Fugue

July 3rd, a day before all the kaboom, I'd gone on a long walk and was resting both my body and my brain. My head was full because C had given me a tree field guide a few days before and the long walk I had just taken consisted of swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan, ogling flowers and fruit and bark and leaves, trying to guess at various trees, trying to keep everything I learned in my brain. I got myself somewhat dizzy from all the tree hopping and the data overload and all those shapes and colors and I sat surrounded by lianas and nepenthes and sky roots in the warm damp of the park's conservatory to read.

Stopping every five feet for a new tree.

As I was reading, a friend walked around the fountain and he called out to me and broke my concentration. A fellow writer. We asked after each other. No, that's not true. He asked after me. I had trees swimming in my head, and I was shaken out of my little hollow of water and hanging green and the smell of paper turning against paper and I didn't remember my social graces, so my answers were short and I didn't offer any invitations for him to talk. But it was nice to see him. He asked after the book I was reading. It was just fluff. George R.R. Martin. Which isn't bad, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't sing to me and I was abashed to show him and I wanted to say, no, it's not for me. It doesn't feed me. It's just something to hold and focus on, a little silly rock to scrabble against and climb onto while I wait for the tide in my brain to wash some of these trees away. An anchor. But how to say that?

We said our goodbyes and I finished my chapter. I got up from the little arbored bench I was on and squeezed past the orchid-gawkers near the entrance and walked through the park, my head filling again with more trees. I was thinking about the friend I'd run into in the conservatory, about when we'd met the time before that. He'd been showing me a book of prose poetry. He read me one. Maybe two.

I like the idea of prose poetry. But I can't recall reading any that stuck with me. I struggle with a deep, but awkward and mistrustful love of formalism. I love forms. Schema. But I chafe at using them for long. I've begun to think as I've gotten older, that my love of formalism is something fostered by my inner anarchist. We need rules. How can one go about breaking the rules, without beautiful rules to break?

But beyond that, I love idea of the challenge of writing poetry in prose. There's a terrible mental trick to staying in a poetic place. And there's something so overbearingly commonplace about prose. It'll drown you. It's everywhere, and everything every day of your life is written in prose. So, it's easy when writing prose to get into prose mind and tune-out and go into autopilot. There's a contortion of willpower needed to keep holding tight to your poetry when you write in prose mode. You have to keep everything present and just so. By abandoning formalism, there's a sort of spiritual formalism that has to imbue every word, to take up the slack.

So I read the poem he showed me. But all I saw was a paragraph of text. I mean, I understood it, but it didn't resolve into poetry. Everything about it was prosaic. It had a prosaic voice, it used prosaic words, and tramped through its lines with a prosaic tempo. It told a prosaic story using prosaic tropes. Everything was prosaic.

I mean, that's terribly unfair of me. He shared it because it moved him. He loved it because it enlivened him. I'm a big fan of everyone leaping into what enlivens them. But the poem said nothing more to me than what it showed on its surface. What it denoted was all that it was. And yet, when he came upon me in the conservatory, I was reading something no less two-dimensional. By all rights, he walked away with the word “prosaic” rattling around in the cubby hole he had in mind for me.

So I walked and I thought about what moves me from the prosaic, into the poetic. I thought about it as I stared into the trees. They were a swaying chaos of leaves, swept in the breeze.
 
I realized poetry for me is a knot of trees. Sure, you can state their names and give their heights and describe their basic positioning. That's prosaic. But then you look, really look. And you see the leaves. The smooth edges on these, the teeth on those. Those shine, these glimmer. And you can hear them. The little clatter of the long strings of beads that chime against each other, in the weeping birches. The soft hulls of little ships bumping in the crowded harbors of the elms. The boisterous drumheads swung back and forth in the dance that overtakes the cottonwoods. They all move. Each on its own, but tethered to a larger pattern of the wind as it nudges through the branches. The interplay between the individual leaf body spun on its kite string stem, the laden branch, the tree and the whole woodland, that aggregate that looks both like chaos and like an orchestra. And behind this leaf is that one and they swing across one another, scattering the light. The woven braid of elm bark, the peel of birches and their growing diamond rifts that cut across a delicate script of lenticels. And then birds dart through, picking for insects and worms, and squirrels clutch at the trunks and run new treasures to their stashes.

I look, and I see one thing, and I see another and I hold them both in mind and I try to hold in mind too the way they are linked. And then all the other things, the myriad, all linked, all individuated. And each one reminds me of something else, so there's another layer and another. And I stare into the green, and I step back to see more at once, hold more in my mind's eye, and all the movement sways in time to something bigger and as I step further away, I'm drawn deeper within. And I realize after a while that who I was failed to remain important and I that I'd been standing transfixed, my mouth dangling stupidly open and my eyes glazed and I was blown into pollen and fluff and scattered on the wind. And when I snap back, some of that grit of potential is still in me and I'm ripe with it as I go back home.

That's where I go when the spirit moves me. That's what I turn to in others' poetry, to find messages from the same beyond and that's what I need, I so very much need to capture when I write poetry. I hear that drive to keep all those links of complex interconnection in how I speak, so I know something of that is in my voice. But it's my goal to cultivate it. It makes me long-winded, I know. But there's no way to pare it down without cutting away all those threads. If the devil's in the details, I suspect my job is writing about the devil.

The next day, as C and I were walking, we met a pair of gardeners at work. She complimented their garden, and one asked if we'd like to see something nicer. He led us around behind his house and let us into his back yard, a little paradise of birdhouses and koi in chiming water and poppies and vine-knotted pergolas. C began taking pictures and he said we could stay as long as we wanted. I stood and looked into the depths of the pond. Everything I saw in the trees the day before, I saw in the water, the ripple and currents, the sway of grass at the bottom and the leaves floating on the surface. The light that danced on the water's skin and bent towards the depths.

I remembered reading about one method of meditation wherein you picture a tree. And branch has a set number of leaves and ripens a precise number of gemstone fruits. And each gem has a set number of facets and each face has another color and you hold more and more details in mind. And it dawned on me that I'm trying to write about enlightenment, even though I've yet to abide in enlightenment. A fool's errand perhaps. But what errand isn't?

And I recalled having fish as a child. And yearning to experience what they did. A sort of envy of the fish, swimming their circuits. Even when stuck in a tank they embodied something so meditative, all the fins and gills working and yet stock still. And I envied too the squirrels, up in their trees, leaping across branches. So fast and antic. They looked like they lived a life of play. They don't, I know. But they were so athletic and alive.

The fish are the formal for me, the squirrels are the anarchy. Fish movement is fluid, perfect, minimal. In a tank, they move one way then the other. When they all sit in a group, they are little unspent vectors, gathered in a cross hatch of lean lines each describing a potential of movement. They move like equations and in doing so neatly define spaces. Squirrels are frenetic, even entropic. They are Ratatoskr, running messages for the Gods, but also gnawing at the World Tree. They are the prairie dogs burrowing the bottoms out of paved surfaces, or raccoons raiding nests. They are all chaos, creeping in.

In the water and in the woods, I find the sublime, but as a kid before I knew what the word sublime meant or why I should care, I yearned to be the animals that dwelt there in those sublime spaces. And the irony is, that as a fish, I had no ability to stand back, ever further back, to take in the entire pond. I would be a part of the picture and could not step outside to write about it. Likewise the squirrel, who, among the leaves cannot stand at the field's end to turn back to gather all the trees in at once.

So at some point, I found ideals that live so thoroughly within my image of the divine that they cannot help but experience it as entirely mundane. And however else the fish and the squirrel serve me as figurative tropes that speak to me, they perfectly encapsulate that yearning, as I too look for that layer of meaning outside, when inside it's so elementally a part of everything I am, that I cannot even see it anymore.

If anything they are more like me than like what I aspire towards. And it struck me that that aspiring towards something is hierarchical. Life isn't a move up the chain. It's a trip around the circle. So if I cannot see the truth written inside me, I turn out to arrive at another poor traveler's encampment to search for messages written for me among their possessions. I value those messages. And so I do the only thing I can. I write to return the favor. If such a trip were a move upwards, towards a final goal, I suppose the only mode of writing would be technical writing. But around the circle, I turn to poetry.