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Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. “Love After Love” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. And from Collected Poems 1948-1984, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. George Herbert, “Love (III)” Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat. “Love (III)” by George Herbert is in the public domain. POETIC THEMES The poem to celebrate the official beginning of summer on the 21st would be Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” a poem that begins with a question about God and ends with a recipe for prayer. We don’t need to know our creator; we just have to commit to feeling its creation, moment by moment. This is the religious imperative of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole—an agnostic worship of the world. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense: what is worthy of our attention. We pay attention, like cash money; we devote our attention, the most precious of gifts. The poem is not about a summer’s day; it’s entitled “The Summer Day.” This one you’re in. It’s not just any grasshopper, it is a particular one. This difference could be illustrated via a longstanding debate about how to translate a famous (perhaps the most famous) haiku. The story is that Basho, the renown Japanese poet of the Edo period, was challenged by his Zen master with a Koan (or riddle), and he responded with a haiku about mindfulness. Here’s the literal translation: Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound). Do we liken the pond to the mind and the splash to a thought? If so, should it be a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? Is the focus on the water, the jump, or the sound? You can google the Basho translation debate and find a whole world there. But suffice it to say, the message of “The Summer Day,” like the frog haiku, is about presence. Our singular existence is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. Every one of us is just as strange and complex, ethereal and earthy. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what you’ll do with your time on earth is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do. We are challenged to drop to our knees and surrender to that calling, offering our lives like a prayer. But since Mary Oliver’s angle on devotion is pretty well known, I want to offer a slightly different angle in a poem by Derek Walcott. Why Walcott’s poem for midsummer? Well, first because hunting around for poems about this pagan-turned-Christian holiday (which takes place between June 21st and June 26th in various places over the globe), I found Walcott’s book entitled Midsummer. But then I swam around in the book’s Biblical allusions for a while—most beautifully in a scene of Caribbean yellow butterflies “stuttering ‘yes’ to the resurrection” in “Midsummer LIV.” The bitter, brilliant manipulation of Christian doctrine in Midsummer rang a bell. I was called back to “Love after Love” as the perfect poem for this tension between earthly and Christian love at work in this weird June holiday. Walcott is famous for his reappropriations of canonical Western texts. I’m not sure if anyone has ever noted that “Love after Love” speaks to George Herbert's “Love III.” This is the final poem in this 17th-century poet and priest’s collection about spiritual conflict, The Temple. God-as-Love issues an invitation to the poem’s sinful Everyman: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.” Herbert’s poem consigns human love to a Christian realm, from which Walcott rescues it. The holiday of Midsummer is rife with these tensions. The pagan focus on sexual bonds and romantic love (mating in midsummer means a convenient birth in spring!) become entangled with the birthday of St. John the Baptist and his divine bond with Jesus. This mishmash yields some mighty strange rituals. Somewhere, this week, lovers are jumping over a ceremonial St. John bonfire with their wrists tied together, to cement a bond said to be stronger than blood. Somewhere a man is eating snails to avoid being cuckolded (long story). Somewhere a woman is putting a beauty elixir called “St. John’s Water” on her face or placing a bouquet of carefully-selected magical flowers under her pillow. Some kinky stuff is happening in an all-night vigil somewhere —even in the U.S., according to Louise Glück’s “Midsummer”! Walcott adopts the dialogue form of “Love III” to concoct his own magical brew from these tensions between religious and earthly love. We reclaim communion to learn to love our own soul. The bread and wine serve to “Give back your heart / to itself.” What more could one ask of Midsummer’s purported capacity for lifelong bonds than a comingling union with our soul and heart? Body and blood returned to same. In “[The midsummer sea…]” Walcott asks, “Where’s my child’s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf, / the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven, / as the Word turned poetry in its grief?” He provides his own answer: “Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!” Only love, Walcott teaches, can leaven the bread of our life. Maybe that’s the message of Midsummer. PRACTICE We might explore the embodied act of reuniting a self divided in two—body hemispheres, past and present selves, mind and heart, body and soul, thoughts and witness mind. We could use a mirror like the poem’s doorway, where one part of the self greets the other. In tandem with movements that strip down, like actions of “peeling off” layers or “taking down” imaginary facades, we are looking for somatic experiences of melting resistance in forms of surrender, like smiling, sitting, and receiving (gifts, food). We could unburden our shoulders or our neck or wherever we are weighed down by massaging them and flicking the excess tension off the fingers. We could peel off clothing or splay the limbs open to unpeel the core. What would gestures of receiving/feasting look like? Finally, to explore the act of mirror-gazing, consider this. I used to sit and touch noses with my dad. A quick google search reveals that the touching of noses and foreheads is an ancient greeting involving the transmission of spirit, practiced across many spiritual traditions: the Maori call it Hongi, the Hawaiians name it Honi; and it is practiced in certain parts of Scandinavia, among Tibetans, the desert Bedouins in Southern Jordan, the Inuit, and who knows where else. If it resonates with you that the eye could indeed be the window to the soul, stand with your nose and forehead in contact with a mirror, and as you stare into your own eyes, envision an exchange of power with the image you face. End in some form of relaxed rest, the stillness like a banquet prepared by the soma, to just be savored, “feasting” on your life.
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JUNE WEEK 1: DA BEACH!
Dan Albergotti, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths. Dan Albergotti, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads. Copyright © 2008 by Dan Albergotti. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. boaeditions.org. Devin Kelly, “Conditionally” Sometimes I remember summer in California, just 12, army father, & the way he left me alone at the hotel, & how, taken to nothing but wanting love, I wandered the beach, not knowing what to do with an ocean. I wore socks with my sneakers & sat, thinking myself older, clutching a book I didn’t read, wanting to read, but not, & then looking up, & wanting to read again. A lot has changed since then, & nothing. I don’t wear socks. I know what it’s like to be high. Sometimes I have wanted to know if there is an underside to life, & if it is inverted, so that there, we live inside of light rather than below it. I have found it better to believe in everything than nothing—like the old man each day on the beach, scavenging with the metal extension of his arm for gold or bits of valuable scrap. Each day I thought him doing something else: sometimes searching or forgiving or even blessing, sometimes longing for something more than this, & yet something still, head turned toward this soft ground that offered nothing but would or maybe. “Conditionally,” by Devin Kelly, first printed in “The Slowdown” (July 22, 2022). Used by permission of the poet. Donika Kelly, “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” I am taken with the hot animal of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs and have them move as I intend, though my knee, though my shoulder, though something is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead on the harbor beach: one mostly buried, one with skin empty as a shell and hollow feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft, I do not touch them. I imagine they were startled to find themselves in the sun. I imagine the tide simply went out without them. I imagine they cannot feel the black flies charting the raised hills of their eyes. I write my name in the sand: Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky. I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg. To the ditch lily I say I am in love. To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow street I am in love. To the roses, white petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am in love. I shout with the rough calculus of walking. Just let me find my way back, let me move like a tide come in. Donika Kelly, “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” Copyright © 2017 Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-A-Day on November 20, 2017 by the Academy of American Poets. Reprinted with permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES As the springtime buzz gives way to summer chill, it’s time to come unsprung and slow down the doing. Come walk along the shore and bury your feet in the sand. What if we take a moment to imagine that what we’ve done is enough? Or maybe the truth is that the world is enough not because of what we have or have not done. It grows in its enough-ness in proportion to our growing attention. These three poems mark a progression in the work of slowing down, beginning with a kind of listless discomfort, giving way to hopeful reverie, which then starts to glimmer enough that we can really attune to it, until it finally peels open to pure presence. The first poem is the darkest. In the belly of the whale, we can just catch a glimpse of sky through the spout. By this dim glow, the other senses come alive: when we can “be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears / and moving water. Listen for the sound of [our] heart.” The beach is something we only dream of, remember vaguely, nostalgically. Albergotti’s list of ThingsToDoWhileNotDoing is randomly assembled, because that’s how it goes in free-float. And that’s how it is, in this cultural moment of reckoning, where we are in between what’s dying and what is yet to emerge. In the blind bungling in between, our attention meanders from reviewing our life’s “ten million choices” to categorically destroying the “evidence of those before” to listening for our heartbeat and back again. It would be lovely to write these wisdom nuggets on sticky notes to hang around the house: “Be nostalgic.” “Try to be very quiet.” “Call old friends.” But also: “endure self-loathing”! It’s not easy, thinking of all we did and could have done. All of us are Jonah in our own deep sea. Albergotti’s image of being swallowed captures the sometimes-claustrophobic experience of tapping into the intense emotional world of the body. The image of being “here, swallowed with all [our] hope” is like being dropped into our own belly, one holding environment where we harbor all the ancient, early lessons of not-enoughness (perhaps even generational lessons that predate our birth). Think of what we learned in Covid lockdown: the shifts between claustrophobia, on the one hand, and the feeling being held in a safe, warm, structured place. Over the course of each long day, sometimes we were grateful for permission to “rest and wait,” and other times the emptiness was excruciating. I’d put one last sticky note right on the bathroom mirror with the marvelous final lines, reminding us of our ability to tread water. It’s a pretty scary place to be, in the middle of the ocean at night, dark and still. But we continue the pedaling action of our legs, “toes / pointing again and again down, down into / the black depths.” We are reaching down into the darkness with our feet, some of the most sensitive receptors we’ve got, keeping us afloat. Enter Devin Kelly, whose writing has broken me and my understanding of masculinity in sixteen different ways. His poetry describes something “inside of every man,” like Albergotti’s Jonah, lying “still at night waiting for change”—and yet the image of pedaling feet make me think instead of Kelly’s devastatingly vulnerable essays about endurance running. Running, he confesses in “Running Dysmorphic,” saved his life in fifth grade when his mother left his father to raise two boys alone. That’s the 12-year-old kid depicted in “Conditionally,” left at the hotel by his father and faced with the enormity of the ocean, lost. The poem focuses on his feet. Jokingly, he claims the only thing that changes with his adulthood is that he no longer wears socks with his sneakers. But between the ground floor of his running shoes and the adult knowledge of “what it’s like / to be high” he plays with flipping the world on its vertical axis: “Sometimes I have wanted / to know if there is an underside to life, / & if it is inverted.” He turns this into useful spatial paradigm to explore the existential-ish notion of living “inside of light rather than below it,” where it’s “better to believe in everything than nothing.” Flipping the light around, as a mysterious underground glimmer we need to root around to find, gives way to the mythical figure of the old man on the beach, “scavenging with the metal / extension of his arm for gold or bits of / valuable scrap.” The preadolescent boy projects into the old man’s divining rod the tasks of “searching / or forgiving or even blessing.” These three primary functions of the heart lead to a fourth occupation: “longing for something more than this, & yet / something still, head turned toward this soft / ground that offered nothing but would or maybe.” This is the final labor of the heart: turning downward to hunt for the possibility of gold that might be right under our feet. The conditional promise of this poem points the heart downward toward the earth and beneath it. Enter Nietzsche, one of Eve Sedgwick’s favorite Queer thinkers, who imagines the “genius of the heart” (with all the attendant freight of the otherworldy, spritely genii bouncing around the 19th-century imagination)—as a divining rod! …the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes rough souls and makes them taste a new longing—to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them;—the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names… (Beyond Good and Evil, article 295 trans. Helen Zimmern, Project Gutenberg). Yay to the heart’s genii, smoothing our souls with the longing to lie placid. Yay for the divining rod that perceives the mortal body as a mirror for the divine, then drops right on through it to go down, down, to long-imprisoned underground riches. Yay for the generous, unspecial, connected, blown-open soul. Yay for new, broken, delicate, bruised, fragile, hopeful regeneration into forms for which we don’t yet have names. Enter Donika Kelly, who brings us back into the living, thriving, loving present moment. Albergotti perceives a tiny porthole of light above a sea of darkness, our toes pointing downward to keep us afloat. Devin Kelly imagines this worldly plane as light, rather than the sky above, a premise as tenuous as the possibility of finding gold under the sand, but one that enables heart behaviors like forgiveness, blessing, and longing. Nietzsche turns this around: the behavior of the heart is the divining rod, and through its capacity for finding gold in the muck, we become placid, hopeful, still, new, delicate—a mirror for the heavens. But to this vertical cosmology Donika Kelly adds time and horizontal space. No longer are we dreaming of some past or future beach, or recollecting childhood heartbreak to redefine our present. The first words of this poem are “I am.” The poet’s name, the thrice-repeated fact of her present-moment-being-in-loveness, stand out in italics as though written in the sand of the poem. There’s no love object in the poem, besides the hot animal of her skin. The magical ability to move her limbs rises above her injuries. She doesn’t linger long enough with death to touch it, instead turning her attention to seagulls above and pavement below and green egg pebbles in her hand and roses and gold all around. Walking like water, she asks only to find her way home. The movement of a tide come in takes everything in its wake, black flies and ditch lilies and all, sweeping everything back to the sea of now. In spite of it all, inside it all, there’s the ability to “have a lot of feelings,” in the language of the facetious title that refuses to take life and love too seriously. We might translate the message written in the sand of the poem to read: we can, like Donika Kelly on the particular day of this poem, insist on existing inside the state of loving. We too can mark the present moment with our existence, walking forward like a high tide that can hold it all. We can be/persist in/within… love. Happy Pride y’all. PRACTICE The video I've offered here is a polyvagal practice I've set to lines from "Things to Do..." But there are so many somatic practices embedded in these poems! Exploring them with other beings and other bodies, my students found different physiological entry points for light. We played with treading-water-walking, pointing our toes as thought bicycling into each step. Moving into the floor in slow motion from the pointed toes through the balls of the feet to the heels definitely slows down the autopilot and gives the fresh experience of “dipping a toe in” to each step. Someone suggested that we visualize a footprint of phosphorescent light left behind. We experimented with myriad divining rods: sitting with one hand on the chest and the other on the earth, as though a current were running between them. One begins to sense that the heart could see, feelingly, through the extended arm and into the ground. Experiencing the actual sternum as a divining rod required a bit more gymnastics, and we experimented with how to both be close to the ground and also stand the breastbone upright. Some movements were yoga backbends: bridge, bow, upward-facing bow, and fish, which definitely gives the heart a rush of something like optimism or light. My personal favorite for experienced yogis is dolphin pose, supported by a yoga block wedged between the upper back and a wall. From a kneeling position, place your elbows shoulder-width on the ground, right up against the baseboard, with the forearms reaching up the wall. Hold a block between your palms, vertically up the wall. Then tuck your toes and straighten your legs to lift your hips, pressing the thoracic spine up against the block. Be sure the head is suspended or at least bearing no weight at all. If you want something more impressionistic, try going for a Donika Kelly walk: what does it mean, in your particular body, to “move like a tide come in”? Perhaps it’s not a physical action but a more subtle shift of focus, sweeping everything you pass into the wake of your attention. Whatever you do, consider making yourself some Albergotti-style sticky notes afterward. What might be your ThingsToDoWhileNotDoing? Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
The Summer Day POETIC THEMES: Schoooool’s out. for. summer! 21st be damned, it’s summertime. To see the extravagance, the unabashed pomp with which nature shakes out her feathers in early summer is to hear the call to be present. This poem begins with a question about God, and ends with another question - Mary Oliver's most famous lines. We don’t need to know who made all this, we just have to commit to feeling it, moment by moment. This might be called the manifesto for the religion of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole - a kind of agnostic worship of what is. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense - the sense of worthiness, what is worthy of our attention. The poem is not about a summer’s day, it's entitled THE Summer’s Day. This one you’re in. Side note about the general versus the specific, as it pertains to another famous poem about spirituality. The most well-known haiku ever written is by Basho, in which a frog jumps into a pond and makes a splash. It's generally agreed that the pond is an analogy for the meditation mind, and the frog jump the arrival of a thought or other disturbance. The translation into English is the subject of endless debate. Is the poem's focus on the water, the jumping frog, or the effect (in ripple or sound)? Do we translate with a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? (Basho's Many English Frogs) Answers to this question reveal different understandings of mindfulness. For Oliver, the still water of the mind isn't the point - it's the music of what splashes in. The rhythm of noticing each thing is, for Oliver, spiritual. Present-tense noticing. And indeed another repeated word in this poem's description of this grasshopper is "now" - the first word of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. The first of his 196 aphorisms reads, "Now, the discipline of yoga." Again, there are many translation debates. But one interpretation is that to inhabit the present moment fully, attentively, is yoga. Mary Oliver calls herself a “praise poet,” and American transcendentalism finds its 21st century expression in her poems. She distills her message with quotable quotes like “Attention is the beginning of devotion." It would be hard for her to have been more explicit: “Instructions for living a life:/ Pay attention./ Be astonished./Tell about it” (from the poem "Sometimes"). We pay attention, like cash money, we give it. We devote our attention, the most precious of gifts. In this same explicit vein, she specifies that this is not just any grasshopper, it’s this one. And repeats "The one who" twice more. Every one of us is as strange and complicated as this grasshopper’s eyes. Ours is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what it is you will do with yours is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do in this world of ours. We are challenged to fall down and surrender to that calling, to offer our lives like a prayer. The central line of the poem, cutting it down the middle, confesses, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." And in this poem, prayer turns out to be falling down in the grass, kneeling down, bowing to this earth of ours. PHYSICAL THEMES We could examine the grasshopper’s specific movements, but that’s not really the point here. The grasshopper is one object of attention, and we are called to find our own. The crucial verbs here are falling down, kneeling down, as a physical expression of worship, in the sense of “worthiness” mentioned above. There are indeed, in the words of her beloved Rumi (or at least the Rumi she grew to love through her friend Coleman Bark's translations), a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground: “Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look up into that blue space? Take your choice, prayers fly in all directions.” (Huffington Post article) So in this practice we’ll anchor our attention - quite literally, anchoring our attention to the earth - by practicing down dirty, in the grass. “Grass” is a noun mentioned no fewer than 5 times in this relatively short poem, and movements that concretely engage grass are fun to explore. Key to this honing of attentive curiosity is to stay spontaneous with what is drawing our regard, heeding the natural wandering of the observing mind. So after exploring the nearest grassy domain, be sure to take some time to just be. |
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