White Lilacs

When I told my friend Dorothy I was trying to overcome my muteness, she wrote to me about white lilacs. In their brief season, she said, they are “white like brides, with less than a month of blooming, not questioning their right to express themselves, to invite visitations.”

I don’t question my right to express myself, but I doubt that I have anything new to say. 

To quote Dorothy again: “Should I try to say something? Is this the truth? Why bother? Who cares?”

I suppose I should write because I care, and not whether anyone else does. I should write because writing is a railing along a rough and precipitous trail.  Writing is exploring, gaining my footing, leaving behind some markers, or even a map.  I feel lost, and writing is a way to be found.

This morning I went for a walk at low tide. The beach was scoured, rocky surfaces exposed.  Everything looked tired and blank in the glare of the sun.  Now at my computer screen the page looks blank. “We stare at the blankness,” Dorothy said, “and listen to some inner dictionary.”  My inner dictionary is silent.

“Once planted,” Dorothy asked, “if tended, how many stanzas or paragraphs could sing in the air, be entered, and flown to another field, maybe turn into honey, maybe tempt a mute to belt out a tune?”

Mine would be a blues song, or a mournful lament. Who would want to hear it?  Sometimes my sorrow is the only thing I feel, even when I know my life is beautiful. My greatest sins are the things I didn’t do, and then it was too late. Can I quell the pain by writing through it? Would someone learn from my confessions?

Sometimes for a moment I subtract the me from what I see, finally free of my history, and it seems like I could simply be.  I’m wasting time, wasting time. My own face in the mirror is unfamiliar to me, becoming vulnerable and distorted with the jokes age plays upon us all.

Dorothy recommends that I read a particular essay by Jane Hirshfield in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.  Hirshfield talks about perceptibility (as opposed to perception, or attentiveness) by which she means the ability to be known, to recognize that what we look at also sees us, and that the way one looks at a thing also determines what one will see.  She quotes Ortega y Gassett:

There is a whole portion of reality which is offered to us without our making any special effort beyond opening our eyes and ears, and this we call the world of pure impressions. But there is another world built of structures of impressions, which though hidden, is none the less real. If this other world is to exist for us, we need to open something more than our physical eyes, and to undertake a greater kind of effort.

And Emily Dickinson, who says it more succinctly: “Not Revelation’–‘tis– that waits,/But our unfinished eyes–“

Ah, my unfinished eyes with their cataract-clouds of confounding connections! I need to find a different way of seeing the world and listening to it. Tall order, but knowing even this much is a start. “Each poet,” writes Hirshfield, and I suppose she means each writer too, “in his own language, states that the basic matter of poetry comes not from the self, but from the world. From Things, which will speak to us on their own terms and with their own wisdom, but only when approached with our full and unselfish attention.”

Right now I can hear a motorized buzz as my industrious husband whips weeds on a hillside behind the orchard. The hills are tinged with yellow mustard flowers, a haze of brush and branch and white lilac where the grassland shifts to chaparral.  At my elbow a cup of tea grows tepid and there is a vase of red tulips on the desk, their color so bright it almost vibrates. Parallelograms of sunlight adorn the faded rug.  Everything has led me to this moment. What more do I want? Why do I need to analyze, apologize, and reconcile?

It reminds me of a poem by William Stafford which asks,

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

I have no better thoughts.  White lilacs for now will suffice, and the monotone buzz of the weed whacker, and the shifting angles of sunlight that have turned the heart-shaped leaves of the philodendron the most luminous of green.

There is, embedded in the chapter, this beautiful poem, “I Would Like to Describe” by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert:

I would like to describe the simplest emotion

joy or sadness

but not as others do

reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light

which is being born in me

but I know it does not resemble

any star

for it is not so bright

not so pure

and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage

without dragging behind me a dusty lion

and also anxiety

without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way

I would give all metaphors

in return for one word

drawn out of my breast like a rib

for one word

contained within the boundaries

of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say - I love

I run around like mad

picking up handfuls of birds

and my tenderness

which after all is not made of water

asks the water for a face

and anger

different from fire

borrows from it

a loquacious tongue

so is blurred

so is blurred

in me

what white-haired gentlemen

separated once and for all

and said

this is the subject

and this is the object

we fall asleep

with one hand under our head

and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us

and taste the earth

with their tiny roots

which next morning

we tear out painfully