Work

Some mornings, the clouds
settle rooftop low,
--------holding us in place
like a specimen slide.

I spend my days
wondering how a hammer
--------weighs the hand
that holds it,

or how the starlings apron
the stoplights
--------at Alcatraz
and Adeline.

A glassworker told me once
that she could tell
--------by the scars
who bandages their fingers

and who kisses closed
the wounds. I don't
--------know how
my father woke

hours before sunrise
each morning and worked
--------until long past sunset.
Sleep was a country

to retire to, an Ecuador.
I live where the light is
--------thin, and clothes us
like linen.

In the hills above town,
a black snake scrawls
--------across the path
like a signature.

I still have countries
left to discover, and ballets
--------of work
for my hands to learn.

-Ryan Teitman, 2014

Long Finger Poem

I'm working on my poems and working with
my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening's quiet breathing. Sounds
of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can't
reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can't make use of water.
Rain falls. But I'm working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.

-Jin Eun-Young, 2003

May

When I looked down from the bridge
Trout were flipping the sky
Into smithereens, the stones
of the wall warmed me.

Wading green stems, lugs of leaf
That untangle and bruise
(Their tiny gushers of juice)
My toecaps sparkle now

Over the soft fontanel
Of Ireland. I should wear
Hide shoes, the hair next my skin,
For walking this ground:

Wasn't there a spa-well,
Its coping grassy, pendent?
And then the spring issuing
Right across the tarmac.

I'm out to find the village,
Its low sills fragrant
With lady's-smock and celandine,
Marshlights in the summer dark.

-Seamus Heaney, 1972

I graduated a few days back, I guess. In Saskatoon, it was convocation, and my graduate degree was formally bestowed upon me, although I was not there to receive it. Thanks to the mail and the transitive properties of degrees, though, I'll still be getting that piece of paper eventually, and I have the dubious privilege of saying that I hold a master's. And now I have the similarly dubious privilege of saying "What next?"

I got an email from my department on the occasion of my graduation containing that old chestnut that's ostensibly from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." I recently re-read 'Walden' and in their original place I can milk some meaning from those words, but denuded of context, as they so frequently are, those two sentences become the sort of meaningless platitude that's difficult to do much with. By contrast, here's the actual quote:

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

If, Thoreau wrote, and that makes such a difference. It's not a command or an imperative, just a possibility, an option. But it's a possibility with the radical potential to carry a person across borders into fresh country.

So I don't know what's next. I'm weighing possibilities, or perhaps more rightly, I'm weighing dreams: one against the other, this against that. Nothing is ever as simple as a platitude, and most people can't live in air castles. For now, though, I'm comfortable living in this liminal place while I sort myself out. It's not tenable indefinitely, but it'll do in the interim.

[Ocean which I pushed up]

Ocean which I pushed up
with my fingers so I could touch
the orange sand below

and white mountain
which is not white but for getting
caught in the cold

Stay here where it is warm
and where the sun shines, for later
celestial garlands of dead light
will draw you into the cold for sure

-Joshua Beckman, 2013