Words edge closer to truth

April 24, 2003

Dear Leslie,

Sometimes in conversation or reading, a word or a situation makes me think of a line from one of my favorite poems. Not a lot of poems are floating around in my brain, but the ones that are seem to have been seared in. They represent some home truth.

I don't live by lines from poems, but often what I believe in is perfectly expressed by the words an artist has meticulously chiseled from the alphabet.

In Humboldt County, I knew a man who wrote poetry and built houses. He sometimes read his poems at my hangout, the Jambalaya. His poems sounded like houses being built. Sometimes there was concrete being poured, sometimes there was hammering, sometimes sawing. When the pieces fit together at the end, you had something you could live in.

A friend sent me a poem recently. I didn't even know she wrote them. It is exquisite, a poem about a skylight a wayfarer gave her from the deck of a ship. It is also a poem about pieces of souls. I loved it and begged for another.

The second poem is about a man we both knew, now dead, "who tried to dig a tunnel into heaven." Maybe because I knew the man in the second poem, I told her I wished it had gone further, revealed more about him and thus more of herself. She understood and talked about how hard it is to be totally honest because you don't want to make others or yourself uncomfortable.

She's right, of course. Virginia Woolf is right too. If you don't tell the truth about yourself, she said, you can't tell it about other people.

Human beings have become good at using words to obscure the truth. Poetry homes in on the truth. It condenses words like a laser does light. The searing result can leave the world no longer the same.

Poetry is so difficult to write because it is like a lie detector. The words do not sound right together, the lines look all squiggly until the truth appears. The rightness of a poem is not for our brains to decide, it is felt in our core.

So here are some of the lines that live in my head. The first jumps up when I'm confronted by dogmatism. e.e. cummings: "Whoever pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you."

Some fascination summons Cummings again:

"i thank You God for this most amazing

day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes ..."

In love, poetry is better than roses and rings.

Rumi:

"Come to the orchard in Spring.

There is light and wine, and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter."

Hurting? Poetry heals.

I use Galway Kinnell's poem "St. Francis and the Sow" as a prayer: "The bud stands for all things," it begins. "Even for those things that never flower. For everything flowers from within of self-blessing..."

A poem can hold the inner truth years of friendship are based on. When I think of you, strong and unsentimental and courageous, the poem is Kinnell's tiny "Prayer":

"Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is what I want.

Only that. But that."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.