Of Open Mics and Mindfulness

I'm going to share a poem that comes from a deep place. I'm excited to have written it, not because I think it is a great achievement of craft, but it marks a new level of understanding that has been opening up for me over the last six weeks or so. This semester off has turned into as much a spiritual journey as a writing one.

Yes, I'm still writing poetry since what I think of as real, serious poems started coming out of me in March. This wasn't planned but it feels overwhelmingly like coming home to myself.

Anyway, I read two of my poems last week at the Final Thursday open mic. Such a sense of power and centeredness going through me as I heard my words coming from me. I do love to read aloud and know I do it extremely well. But then, as I discovered in the fall already, open mics seem so brutal emotionally to experience -- at least this one, at least for me. There was no response at the break or at the end (okay, one colleague briefly as I was going out the door), and the pain I experienced was intense. Some of it is bummedness and ego disappointment, I'm sure -- I so longed to have someone reassure me my poetry was good. So of course one fear that came up was that it was actually so awful no one had anything good to say. But I tried to stay with the feeling and not judge it, and I realized how deep it went; to such a primal sense of non-response and the pain of not being met. Offering all you are, letting your deepest self shine forth, and then nothing. (Blogging is rather like this too, I find, but this was more immediate and profound.) And I tried to be with myself in a compassionate way.

The miraculous thing is that over the last six weeks or so I have been been doing pretty dedicated meditation/mindfulness practice, and not only is that what is part of what has reopened my capacity and desire to write poetry, it has also begun to show me that I can be the one to attend to my feelings with kindness, rather than looking for that outside myself only. That practice is part of it; there have been some other outer and inner happenings that have contributed to the opening of this new perception as well, and it's still at an early stage. Yet I can feel it is deeply transformative. One thing that has had a tremendous impact that I should acknowledge is encountering the work of meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach and reading her book Radical Acceptance, which has hit me so very deeply (I'm on the second time through now).

At any rate, here is what I wrote. I think, hope, it explains itself. I don't think I'm as wise yet as it sounds; the words themselves carry me as I discover them to a place I am only beginning to touch in real life.


Reminder

When you stand in what you have become
trying to find your way back
to yourself and the wind that roars through everything
and you let that wind come through your mouth
in the words you have plucked from it
and they feel like burning
and they feel like an offering
and you feel yourself in and out of your body
doing what you came to do at last --
then, when no one speaks to you,
acknowledges what came from you at all
you bank the fire that you thought you were,
you walk out to the night, the car, the road.
The sound you hear is the ball that is your heart
rolling loudly around an empty room.
You remember all the times you longed
to give yourself, and no one saw you there;
and maybe your words are just pretension
and you alone have no purpose here on earth.
Stay with yourself then:
Sit down on the hard floor of the empty room
silent and listening, and you will hear the wind
that moves through everything come in the window
flowing into the room, and it is the room,
and you are the one speaking and seeing
you are the giver and the receiver
standing in the room saying I love you
standing in the fire saying thanks

The Night the Bats Came Out

I truly am not obsessed by bats. But having written a poem sorting through family memories and present feelings via an experience with bats, it triggered the thought of writing another one, which I wrote earlier this week.

I did a little background reading, and now realize that the image we had -- of the bats leaving the nest all at once, for good -- is not the reality. Did they really go out every night once the babies were old enough, until at some point later the "maternity colony" dispersed? That takes away from the story as we remembered it. But at any rate, none of us ever saw the sight described here again, despite my parents' many evening fishing expeditions on the lake.

I have now written five serious poems in the past month. I haven't even wanted to be writing poetry, but it seems to be what wants to be written. There is power and awe -- and bewilderment -- in realizing I still know how. The poems feel a little rusty but not bad; they feel (for better or worse, I can't tell) strangely recognizably akin to the poems I wrote in college or shortly after. I am aware I know what I am doing in terms of craft much more working with poetry than when I am trying to write creative prose.

I searched some possible bat colony pictures to share, but yikes. They are horrifically creepy looking, just as the experience was.

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[poem taken down during submission for publication]

Let go, go back.

Well. I drafted another poem, sitting in a hotel room in Saratoga Springs, NY, before going out to spend the rest of the day exploring. I want to share it because I am awed that poems are starting to come to me again after so many years; also it stands as a report on recent days. I did find my old college poetry again a couple of days ago, and I am awed by how good I really was. And, I think, how far I could have gone had anyone really taken me up and mentored me in those years -- I had good creative writing class experiences, a few (there wasn't the culture of it then there is now, at least where I went to college and then graduate school), but no one gave me a sense how to purse this as a calling. I am struggling with a tremendous sense of lost opportunity and power . . . but trying to hold onto the thought that maybe not everything is lost. I'm not sure where poetry fits given that I have been trying to write personal essay, but I don't see it as an either/or thing. As long as I write, it seems like a good thing.

Yesterday I left my family's home symbolically -- it probably isn't the last time I will be there before it is sold (the closing date of which is uncertain, although the contract is being drafted) but it might be the last time I have stayed there; if the closing comes fairly quickly (the purchasing family needs to sell their own house which should go on the market soon) it will probably be cleared out with an estate sale before I see it again. I don't even know how to process this -- it is probably impossible to do. But anyway, this poem tries to distill one experience of it.

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Counting Breaths

Counting breaths in my family home
the morning before I leave it.
The thighs press against the woven seat.
The abdomen lifts and falls.

The lake glitters coldly past tall windows
in this belated spring.

In 1918 a family bought this house.
In 2018 a daughter of that family buys it back
after fifty years. And this daughter goes on
to what I don’t yet know.
to what I knew but somehow gave away,
hoping it is not too late to find again.

Counting breaths, each number rises and falls,
reaches ten to start over again.
Quieting the mind as a bird calls,
as the furnace cycles on, as the world
is lost and present, decades whirling round.

A day earlier in a box I found my writing
from college, when being a poet was all I wanted.
I tried not to scream for the lost power.
In those years too I tried to watch my mind,
counting breaths in a gabled dorm room
as a same spring moved trees beyond the window.

Thirty-five years later, I can see everything
I want and wonder about is much the same.
Trying to count and watch again.
Numbers ticking over, the same body breathing
though now a voice on my phone teaches me.
What is lost, found, possible
if everything is present?

Let go, go back. Let go, go back. Let go, go back.
At the edge of awareness
breath summons the whisper of a poem.
Breathe out. Open the eyes. Close the door.
A day later, count again and write it down.

The Bats

I am in New York state working on the sale of my family's home. I haven't been able to focus on writing until I made myself do some journaling last night. But this morning I drafted a poem that had been, um, battering around in my head since I got here as something I wanted to write while I was in this space. I just wrote it during the weekly Tuesday morning Shut Up and Write (#suaw) hour for academic women (and others) hosted by Lisa Munro on Twitter.

So, go me! I think it's a viable poem -- I do feel like I am regaining some ability to write poems. I'd love feedback for improvement though if anyone feels so moved. It is just a rough draft!

I can't put quite into non-literary words what I am trying to express here. Family memories, of course, but also something of what I am dealing with at this time of my life, reflections on who I am and what I have lost and might re-find inside myself. The scariness of otherness both outside and inside, but realizing that what is strange and scary is not actually bad.

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[poem taken down during submission for publication]