summer air

Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is”
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
 
Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love. Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. boaeditions.org.
 
 
Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
 
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
 
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
 
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
 
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            As per the commonality in the titles, this week is really about thingliness. Humidity and wind are among the few things that makes the air real to us. Like seeing our breath in winter, humid and motile air makes a real, palpable thing out of the invisible element that surrounds us always and permeates our being. Like any good anchor for mindfulness, the presence of humidity or breeze makes the familiar more real to us. For whatever reason, the body responds to the thick humidity of August by shortening and shallowing the breath, when we really need to cultivate a deeper and fuller breath to combat the feeling of drowning in water. A friendly way to welcome this breath is to envision ourselves, as Ellen Bass does, like fish with gills, sipping the air easily into our side ribcage as if we were in our natural element. This fishy play is sobered up by the poem’s likening of the air’s heaviness to the thick oppression of grief, weighting us down “like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief.” Acknowledging the discomfort is a step toward calling it like it is: grief isn’t comfortable, but we can learn to live with it, to love the world as is. You can drown in the thick humidity, or you can take life as it comes, “like a face between your palms.”
            What if truly learning to love the things of this world requires that we forego prettifying them? Wilbur shifts our airy focus from humidity to movement with a spectacular image of a morning “all awash with angels,” as laundry moves across the line and in the breeze. Air is likened to breath, as the laundry angels rise “together in calm swells / Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear / With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing.” The poem ends with a very different analogy, pulling the clothes from their gallows. In a way, this is the reverse practice of magicking fireflies and heat lightning into some ethereal otherworldly phenomenon. We move away from the tendency to romanticize the natural world. Like laundry off the line, we take our love down to this plane, for nuns and thieves alike. 
            Both poems explore how the dynamics of air reunite body and soul, by reckoning with this world as it is. Wilbur takes his reader down from the angel dance to harsh reality—“the world’s hunks and colors.” (Somewhere Wilbur stated that “hunks” is his favorite word here, for its effectiveness is shifting to the real and the quotidian.) With clear, unidealized perception, we fall in love with the things not of heaven but of this world—lovers off to be undone. The soul, in the first stanza, “hangs for a moment bodiless.” From this disembodied state, the middle of the poem marks the soul’s resistance to heavy, grounded reality: “The soul shrinks / From all that it is about to remember” in a stanza riddled with contrasts between heaven and earth, blessing and rape. But the sun is warm, in the last stanza, looking down on this earth. There are colors among the hunks. The soul’s movement is downward, returning to earth: “The soul descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body.” We come home to this reality, this body, the things in this world of ours.
 
 
PRACTICE
           In this video I'm playing with EFT to tap along with Ellen Bass' evocation of hands, heart, stomach, gills... feel free to let your fingertips explore free-form. AND/OR, to transform August’s watery heaviness into some kind of freedom, you could lift and lower your arms in angel wing mock-flight. We could also use a little taste of the joy in “impersonal breathing.” Liberating the breath in tropical air involves opening and softening the back of the throat to avoid any burning silt feeling. Imagine two bodily points as the ends of the laundry line, and, as though in a breeze, breathe as openly as possibly while waving and undulating the flesh between those points. For example, in many shapes the points might be tailbone and crown; for other movements it might be fingertips and toetips; still others might explore diagonal endpoints like one shoulder to the opposite hip point. When we imagine freedom between those fastened points, how does the breath rise and fill and move-and-stay and swell and swoon and fly and dance and float, to adopt Wilbur’s verbs? Inevitably, undulating between these points will involve sidebends—opening the intercostal muscles like bass gills in the humid air—and twists, feeling the skin and viscera crease in one place and stretch open to the breath in another. Whatever it is you do to embody these poems, in the end could we take our face in our palms and read its reality like braille?