The Mind of a Poet

March 16, 2010 at 9:02 pm (The Mind of a Poet) (poetry, Scintillectual)

Better Late Than Never  

I must apologize for being late with [last] Friday’s post.  I was on a plane to see my sweet Scin.  Then, I was…well…getting reacquainted.  Here is the intended post for last Friday.  [I should be on track now.]

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been talking about language and power in terms of the more ancient and mystical understandings of the spoken and written word.  I threw out the idea that poetry–as intentional, fully formed language–has particular power:  the power to heal, to transform, to make manifest all sorts of things in our thinking, our experience of our daily lives, and our world.  I introduced my experience with my writing over the past couple of years:  that I had found myself beginning to write about and explore relationships in regard to reunions, second chances, healing old wounds, and like concepts.  As I did this, my experience in my daily life came to manifest those ideas.  I bumped into people I had not seen in years, heard from people I had not in a long time, and found existing relationships with family and friends deepening in wonderful ways.  It was as if, in some mystical-physics kind of way, I had begun to write things into being–to speak them into being, as it were.  On some level, most of us know that what we think, we manifest.  Our awareness of this universal truth varies based upon our mindset and world view, as well as our level of general awareness; but, we all have some experience with this.  Examples:  we go to a party, meet someone who knows a long-lost friend, then bump into the old friend a day or so later.  We are thinking of an old friend and that person calls.  There are numbers of ways this happens in our lives.

As I said, my experience with this has been interesting.  It has also opened my relationships.  Not surprising, really.  It follows that as we open ourselves and explore ourselves, our lives open, our relationships deepen–our lives expand as we do.  The most significant of these openings and reconnections, of course, has been my reunion with Scin.  I believe we were preparing for–and calling out to in some way–our reunion long before we were aware…and, at the same time.  The way in which the whole re-connection occurred is almost too beautiful to be true; it all unfolded as if it were a story someone had written.  Yet, it is true.  [See www.Scintillectual.com for more on the story.]  The short version is:  I had been thinking about her, re-examining my life (as we are prone to do) in general, and writing all this poetry about reconnections, etc. for a couple of years–all while trying to get the courage to get her on the phone somehow.  She was going through some real changes too, and, eventually woke up in the middle of the night with a need to write about us; she then spent a good part of the next day tracking me down until she got me on the phone.  My response:  “great to hear from you; I’ve been looking for you.”  The rest is, as they say, history.

This poem is one of my favorites of the reunion poems I have been talking about here.  I think it sums up the kind of synchronicity I have been talking about, as well as the power it holds to transform our lives–often, for the better.

Random Lines To You

Your return is an absence so relieved
it is solid, like wood—perhaps a doorway,
a fixing of something essential
to its frame.  We opened this door

stepped across the threshold into a misty
world where our past and who we are now
merge into this newness like the lifting
of a veil.  We are changed and not changed.

I consider your face still like night-blooming
flowers in the fading light:  how it reveals
you, how easily I settle now into the soft
lines, the gentle angles—how I breathe
there and linger.

Here, again, is the sound of your voice:
like warm southern rain on dry, upturned leaves,
a measured cadence out of which laughter comes
like a children’s carousel at dusk in the Fall

of the year.  Here, now, is your love-making
like the breeze blowing blooms off the hollyhocks,
then lifting them lightward into the sun.  This is
my hand at the small of your back, your breath

upon my neck, my exhalation of your name,
your hand in my hair—this is the sound of us,
separate and joined, meeting again and again
everywhere and nowhere, in breath and in stillness:
we are a rhythm as ancient as drums,

as new as this evening breeze
blowing wind chimes on the porch.

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