Poem of the Week, by Alan Gillis
When I was eighteen I left the landscape of my childhood –the foothills of the southwestern Adirondacks, in far upstate New York– for college in Vermont, and in all the years since I have never spent more than a week at a time in my homeland, always to visit my parents. You would think I left that world behind, the day I got to college, and in a way that’s true. The horizons of my life blew wide open that day, and they have kept right on opening. But every adult novel I’ve ever written is set in that land, with its maples and oaks that turn to flame in the autumn, pine trees in winter that look black against deep snow that looks blue or white or pink, depending. The people in those novels aren’t real, I conjured them up out of my heart and my head, but I wish they had been around when I was a girl. Maybe I would’ve loved them, maybe they would’ve loved me. When Alan Gillis in this beautiful, dreamlike poem below talks about the girl who sheds the skin of her longing only to escape into more longing, I know in my bones what he means. I guess everyone does.
To Be Young and in Love in Middle Ireland
– Alan Gillis
The girl from the satellite
town holds berries in the fast stream
supermarket queue.
She carries her longing like a stream of song,
her melody
a body over the boundary
of what is solid and what flows.
The guys in the depression-
hit town are tripping in the fruit
aisle. Falling for her
berry lightness they slip out
from their outlines. One guy says
she takes the form of a dream,
or the dream of a form.
On the page of the regional
night berries
pulse like the notes of a song
in the stream. The girl
who sheds the skin of her longing
escapes into more
longing.
In a dream on the margins
of town one of the guys
hears a girl sing, her voice
like strings,
a basket of ripe berries
floating into the night
on a stream.
The girl, the guy, in derelict
bedrooms hear lucent songs
undressing,
streaming from their outlines
through the boundaries
of town wrapping around them
the scent of fresh berries.
And I was the guy and the girl
was within
the page of the town
ever, over, after, never, the song
long, long, long, long.
The stream is slipped as the ground
you stand on.
Build houses out of song.
The berries are undressing.
The stream is long, gone, long.
The girl dreams a form of dream,
or forms a dream of form:
the boundaries of song in the night
undressed as a stream in the morning.
For more information on Alan Gillis, please click here.
Long ago, only fifteen years after they were first discovered by farmers digging a well near Xian, I went to see the terracotta warriors. The memory haunts me. The place wasn’t well organized back then – you sort of stumbled around and then down into the ground, where the clay soldiers, thousands of them, stood at attention. Signs: “No spitting. No taking pictures. No taking artifacts.” The guy we had hired to drive us out to the site bent down at one point and scraped up some clay dust and dropped it right into my pocket. No taking artifacts, I whispered to him, and he shrugged and laughed and said, Now you’ve got some 10,000 year old dirt to take back to America. It was the soldiers that haunt me, though. Their faces, their bodies, their height and weight, the breadth of their shoulders: All different, like looking at an army of real men frozen in time. I stood looking at them, wondering about their lives. This poem by Lisel Mueller makes me remember them all over again.
Walking Man was someone I first noticed many years ago because he walked as fast as me (apparently I walk with great purpose), and he seemed to walk all day long, every day of the year, tromping the lakes and streets of our southwest Minneapolis neighborhood. He was a strong, well-built, handsome man. In summer he wore shorts and a t-shirt, in winter jeans and a parka. One time only has Walking Man returned my hello; his eyes are usually fixed on a far horizon. Once, about fifteen years in, I passed a man sitting on a bench on Lake Calhoun and did a double-take. Was that Walking Man? Sitting? Yes. The first time I ever saw him not in motion. Two days ago an old man in jeans and a t-shirt came toward me on Lake Street: extreme bowlegs, a mane of flowing white hair, a rocking gait that hurt to witness, so painful did it look. I watched that old man lurch toward me, hoped he didn’t have far to walk, wondered if I could help. Then I realized who it was.
A few months ago I began reading poems by Ocean Vuong, at first because his name, Ocean, enchanted me and then because his poems enchanted me. I have read the one below many times now, and each time, that opening line —Ocean, don’t be afraid– brings a lump to my throat. (How many times I have told myself Be brave, Alison, don’t live a fearful life.) The title, Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong, hits me in the same gut-punch way. This is one of those poems which I can’t sum up in a “What’s it about” kind of way, but because my heart responds to it in a below-the-surface way, I don’t need to. Months after I first discovered his work, I learned that Ocean Vuong thinks and writes in intricate English while communicating with his family in elementary Vietnamese, that he saved every penny he could from awards and publications for a down payment on a house for his family, and that his mother found it unfathomable that words –spun out from her son’s head and sent around the world in print and on youtube– could result in something tangible: a key to a house they could call their own. A poem borne of so many threads, so many years, so many tides and currents.
I’m teaching a Creative Writing Boot Camp this week. Six days in a row, seven hours a day, nineteen of us gather in a windowed classroom halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul to write and write and talk and talk about the art and craft and act of writing. Poems and tiny short stories, tiny memoirs. Beautiful, painful, funny, wistful fragments of life, captured on paper and released into the invisible air of the room. I could teach for another fifty years and never lose this astonishment, that nurses and truck drivers and musicians and stay at home parents and hair stylists and sex workers and clerks and commodities traders and group home workers, Muslim and Christian and atheist, come together in a single small room and transform themselves and me and the whole outside world by the power of sharing stories. If a teacher asked me to name a sacred place, the classroom would be mine.
Last month I was in the foothills of the Adirondacks, poking around my parents’ giant vegetable garden (the thing could supply a small farmer’s market) talking tomatoes and beans with my father. Every summer and fall growing up we had an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and chopping and blanching and bagging zucchini and corn and beans and all kinds of squash for the freezer. Like most of the men I grew up around, my father always wears a hat (cap for everyday, hat-hat for solemn occasions), goes to the diner every morning, knows how to drive a tractor and change its oil, and has spent his life working hard and helping his neighbors and voting in elections. Joyce Sutphen’s elegant, fierce poems bring me back to my childhood. Some of them, like this one below, bring me to tears.
I’ve sat in silent, exhausted rage around dinner tables listening to men and women argue about rape and which factors that lead up to it are under a woman’s control. Sometimes I leave the room and go into the kitchen to bang my head against a hot stove, because that feels better than listening to good men, many of whom I like and respect, explain with care and patience how women shouldn’t get so drunk, especially late at night, how they shouldn’t walk alone, shouldn’t wear certain outfits, that it just is not safe, how they wish so much the world wasn’t like that for women, but it is. What a revelation, I think, thanks for solving that whole rape thing.
Alison McGhee 