winter solstice

James Wright, “The Jewel”

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

James Wright “The Jewel” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
 
 
James Wright, “Trying to Pray” 
This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water.

James Wright, “Trying to Pray” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
 
 
James Wright, “A Blessing”

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
 
 
Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
 
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
 
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
 
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
 
Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
  
POETIC THEMES
            At the darkest time of the year, we can reorient toward light, or we can delve into the transformative power of darkness. Pagan traditions hold midwinter as the most sacred time of the year, with the most potential for mysterious, secret processes of spiritual change. I love the gem-like precision of these tiny poems of Wright’s, which condense their ingredients into crystal form, like the pressurizing force in metamorphism. In “The Jewel,” the wind turns our bones to emerald. The air behind our body is a cave. A cloister. A closing silence. A fire blossom. Wright goes spelunking around in a sensual underworld menagerie, all murk and glorious riddle.
            I want to reference “A Blessing” mostly for contrast. This poem, probably Wright’s most famous, is atypical in its all-over sweetness. Barely a pinky finger is dipped into the darkness that most of his work swims in. Hanging out with a couple of lonely ponies by the highway, something becomes real to him: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” Those final lines are a barebones layout of one view of body and spirit: one must be transcended to reach the other.
            Nowhere in his other work do you find that kind of facile reading of the body’s place in the realm of spirit. These two shorter poems are in many ways more challenging. Both are working through something more complicated than body transcendence. In “Trying to Pray,” Wright proclaims, “I have left my body behind me, crying / in its dark thorns.” But then he lifts the poem from despair with a list of Good Things, all sense-based: good darkness, women’s hands kneading bread, the leaves of a tree being touched. In Wright’s poetry, the amalgam of our senses interacting with the mysteries of nature sparks a kind of transformation. Sense experience nudges our conceptual faculties toward the mystical. Wright’s focus, as per “The Jewel,” isn’t in what we can see with our eyes, the clear, controlled space in front of us, but in the mysterious zone behind or inside our body, which we can never see but always follows us. And the recognition of the mysteries one can’t quite see releases a kind of epiphanic clarity. Wind touches not skin, but bone. We have felt this—the wind down in our bones like the crystalized cold of emerald.
            This dark, mysterious, sensual tone is one Wright shares with Theodore Roethke (who was in fact his professor). Roethke’s hard-earned rendering of Immanence isn’t to be found in his most-anthologized poems, like “The Waking,” but in the deep dive of a poem like “In a Dark Time.” Roethke’s poetry is a relentless, inward probing, an introspection that picks at the scabs of the psyche’s machinations until they bleed again. Living just this side of madness may have thrown this poet in and out of the sanatorium, but arguably this threshold state is transformed into a “nobility of soul” by his art. It’s noble because it’s healing. At least it has been for me, having taken so much comfort in his companioning darkness. In my own dark times, I had someone to hold my hand, even “pinned against a sweating wall” or dying to myself in the “long, tearless night.” Living on the edge of what the mind can withstand isn’t so much a choice as a temperament—“The edge is what I have.” Those of us who resonate with the line “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire” do, in fact, see better “in the deepening shade.” But the involuted process of compression in Roethke’s poetry gives hope because it eventually goes so deep as to spin us free of the poem with a glimpse of the sparkling sublime. “The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.” It's lines like this that help us climb out of our fear.
  
PRACTICE
       Could you spend a half an hour in darkness? There is a summer program that leads clusters of people with blindfolds and canes along my block in Philadelphia. This is a simulation exercise to train people to work with the visually impaired by walking a mile in their shoes. I tried this out while walking the dog and decided it was better to leave the dog at home (sorry, Skunky). On my own, it was still brutally difficult, even without an enthusiastic fluffy thing tugging me around. It involves mentally projecting a parallel line to the movement of traffic, navigating uneven sidewalk, and using sensory cues to inwardly construct the geometry of an intersection to cross a street. I found that I was focused more on the practical challenges of being blind, as opposed to the psychology of darkness.
        So instead, you might simply try a half an hour feeling your way down the stairs, to the coffee machine, to your toothbrush. You can expect that few practical tasks will get done. What is the psychology of darkness for you? Does deprivation of one sensory pathway heighten others, and which? Is there any shift in your experience of the relationship between sense and spirit? You might even free-write from your own “steady storm of correspondences,” by keeping pen to paper, resisting the urge to pause. If you get stuck, you can always simply write one word over and over until your mind unclogs. Or, consider a blind drawing of any object or face you encountered in the darkness, without looking at the page and without lifting the mark of the pen from paper. This one-touch technique often alleviates any perfectionism or interest in reproducing reality, instead making manifest an impressionistic picture of something as it exists within you.
              If you just can't let go of the visual, here's a video. It's designed to entice you, through the visual, to enter more deeply into the auditory, with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about turning your whole body into one big huge listening vessel. A yogic approach to becoming a tuning fork is to allow your attention to rest at the crown of your head, the third eye, and at the center of each palm. You might be enticed to close your eyes, when you feel the effects.