Greenstorm's Journal

I don't like Mary Oliver. Her work feels trite, lacking in nuance, more like a motivational poster than the echo of a person's insides.

Nonetheless I'm spending a lot of time walking carefully, censoring myself, making myself small and invisible and unassuming to keep people comfortable lately. I'm keeping company with people who find no joy in me; quite the opposite.

I want a better poem but I can't find one and so Mary Oliver it is.

I don't want to live a small life

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Mary Oliver

I have the feeling that ee cummings has written something closer but all I get are approximations of the target:

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness—

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

and maybe...

i am a beggar always
who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking
with a sign on his
chest
BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow
you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than
just enough dreams to
live on)
after all, kid

you might as well
toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,
anything which you can’t
pass off on other people: for
instance a
plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something
fall into his hat)go wandering
after it with fingers;till having

found
what was thrown away
himself
taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life
to(carefully turning a
corner)never bother you any more.

Graham, I realise you may not have read this poem yet:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
by: Craig Raine
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Everyone else: http://www.beyondrobson.com/city/2006/02/mutiny_at_the_cafe/

Tonight I Can Write
Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

translated by W.S. Merwin

Evidently I'm down. Down, down, pulled by rain and grey and the constant clamour of people that swirl around but never quite make it to the stage of intimate conversation. Sometimes it's so important o hold a hand, to exchange I-love-yous, to wander around in the rain, any of that human stuff is necessary to us. Here we can talk about poly; I can 'be poly' and say, I must drink at many wells to satiate my thirst. I can say, this one well runs dry so often, I am so thirsty.

I can drop metaphor. I would say, does anybody love me, except-- that's a question from two years ago. Today the question is not about externals. Tonight, the question is-- do I love myself enough? What do I want to be doing for myself? How can I make myself happy? Why have I been neglecting my needs? Who do I think I am to let someone else pull me so far away from meeting my own needs?

Tonight, I can turn from being lonely with myself and angry at him to being simply lonely with my beautiful fish and slightly trepidatious rats and sad with myself.

The truth is, I want someone to be here and go through all these things with me, the life partner to partner me and listen to me, simply because I'm afraid of absorbing it on my own. It's hard to sit down and listen to someone's pain without wanting to do something; learnable, but hard. It's harder yet, for me, to sit and listen to my own without co-opting someone to do it for me.

I never want to lose the ability to listen to myself. It comes and goes, always, and I forget that there's more than the wisp perception walking in my shoes; there's a whole person, watcher and listener and feeler and thinker. I think I'm afraid that I can encompass these things so easily when I really stop and look at them, stop and listen to them. I think I'm afraid that when I centre myself (which is really an odd act; putting myself between the two of me) I won't need anyone, and when you've no ties then it's so easy to float away.

I don't know. I know that when I feel bad, it's hard to take the step to here, to this place, to being with myself. It's safer to say, 'listen to me, help me' to someone else. It's scarier to just be, to listen to myself, to help myself. I don't know why. I don't know why the earth doesn't tremble with my presence, when I come into myself. I don't know why the ground doesn't shake beneath my feet.

I've written this, and I feel so much better. All I had to do was start writing, 'does anybody love me' and realise that it wasn't the right question. Look! I'm my own sanity check too, if this is indeed sanity. I don't need you to stand there, to test and correct and approve. I don't need a you at all.

It makes the love more meaningful, to have it that way. I do love you anyhow, of course. :)

Not so down after all. My feet are warm and dry and clean, my rats love me, and I have a cup of tea and a raincoat.

So, back to life.

His birthday yesterday.

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo…
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