Here, in this, the Light in which we are

Three days left in Wisconsin, a span just long enough to pause for a moment and look, while I still can, at where I am, at who and what’s around me. Other than a few small errands and a carry-on to finish packing, this, if anything, is the only task that’s left for me to do before I leave, and while I’d like to think I’m always doing this, this noticing, at least to some extent, I’m not. Like everyone else I know, I too am easily and overly caught up, too distracted and entertained to pay attention to what matters and makes sense to me. This specific summer, though, feels different, as if the looking has been made easier somehow by the fact of my departure and by the time I’ve spent with both the people I’ll be leaving and the people I'll be leaving with. Kelli, a relatively new friend who I've known for the last three years as the pretty girl from Racy's who serves me coffee and has strange eyes, and Riley, an older friend I've known since I was sixteen and whose eyes are also strange, though in a sleepier way, will be joining me, at least at first, in Thailand. That their lives have somehow and out of nowhere lined up rather nicely with my own is, well, it’s everything. I’ve spent a lot of this summer wondering what the hell I ever did to deserve the place in which I find myself, right here, right now, as the trip gets closer by the hour, more tangible, more real.

Another  friend of mine, who I went to school with and who is now a farrier in Colorado, told me once when I asked him why he decided to spend two years studying poetry that he wanted, in the end, to be a better person. I used to tell my students this in Iowa, though I doubt they understood it beyond an inclination that somehow poets are supposed to be more sensitive than other people, which, of course, really isn’t true. What is true, or at least it is true for me, is that the act of sitting down to write is an act, ultimately, of opportunity, a chance to gather yourself together and pay attention. In the experience of the poem one looks harder at oneself and things and others than one might otherwise be inclined at some less focused moment in one’s life, gazing instead of glancing. My friend and mentor, the poet Joanna Klink who has taught me almost everything I know and whose book Circadian is never far away, writes that she would like to place herself “in a field of deep attention, and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there.” For her, and for many of us who believe that poetry makes us better people, the focus it takes to read a poem, and to write one, is precisely the focus it takes to be fully in the world. My faith is that once there, one reacts with greater curiosity to the mystery of other lives, with empathy, and that in doing so, it increasingly becomes possible to love and feel alive. This summer has been both these things, in spades.

Yesterday, Kelli and I went driving through Wisconsin, south on highway 27 then east on 10 to Granton, a village of about 500 where she grew up, in order to say goodbye to her parents and drop off some boxes at their house in the country. The sky that afternoon was a blur of clouds and the thinnest sunlight through the windshield, rain and not rain, a cast of grays and shadow-blues too numerous to name. We drove on blacktop and then, when the blacktop ended, we drove on gravel. We listened to a lot of bad music from the radio. Every now and then, if it was a band we used to listen to (Alice in Chains for Kelli, anything off Pearl Jam’s Ten for me) we sang. Mostly though, we watched the farms and fields go by, the cattle almost motionless but for the fact that we were moving at such relative velocity, talking in her car. We stopped for a while at her uncle’s farm where her grandmother lives in a small trailer parked in the side yard of the farmhouse. I met her mother and her uncle and her cousins. I listened to them talking and the easy ways they always seemed to find to laugh, even when the talking turned to those who were either dead or dying, or who had lost their fingers in a combine, or the cat which, sadly, caught itself in a fan in the barn and rotted. Not two days ago, a neighbor even accidentally shot himself while chopping wood in an adjacent field just down the road. Her cousin showed us a picture of a stream, and later we went wading through the brambles beneath the bridge she took it from. We sat on its bank beneath a tree and watched the raindrops sparkle in the still water, little jewels aloft above the silt-bed, and the light in which we were. We imagined going fishing.

Lately, it’s just kind of been like this, not just with Kelli, but with almost everyone. In Wisconsin, all is well. This is the feeling that’s taken over. All is well. And even though I’m scared, and even though I’m sad, I’m not sure how I ended up like this, what tiny god I prayed to or what selfless deed I did however long ago that just this summer is coming back. There were years, entire years, in which these last few months would have felt impossible. But I left those years. People and places helped me. Poems helped me. I am going somewhere else.