poems are meant to hurt our pride.They are bruising things to the tender fruit of our thinking ourselves wise or right or people with understanding. The poems tear down our defenses. The poems reveal and reveal past layers of skin and shards of interpretation to that quickening heart, the one that beats and beats and goes on beating even in the longest day.When I wind my way home on an afternoon, when I am convinced that I will be weighted and measured by the accomplishments that gather dust in the old battered shoe boxes at the top of the creaking stairs in my house, there the poems arrive.One after another they cling to me like stubborn water, in my hair, in the hollow spaces of my ears.I can hear them even now, their echoes -"so, through me, freedom and the sea" (here)"He had cancer stenciled into his face" (here)"Something there is that doesn't love a wall " (here)"Out on the flats, a heron stillas a hieroglyph carvedcarved on the soft gray face of morning."(here)That's Pablo Neruda meeting Edward Hirsch meeting Robert Frost meeting Leonard Nathan.And still, they devastate me with the promise that I am not the accomplishments, I am nothing as neat as a checklist or a perfect score. I am nothing as simple as dotted i's, for the space between a lowercase i, ee cummings, and the regal I of Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" - that is where  mystery begins.If a poem was a graph, I think, I could map its meaning, plot it, make a line of best fit to zip the untidy grammar and preserve this idea that I can be known by what I do, and by that I mean you can know me by what I presume and present.If a poem was a graph, but, then - a poem in the midst of the thought -the small clustered army of empty boxesmarches across the white desert, line by starved blue lineawaiting the signal to scatterplot, parabola, sharp V like the neat geese northboundin June.I can't even write a post about poems without being taken up with the idea of one, the promise and peril of words on paper. These poems wound my pride until it sits meekly in the corner, finally, aware that there are a million acres of understanding between me and the poem, me and the poet, and those acres in an instant no distance at all.This is for the poems that make me think I can never love poetry.Those same poems preach in my worried heart that I wanted to be taught the wild love, and they are the unrepentant teachers.These are the poems that will uncage us. These are the poems that call out our sweet, living flame.Love,hilary

on poetry (a guest post for Seth Haines)

Today I get to share over at the wonderful Seth Haines's space about poetry. About why I love it, how I love it, why it makes me move and think and wonder. Join me over here?I'm not a poet, I'm the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I'm not a poet, I'm wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I'm not a poet, I'm a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I'm not a poet, I'm a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door. I don't write poetry because I'm a poet. There'd be no point to the words, then, they'd be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I'd say, "I'm a poet" and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I'd say, "I'm a poet" because I'd want you to think I'm a good writer and the title will tell you everything.Keep reading over at Seth's place, and let's celebrate poems and poets and the way that words make this world so beautiful.Love,hilary

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

all I know how to do is read

"To write good poetry," he said, that cold afternoon, the kind where the fall burns to winter, our bodies huddled in bulky sweaters, feet crammed into rain boots a bit too small for us, pens and pencils out and at the ready over the white spaces, "you must read good poetry."This was not the first time he said these words, not even the first time he had reminded us that most of the work of poetry is reading it.We were ready to slice sentences like bread into fragments tripping over the page, to pair words the rhymed with precise, clean movements. We wanted the ease of the clicking consonants and the sticky slow rhythm of iambic pentameter. We were ready to be poets - but perhaps most of us thought poetry was the easiest art, since it had the most silence?He told us to read.It was Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda and Ellen Bass. It was Katha Pollitt and Tom Hennen and Donald Hall and Richard Wilbur and Linda Pastan and a hundred others who write into the vast world without our knowing, most of the time. Every day, a poem. Every day, a person who saw the world and who spoke it back, its absence, its presence, its earthy goodness, its salt.He told us to read, and for the first time I became hungry for words, for the way they each sound and how they flow into one sound which is many which is one meaning which is many, again. I wanted to read as I had never read before, savor the pages of the thinnest books, not the hefty pages of great American novels and trying physics textbooks. No, give me the lightest touch of pen to paper, the silence of Emily Dickinson's dashes and the desperate yawning chasm of Edward Hirsch's "Self-Portrait as Eurydice". There is something deep in the words, something I would start to grasp just as I finally let the book slip from my fingers, and with it, the memorized neatness and the words and all that was left was the impression that I had met something, been asked a question, been gifted a bit of living fire.He told us to read, and I have been reading.And not just the books in the old poetry bookshop down the side street in the heat of summer when I am falling in love with Preston, not just the poetry I find and write and make, no, I have begun to read the world.I have begun to see the way the sun rises slow in the April and too fast in fall, how there is a dance to rain against a windshield, a hypnotic, unending chaos that draws you in. I have begun to read the steps between home and the pond, the wind like Braille against my fingertips, hands moving like scissors as I run. I have begun to believe that to read the world like this is, indeed, to love the world, as it is, as it must be, as it yearns to be.It is this way with the man who shovels snow too early in the morning to talk back to the silent trees. It is this way with the woman I see making her way nervously, heels-clicking, down the sidewalk towards the post office on Saturday, the way it is with the bird chatter or the dog and his patient tail thumping the song of our mornings.All I know how to do is read, for poetry does not teach you to write, only to see everything new through the ache between your eyes and your pen, between the word you must delete despite your love of it, its syllables and sounds, because the poem itself does not need the word. I know how to read and, if I am patient even with myself, the world who is patient with me still will read me, open me up like the well-worn copy of Farmer Boy that I watched my father open, night after night, years ago.This is the most brazen command of and to the poet - read. Love,hilary

i write a poem

The edge of the row of the mostly-empty plane, three hours from Boston and home and all I can think is how the words have left me. Because there is nothing like holding my nephew for the first time, nothing like wondering at it, nothing like feeling his breathing slow to the steady hum of sleep, nothing like singing him "Come Away with Me" with Norah Jones on repeat in the kitchen, offering him my voice and my swaying hips, my own breathing steadied by his. 

It makes me want to be a writer again, makes me want words to take wing into your heart - and I am remembering how on the days in college when I was afraid I would read poetry in slim soft covers and savor the words, tasting the way I wanted to write. Because I could tell you the story about holding him, the steadied breathing, the sway, the Norah Jones, even the kitchen - 

but I want to give you poetry.

And I want to render thanks to God that way, in a poem written on a plane late at night coming home from a visit that was pure gift. I want to put my poor love for this world into words in slim soft covers someday, put them in your bookshelves and in your hearts, tell the story of how I have been loved, wildly loved, and how I long to live and move in this world, by writing poems.

And so, last night, thinking about poetry, thinking about the steadied breathing of my nephew and the beautiful swirling days of fall, sitting at the end of a row on a plane, I wrote.

Trainspotting

The crickets are resurrected,
singing.
The desert of the station feels the echo.
Everywhere is thirst,

Everywhere, wanting.
I wait, swing my legs along the yellow strip of warning
near the tracks:

Where are you?
The world shivers heat
and I wait, a blue
dress falling down my back.

I am a moment,
An ocean, a longing voice
in the chorus of the night.  

Somewhere, in your day, may poetry find you, and bring you something beautiful.

Love,
hilary

when my mind wanders

on a Sunday late morning, mid-day, really, we're driving home together, music or no music, around the winding roads and past the farmstands and apple orchards, fall around us. I think about how the leaves are like flames now, licking up the sides of the trees,how the wind lies in wait to surprise the scattered seeds of the last of the dandelions,how all of this should make a beautiful poem, the ordinariness of nature, how it goes on and on harvesting the expected and the surprising in one fell swoop of the calendar.This year the word was light, I remember, as I see the sun peek through the trees and catch the edge of his glasses. I glance at him, a second longer than I look at anyone else.I remember that God turned all the lights off, suddenly. I remember how last October I cried and cried about being among the ones who never strayed from the crowd, when God told me at a stoplight how He leaves the rest of the world to come after me, in search of me the way no one else ever has been, ever will be.Last year the fall was golden, and now it turns red, and again and again the harvest returns, offers something to us.I think about Rilke and poetry and how there are now 45 poems in my computer that weren't there before. How it must be an act of obedience.And then I think about you.I drive and I think about you, writer, reader, lover of leaving - that's Rumi, a long quote about ours not being a caravan of despair - I think about how you have watched this year, in a way, watched the light dawn and fade, watch me wonder about stillness, peace, watched me try to write wisdom into a space where more often than not I am the one who must learn from you.I think about how I could not write, but that you, you, read this. And you give me space to write it wrong, write it with questions hanging on branches, write about silence and presence and God's wild love... Rilke is right, always, but as I drive and think about you I want to tell us - tell you -the reading of it matters.The reading of the poetry,or the blog posts,the half-my-heart-intact prayers,the reading of it is important.It makes a difference to me to think about you when I think about writing down the leaves have turned to flames on the trees. It makes a difference to know that I can clang pots and pans in a field somewhere about the Kingdom and midwives and Shakespeare, about silence and ache and courage, about not knowing where to find God and sitting in a chapel all alone at the end of a long day.My mind wanders as I look at the world on a Sunday afternoon driving home, and it takes me to you. I'm so grateful.Love,hilary

a poem is still

There was no reason for me to fall in love with poetry that first semester in high school. We sat around a fireplace, notebooks ready, pens hopeful. But we didn't write anything right away.  Charles told us that to write poetry you must read good poetry. He told us to read poems twice, once for sound, once for meaning, that the better question is always, how does this poem mean? and not the elusive "what" or "why" that the poet so often slides by you, unconscious as water, so that it isn't until you read the poem years later that you realize it must have meant something about faith, or something about how humans hide from each other, and in hiding, are revealed. Charles told us we would read much more than we would write that semester, that to be a poet you must be a listener to the beauty and weight of words.Oh, I want to be a poet.Preston sends me prompts in the morning, ideas and quotes and snippets of things he must have overheard or imagined while he drinks a dry cappuccino before work. He doesn't give me more than a sentence, a moment, a question, but he tells me quiet in the afternoon where we sit side by side in the ordinary, he says, you are a poet, Hilary Joan. But being a poet is stillness incarnate, wild enough to sing freedom to a shuttered heart, soft enough to whisper over you in the desperation of another morning of unknown. Being a poet is love. Being a poet is listening.I've been trying to write this post for so long, to confess the dream, that I want to be a poet -and maybe I need the stillness first.Maybe being quiet here, on this blog, is about learning to listen again for the good words of others. Maybe it is not just the poems that must be still -maybe it must be me.So I will write - words on the page like this - and pray.Childhood Friend,It was a happenstance morninglooking out my windowwhile coffee dripped behind me.My husband slept to the quickrhythm of water. You ranpast - a ghost? A memory.I am no longer young enoughto drink from the well in your backyard,to prance in white dresses, splash pink floweredselves along a sloping hill behind your house,but remember with me oncehow we whispered to each otherclutching teacups in the forbidden living room,grownup ladies dressed as children,children dressed as they someday dreamed.You wore lace beforewe knew its name.Our friendship grew barefoot and wild,your mother planted roses the yearwe forgot.Seeing you again, out my windowas it rained, your figure cutting throughthe road, the morning,no longer young.I'll be listening. I'll be still.Love,hilary 

poetry is wonder (a guest post)

Hi y'all!You know something I love (while I'm sitting here in Waco, TX, with that guy who makes my heart stop)? Getting to hang out and share some words over at Hannah's space. I love her loud, wondering and curious heart - and it's a joy to share at her blog. I even got to write about poetry, and wonder, and tell a few stories. I'd so love for you to head over and check it out here.

In a night of soft rain, she lies on her bed, angled just so her feet dangle off one edge while her head rests on the lopsided pillows. She feels her stomach rise and fall with the work of breathing, the letter still resting in her hand. She wills gravity to bring it back to the floor, but it stays nestled in her fingers. She won’t let it go, because in it is the truth, the kind of truth that once you read it sears itself onto your skin, an endless repetition. So she holds the letter and she closes her eyes. There is no music playing, not fitting soundtrack, just the night of soft rain and the rise and fall of breathing.

Keep reading with me, over here?

Love,

hilary

you must be taught by your story

Everything can be a part of your becoming, if only you would allow it... I tell myself this as I sit at the computer, my face whitened by the empty page.I type and delete, type and delete.You don't have to abandon those stories at the side of the road, the stories of running in between patches of late winter ice, the nights in crowds with loud music and unnecessary Guinness, and the waitress who had cowboy boots like yours, and the questions that leave a person making promises to the stars that aren't really listening.I type, and delete.You can write your way into meaningfulness, tell your wonder and fear in characters who find themselves inside the clean glass of the hip bar on Dartmouth Street, discovering the hole in their jeans at the crease of their left knee, drinking something with gin and a sprig of rosemary in it. You can write the character as someone who wishes they knew why rosemary did anything to gin, but they don't, and when they look out the window and realize they put their sweater on inside out, it is a realization of how far they have yet to go.I type, and delete.You can't always write the stories that are at the forefront of your mind. You can't always sit on the dusty floorboards with your pen and make something beautiful out of what is happening around you. It doesn't make the stories untrue. It doesn't make you less of a writer. It doesn't mean you won't someday celebrate the book's birthday.I type, and delete.And the winds, and the spaces, and what was that phrase?O, Zarathustra, you are not yet ripe for your fruit. The story is inside you, but you are not ready to write it.The story belongs to you, but it is bigger than you. It hasn't asked to be written.The story is still in the winds,in the spaces,in between changing the sheets on your bed as the cold air leaks into the roomin between poetry, and the silence that comes after.The story, the one that is not this one, is still too vast to be held in a small vase of words. It is the field, and you are the seedling.I type, and then - I hear -Sometimes you have to be taught by your story before you can write it. I am a student again.Love,hilary

to the musicians

Dear musicians,You wrote this.And this.And still, then, this.You see, you have made more than music. You have put words in front of me, sounds in front of me, that I turn to when no words seem sufficient. When all has been said, or felt for so long it may as well have been said.I turn to you, Explosions in the Sky, because you are signaling something more than I cannot understand but I wonder, fear. I turn to you when I'm wearing black running shorts too big for me, lying on my bed with my eyes closed in the face of making some real mistakes with myself, the kind that put you on your bed late on a Sunday as the sun bleeds pink into your room and you cry, not the tears of guilt anymore, but of simpler exhaustion. I play you because I don't know what else to do.But somehow you are the answer.I turn to you, Horse Feathers, for the violin. For the song of the year, for everything you realize as you sing that it feels like you are just beginning to learn. I can hear you echo when the last train pulls out of the station late on a Friday night, and it's as if the stars themselves caught wind of the Last Waltz and played it back to me, looked down in something like pity or compassion, something like grace or peace or understanding or tenderness, and whisper your music. I listen for you in the night sky.And somehow the violin plays.I turn to you, The Civil Wars, because when I watch you singing "Poison and Wine" I think of the day when I am telling my daughter the hard stories about love and I imagine that we'll sit on a park bench and I'll play the song, and whisper in her ear that all of this hard is also all that is becoming beautiful, the bass notes to accompany the sweetness of the guitar. I imagine as the song plays, each of us with one earphone, our heads together, that I will tell her that in love aching is a part of the whole, a thing not to be shunned but accepted, embraced. I hold her imaginary self in my heart with you playing in the background.Somehow this teaches me.I turn to you, Bon Iver - I turn to Holocene, strangely, to give me my heartbeat back. Because there are the days when I catch my breath at the clarity of the truth, the invitation to do a difficult thing. I turn to Holocene to listen for my closest friends. I turn to Holocene in the middle of the work day when I imagine writing a poem with a line about peeling potatoes, something so ordinary it ought to become beautiful to us, or as I make the same right turn out of the school driveway to go home, or when I sit in astonishment at the words of the Collect in a Sunday liturgy. I turn to Holocene to write and reimagine. I turn to Holocene to allow my heart to beat, even for a moment, to a rhythm I feel inside my bones.Somehow you play me back to myself.So, musicians, you who struggle for 10,000 hours, who light candles with your sounds and silences, who make a way for the tongue-tied and trembling, who build songs that carry us forward even as we fight, who play the world, and are played by it -who, somehow, create out of nothing, something -I am so grateful. I am so blessed. I am, entirely, awed. Love,hilary

to the poets

Dear poets,The house wasn't big enough to hold me. It was late, later than I should have been up, and it was quiet. It wasn't the leaving, I start to write. But I don't want to write about it, don't want words on paper about it. They feel small, cages for heart to fit into, one after another. The words tell me to feel better, become whole again, rebuild, make peace. The words and their empty, echoing spaces.I was the reader leaning late and reading there, Wallace Stevens. I was the stillness, and the noise. I had all these questions. Why don't we get what we want? Where do we end, and other person begins? And how can this be, that we are so strong and break so easily, the weight of just one question enough to undo us?I remembered a line from a Kate Light poem - "and it flickered, and was frail, and smelled wonderful." I found the book, smoothed out the crumpled blankets, set her pages up between the folds, and drank in her words.

I remembered Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus:To sing is to be. Easy for a god.But when do we simply be? When do we

become one with earth and stars?It is not achieved, young friend, by being in love,however vibrant that makes your voice.

I heard a line from Stephen Dobyns and another from Lisel Mueller and another from Pablo Neruda about the saddest song and the forgetting, and another, and another, until I could not breathe for all the words. I could not breathe for all the echoes.

The poets teach us how to live.You plant words in us. You sing out a blazing, single flame of song, something about the ordinary mundane moment of watching a woman run for the train, something about winter, something about disappointment or the death of a butterfly on your windowsill. You write about Italy or fear or walking alone into the underworld (as Persephone who is Eurydice who is Psyche, who are all different and the same).Perhaps you are always a bit lonely, your words departing you as children do, not ever really yours, always sent to you for the moment when you write them. Perhaps you sit at your computer and dare yourself to cut sentences apart, to watch each word like  glittering fish in a stream.Perhaps this, too, is good. For if you do not write the poems that swirl through my head on the late night when I cannot write, if I could not hear you echo back to me that this world is capable, that we are capable, of making beautiful things despite ourselves, I might lose hope.The poets give me hope.It isn't a sly hope, the kind we have when we already know all the possible outcomes. It isn't a cynical hope, where we have given up. It isn't a safe hope, either, a blind trust that things are good and will get better.Poetry is reckless hope. It strips you bare and looks at you, at the story of you, at the empty room late at night and dares you to make something of it. To make something more of what happens to you. To make something, period.You make me reckless, wild, afraid and impatient. You send out that single flame of song and in my room leaning late into the night, I catch fire.Love,hilary