Breaking Free or Closing the Loop: You Choose

[Image: “Magnet Loop Swirls,” from the Flickr account of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The caption there reads: “A close up of an active region in extreme UV light reveals tangles of loops and coils of arcs. This static image of particles spinning along magnetic field lines conceals the fact that the dynamic region is in motion every second.”]

From whiskey river :

Sunstone
(excerpt from a much longer poem)

I heard my blood, singing in its prison,
and the sea sang with a murmur of light,
one by one the walls gave way,
all of the doors were broken down,
and the sun came bursting through my forehead,
it tore apart my closed lids,
cut loose my being from its wrappers,
and pulled me out of myself to wake me
from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone.

(Octavio Paz [source: various, but here is a good place to start])

…and:

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say “We loved the earth but could not stay.”

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Don’t talk to me about the stars, about how cold and indifferent they are, about the unimaginable distances. There are millions of stars within us that are just as far, and people like me sometimes burn up a whole life trying to reach them.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

The Magic Mountain

A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?

Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.

I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Student

She never spoke, which made her obvious,
the way death makes the air obvious
in an empty chair, the way sky compressed

between bare branches is more gray or blue,
the way a window is more apparent than a wall.
She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat,
smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence
colored the smaller silences that came and went,
that other students stood up and filled in.

I leaned near the window in my office. She sat
on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting
while I made my little speech. February

light pressed its cold back against the glass,
sealing us in. She focused on my lips
as I spoke, as if to study how it’s done,
the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration
of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem,
shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence

drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow,
let its petals settle on my shoulders.
I looked outside to the branches

of a stripped tree, winter starlings
folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames
shuddering at the tips. Students wandered
across campus as if under water, hands and hair
unfurling, their soundless mouths churning—
irate or ecstatic, I couldn’t tell—ready to burn

it all down or break into song. When I looked back
her eyes had found the window: tree, students,
birds swimming by, mute in their element.

It was painful to hear the papery rasp
of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch
color smudging her neck and temple, branching
to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened
to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush
collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke

rising from ice. I could see what it cost her
to make that leap. What heat it takes
for the body to blossom into speech.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

Accountability

Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming
pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their   
haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow,   
their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well   
as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town   
that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few   
stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing   
but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:   
Denver, Cheyenne.

Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill   
a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa
and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred   
North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders   
on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed   
by the hard stars. The school bus by the door, a yellow   
mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose   
door and worries it all night, letting the hollow   
students count off and break up and blow away   
over the frozen ground.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

#27: People often speak as if their nostalgic highlights were knocked out of the dark earth of the past with a rock hammer or pick — hence the golden-amber glow of such memories. But this fails to consider the whole truth of nostalgia, of memory itself for that matter: these treasures seldom if ever existed as solid nuggets. They existed rather as glints — bright flakes in a series of moments, which coalesced into whole things only via the sluice of consciousness: repeatedly washed, over and over, fused under the heat of emotion, burnished until becoming all but indestructible. If you would truly cherish the past, you’d not plunder it with the heavy-duty hardware and earth-moving machinery of a mining company but sift through it delicately with the sieve, cheesecloth, tweezers, and magnifying glass of a professional paleontologist.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)