September 2, 2009
Our group’s last night here at Ragdale – splendorous open studios from each of us twelve, a hustle of goodbyes and on into that odd phosphorescence that happens next. Of our respective creative explorations. A place that is both so dark and so light. Like the glowworms in caves.
We arrived on the day of the new moon, and it’s nearly full…not ’til the 4th. My moon window above the bed keeps lunar time. Whoever its next occupant is will arrive at the full moon, and I will be in the Shenandoah Valley, back into the novel again.
Yesterday I did manage to get the poem inked onto the 30 foot pad of paper, and spent six hours out in the prairie photographing it. For two weeks, I ran into nary another living soul out there. The moment I spread out my poem against the grasses, heads emerge from the milkweed stalks. Mostly elderly women and their packs of dogs, parting the sheaves and emerging full-bodied, curious. The dogs reading the poems, the human reading the poems. Making comments. I received a lot of insightful observations by ladies who seemed elated to stumble upon an errant poet in the flowers.
One said to me the best thing ever: tell me again what the poem is telling me.
I looked at her and said, it’s about a woman who loses something on the prairie, and cannot forgive the prairie for her loss. And then later she comes to believe that the prairie’s job is not to prevent, but to repair.
She looked around at the plants and trees and down at her dog, and off into the sky for a while. If you look down into tall grass with some concentration, one begins to see multiple ecosystems. Low-slung ferns, and below them the strata of the mosses, and through each are paths cast by proportionately sized animals. Until it is a web of ecosystems, and a web of creature trails, and an infinite universe. She was looking into one of those infinite universes.
Yes, she said. She looked a little while longer into whatever it was she saw. Her hair was its own cloud of white against the blue skies. Yes.
She flashed her eyes at me and said, You’re understanding something, my dear, you are. That poem is saying things. Keep going.
I miss the days of oracles – a woman with words tending a spring, a brook, a ravine, the entrance to a swamp, the crest of a cliff, a throaty valley, a dais amidst an oak grove…
Now that we have dismembered our wildernesses, I must remember to keep watch for our oracles elsewhere. They are Russian women tending their taxicab, perhaps. The blond girl at the Nars counter. The faceless head and spine bent down restocking the epsom salts at the convenience store.
And in the name of my prairie lady, I say unto you, I say says I: you’re understanding something, my dear, you are. Keep going.