What the Light Teaches

Steven Outram

What the Light Teaches

Language is the house with lamplight in its windows,

visible across fields. Approaching, you can hear

music; closer, smell

soup, bay leaves, bread - a meal for anyone

who has only his tongue left.

It's a country; home, family;

abandoned, burned down; whole lines dead, unmarried.

For those who can't read their way in the streets,

or in the gestures and faces of strangers,

language is the house to run to;

in wild nights, chased by dogs and other sounds,

when you've been lost a long time,

when you have no other place.

There are nights in the forest of words

when I panic, every step into thicker darkness,

the only way out to write myself into a clearing,

which is silence.

Nights in the forest of words

when I'm afraid we won't hear each other

over clattering branches, over

both our voices calling.

In winter, in the hour

when the sun runs liquid then freezes,

caught in the mantilla of empty trees;

when my heart listens

through the cold stethoscope of fear,

your voice in my head reminds me

what the light teaches.

Slowly you translate fear into love,

the way the moon's blood is the sea.

Anne Michaels

This is one of my favorite images - light from a distant window. If you’ve ever been out for a long walk at night when the air turns chill, you’ll know that nothing can make you feel more lonesome or full of longing than the light of a home window. It can be either the anticipation of warmth and welcome, or the cruel reminder that you are outside.  I absolutely love the line, “Language is the house with lamplight in its windows, visible across fields.” I have to pause and think. Is she saying that language is the hope of warmth and belonging, the invitation to relationships, to shelter? “Language is the house to run to.” How interesting. Until this poem, I had not thought of it like that. Writing, speech, language, can be a place to find yourself when you’ve been lost. It’s true, isn’t it? “Slowly you translate fear into love.” And isn’t that exactly what we’re attempting? To write out (or speak out) the darkness, the lostness, the loneliness – to work our way Home? Is Language that magic? Can words do all that?

Poem White Page White Page Poem

Pierre Bonnard

 

 

Poem White Page White Page Poem

Poem white page white page poem

something is streaming out of a body in waves

something is beginning from the fingertips

they are starting to declare for my whole life

all the despair and the making music

something like wave after wave

that breaks on a beach

something like bringing the entire life

to this moment

the small waves bringing themselves to white paper

something like light stands up and is alive

Muriel Rukeyser

“Something like light stands up and is alive”. That hits me in the chest. “Something like wave after wave/ that breaks on a beach” – do you feel that?! This is something inexplicable, and yet, she has said it. She has shown us something we didn’t know we knew. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think poetry is one of the highest arts. The art we all find within ourselves, and can carry anywhere – into any circumstance. We don’t have to lug a frame into a landscape, or carry a sculpture into a battle, no, but we carry poems in our minds. Whole worlds open, anywhere, anytime. And this is the work of the poet. Rukeyser makes it sound like magic, but it is hard, hard work. “Streaming out of the body in waves”? Not bloody likely! If only. Oh, if only.