I had a dream in the day:
I laid my father's body down in a narrow boat
and sent him off along the riverbank with its cattails and grasses.
And the boat -- it was made of bark and wood bent when it was wet--
took him to his burial finally.
But a day or two later I realized it was myself I wanted
to lay down, hands crossed, eyes closed . . . .
Oh, the light coming up from down there,
the sweet smell of the water -- and finally, the sense of being carried
by a current I could not name or change.
--Marie Howe
from What the Living Do
My friend Meredith passed this poem to me some years back now as a handwritten card. I imagine that the occasion was my father's death or in the aftermath. I've had Meredith's card on a bulletin board for quite a while, and I realized the other day that I hadn't actually read the poem, hadn't actually read the words, for some time now. You know how things we put up on the walls or on such boards start out as declarations or celebrations, but in time become mere decorations, mere furniture. At least, that's what happens for me.
I like to move my books around in the shelves every so often. I'll shift from alphabetical and genre groupings to as random as possible, or by size and shape, or by color. Occasionally, of course, I'll put books together that I think would enjoy each other's company: Shakespeare's Hamlet next to Sophocles' Oedipus the King, for an obvious pairing, alongside McGuane's Panama, Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, Melville's Moby Dick, and Homer's Odyssey. Mostly, I've found if I move the books around just enough so that I see them as themselves, as individual works, and not as mere and merely familiar color patterns on the shelves, then I am more likely to pull one out and reread it, or to at least re-regard it with all the wonderful actions of the mind and heart (and even body) that follow such an engaged perusal.
So too with pictures and sculptures on the wall. So too with the pictures and poems and quotations and stuff (fishhooks, whistles, talismans) affixed to the two bulletin boards in my study. I need to move these materials around to not overlook them, to avoid merely taking them for granted.
In this case, I just happened to look directly at Meredith's card, at Howe's poem, in a receptive mood so that I saw it. Saw it, read it, considered it. (Hi Dad! Hope the water's fine. Wow, such water could feel pretty good, couldn't it? Just a bit of rest, just . . . .) I reread the poem, felt the poem, considered the gift of that poem.
And now I share that poem with you.
Thanks, Meredith, again.
