A portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal

[“A poet…never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.” Yeats]

Every morning I sit across from you

at the same small table,

the sun all over the breakfast things – 

curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, 

a dish of berries – 

me in a sweatshirt or robe,

you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended

over a deep pool of silence.

I stare straight through you

or look out the window at the garden,

the powerful sky,

a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,

the pot of jam,

or pour you a cup of tea,

and I can hide behind the paper,

rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice

a little door swinging open

in the morning air,

and maybe the tea leaves

of some dream will be stuck

to the china slope of the hour – 

then I will lean forward,

elbows on the table,

with something to tell you,

and you will look up, as always,

your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

[Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning; Pittsburgh, PA: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1998, 3-4]

One of the surest signs that a relationship is in trouble: ignoring a partner’s attempt to get attention.

Looks like these two are doing just fine.

I pulled Robert Nathan’s A Winter Tide off the shelf this morning; Nathan wrote these poems in the 1930’s, and they reflect his growing concern with Nazism and war. Some are hopeful, some not so much. Like most of us, Nathan surely had hope-filled days and days when hope was absent. Either way, I love his words.

Looking through the poems today, after finishing The Book of Joy just yesterday, I see something else in Nathan’s poems: an expression of re-framing, of accepting the darkness of life in the 1930’s and trying to draw from it whatever gifts it offers. Not such a bad thing to do. I hope a life of joy came out of it for Nathan.

III

It would be wiser, since we live in fear,

To use our sorrows to correct our ways.

If winter be the color of our days,

Then learn of winter to be still and clear.

The greener spring, the new and happy year

Is not for us but for the birds to praise;

It is the snow that over autumn lays

Its quiet hand that  is our teacher here.

For see, it has its lessons for the soul:

Look how the tree with piety keeps fast

The bud and blossom hidden in the bole.

So bear the winter with its frosty blast,

And seek, beneath the season of our grief,

The spring unending and the waiting leaf.

[Nathan, Robert; A Winter Tide, III, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940, p. 5]

photo by Jared Fredrickson

This being human is a guest-house.

Every morning a new arrival

A joy, a depression, a meanness

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Rumi (John Moyne and Coleman Barks, trans.), Say I Am You, The Guest-House, Athens, GA: Maypop, 1994, p.41

Until I learn the lesson each encounter with life offers to teach me, the lesson will keep showing up on my doorstep. Until I can greet each emotion and thought with compassion and humor, I refuse the joy they carry in their pockets.

At fifty-six years of age,  it’s well past time to be grateful for everything.