In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
I got hooked. I was haunted. It was perhaps the “who am I?” moper in me that clung to that "I am what is missing" link. Or just the angry young man howling: I’m not who you think I am. I’m here but I’m somewhere else. Yet I sensed that the power of the poem was beyond what I was going through (or how I was acting up) at the time. The power and beauty lay in the poem itself. But I still had a long way to go before realizing that.
In the early 1980s, I graduated from college. (Who knew this Lit major would be able to finish something?) My first full-time job: high school English teacher (surprise, surprise). One of the subjects I was asked to teach was poetry writing. And I had to compile a series of handouts for the class. I needed samples of poetry from various historical periods, in different styles, but none of the staid, predictable choices, please. I needed teachable poems (i.e., short and sweet, so none of T. S. Eliot’s epic brain-twisters). But I also wanted quirky, edgy types (so I tossed in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s "Underwear") and visual innovations (e. e. cummings’ “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” — that’s “grasshopper,” kids, with the letters mixed up and stanzas cut up to make you feel the insect on the page doing its hop, hop, hop). And I wanted poems that spoke about what’s weird and wonderful about poems — e.g., “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand. Says my buddy, my bard:
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. (Be patient, kids. We’re getting there.) I am this “yuppie” assistant editor at an international trade magazine, sitting in a cubicle, facing the computer monitor that flashed nothing but tiny rows of pale-white letters on a black or dark-greenish (Matrix-y) background. The pay was okay, and I had friends in that place. But the hours to fill and the paragraphs to clean up and my restless brain’s “I’m here but I’m somewhere else” refrains went on and on and on. (Kids, in those days we had no Internet in the office, there were no cellphones anywhere, I didn’t even have a mouse for my computer — and Keanu’s Matrix had not yet been shown. Yeah, what the...!) So I needed poetry more than ever. I needed my buddy-bard back.
And he was there, with “The Continuous Life.” This Mark Strand poem was first published in The New Yorker in 1989. I photocopied it, pasted the cut-out on black cardboard, and pinned the frame on the corkboard lining my venerable cubicle. So there. One of my Top 10 Favorite Poems of All Time hanging around as I tried holding down a job and keeping my sanity intact. It’s been with me ever since (the poem, I mean; the sanity, I'm not sure). This poem speaks to me and hears me when even I refuse to listen to myself anymore. It tells parents to talk to their children:
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost — a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
Which brings me to this moment. It’s been 20 years since I first read “The Continuous Life.” More than 30 years since I started “Keeping Things Whole.” Four months ago I bought a copy of Mark Strand’s New Selected Poems, which puts together his greatest hits — no, I’d rather say, his greatest gifts — from 43 years of poetry writing. Oddly enough, this is the first and only Mark Strand book I have ever bought. I am looking now at the poet in the Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photograph that appears on the back cover (see above). The face looks weather-beaten. There's a Clint Eastwood-ish stoicism about it. I keep staring and find myself lingering between the poet’s grin and grimace. As though the lines on his face were hinting at the crossroads (his? mine?) where years of reluctance and determination finally meet.
Yes, weather-beaten. Which makes me think of yet another word, this one from a Mark Strand poem I recently read: “moonhandled.” It sounds like “manhandled.” (Look it up, kids. It means “to be handled roughly.” A manner that’s the opposite of tender.) The poem speaks of anxiety, a dreaded unknown. So perhaps a moonhandled scenario goes well with a mind in disarray. Still, I tinker with other possibilities, no matter how far-fetched. Couldn't the poet mean “moon-caressed”? Or how about drenched in shadows? Shrouded in faint light? I would love to put up another blog just so I could use that word as the title, to find out where those three syllables could take me or what it would be like to be moonhandled. The word is from the poem "Sleeping with One Eye Open":
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
Something inevitably happens when I look at a photograph like the one I’ve chosen for this post. Somewhere in my head there’s a word or a poem that seizes the moment. Suddenly I’m dumbfounded, moonhandled. I’m eating poetry again as my thoughts meander over years that contract and stretch and dim. My buddy (from way back in high school) is now 78 years old. This year he published his 18th poetry collection, Almost Invisible. The poet who wrote "Wherever I am / I am what is missing" continues to write about feeling or being almost invisible. Kids, it’s time to see this man and read his poems.
[Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc. Source: The Austin Chronicle.]
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