"I come here every day"
"Listen— / all you bare trees / burrs / brambles ..."
Dear friends,
I am on the road again at the moment for a small while: I’ve just been in Virginia, and am on the train back up to New York City for a few days before teaching a class at the Omega Institute next week for a retreat on poetry… a retreat where I hope to meet some of you.
So, it’s a short Substack this week.
At a session in Virginia last week we looked at Jane Mead’s poem “Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make” — the opening poem to her first book, a book that rejoices in the glorious title of The Lord and the General Din of the World.
It seems to be a poem written from the point of view of someone who has come to the end of themselves, and now, having got beyond a crisis of death, is facing an even more demanding crisis: the crisis of life.
It’s a poem that begins like a prayer:
Jesus, I am cruelly lonely
and I do not know what I have done
nor do I suspect that you will answer me.
How strange — and brilliant — to begin a poem with such ambiguity: to address someone you are unsure will return the address. While trying to save her own soul, the speaker of the poem turns to landscape — “I come here every day” — and then describes a railway bridge over a river, and a sky blue T-shirt, and a half-sunk dead tree, and warehouse lights, and shards. It’s not a pretty place, but it is a place. And it is in this place that some kind of salvation is found. The poem, having begun with an “I am” (cruelly lonely) finishes with another “I am”:
Listen—
all you bare trees
burrs
brambles
pile of twigs
red and green lights flashing
muddy bottle shards
shoe half buried—listen
listen, I am holy.
The whole poem is stunning, and the kind people of the Virginia Quarterly Review have it on their website.
To be held between these statements of the self — lonely and holy; isolated and somewhat integrated; removed from the self and in touch with the self — is an act of brilliance by Jane Mead, a poet who died too early, in 2019 at the age of 61. How true for us all that we are in the cycles that are trying to survive and then trying to thrive.
Over and over, it is the landscape — ordinary, industrial, at the edges of a city, not postcard pretty, but daily, recognisable, and utterly real — that holds the poem in place.
It’s a question we’ve talked about before, but it’s worthwhile asking again:
What’s an ordinary place you go to?
When I was a teenager, my friend Sinéad and I would go to the top of a carpark in Cork city. We’d buy bread and cheese and milk, and would look out over the River Lee, up toward the north side of the city toward Gurranabraher where my dad grew up. Nothing pretty, but it was a view of the city that helped us be part of the city. When I’m back in Cork, I often park in that site now, and steal a glance over the wall on the open top storey so as to see the city, and see the teenage self, still looking: out and back, up and down.
I’ll see you in the comments, and in the places you recall.
Poetry in the World
ONLINE:
Strange Stories of the Bible
Next Sunday begins this weekly evening series: October 8, 15, 22, 20, and November 5. Learn more and sign up here.
U.S.A.
Lexington Community Education | Lexington, MA
I’m giving a talk about the “You” of poetry at Lexington Community Education Project on October 19, 7pm. Details and registration here.
Boston College | Chestnut Hill, MA
I’ll be giving a reading and a poetry workshop at the conference “The Art of Encounter: Catholic Writers on the Imagination” at Boston College on the 20th and 21st of October. Full details (and timetable) here.
Oklahoma City University | Oklahoma City, OK
I’ll be giving a poetry reading and lecture at Oklahoma City University on the 26th of October. Details and registration (the event is free) are here.
EUROPE
Journeying Into the Common Good | Patmos, Greece
Together with Krista, Allison Russell, JT Nero, and Joe Henry, I’ll be one of the speakers at a small salon on the revelatory Greek island of Patmos next summer from June 27 - July 7. More details here.
I grew up on a small horse farm in upstate New York. In my early childhood, it was an extraordinary place, full of magic. My brother and sister and I were like wild ponies. We roamed all over the farm, but also foraged in the woods and swam in the pond and made fairy bridges across the creek. When I went full-on angsty teen, I also developed an unkind blindness. The farm was shabby, not beautiful. The pond was full of algae. Someone should clean up all that junk, and why was this place so dirty? Why did we have mushrooms growing in our basement?
I spent a great deal of my young adulthood hating the place, wishing my parents would sell it so we could have something easier, like my friends had. Something more ordinary.
My mom was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme on March 19, 2022. The doctor gave her 12-14 months. I was primary caregiver to both my mom and my dad, who has Parkinsons. Enforced time on the farm, with nothing to do but be of service. As my mom began to fade, she slept more. I began to wander the farm and the forest again, this time lonely and heart-sore, in need of a different magic. This place--this extraordinary ordinary place--enfolded me in its green self again. My mom died on June 13th, 2023. Now every acre is infused with her spirit, and the whole place sings with beauty and peace and home.
I'm sorry--this is only my second post and it's ridiculously long. What can I say? I'm triggered. I've been thinking so much about the farm and how it has reclaimed me. I resisted, much to its amusement. Now it's welcoming me back--and I'm so grateful that I don't even care that it's also whispering, "Told you so."
Every morning I sit on my screened in porch. In so many ways it is ordinary. A common screened porch. But for me, it is my happy and holy place. I hear and see the birds. I appreciate the flowers I have planted and tended. I hear the neighborhood waking up. And I am grateful for another day.