Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011

Starting Out from Ted Hughes’ Letters

1 Starting Out from Ted Hughes’ Letters He would have his children make lists of similes and reward them thruppence each for the good ones. So & so is like so & so. This list rose up in me when I read that. A pot is like a possibility. A beef stew is like a pile of leaves with children hiding in it. The end of a love affair is like the rest of my life. A pair of glasses set out on the desk is like forgetting your name. A rainy late afternoon playing the board game SORRY! with two grandsons, Tuck (11) and Woody (7), and my son Benjamin (45) is like the peach basket James Naismith nailed ten feet up above the YMCA door as he was inventing the sport of basketball at Springfield College in Massachusetts, December 1891, trying to keep his delinquent students active but noncombatant, indoors during the winter. They used a soccer ball. I would love to see it happen, to honor Dr. Naismith’s ingenuity, that every NBA team should play one quarter a month with a soccer ball. It would put some Globetrotter slapstick into the passing and courtlong hailGoose shots. The joy of being side by side touching shoulders with someone so loved and different from one’s own self is like a simile. Being wonderfully full of oneself is like feeling mean and forgetting your heart. Surely something will survive this self-destructing love that pulls us along. Gregory of Nyssa says there is a sort of watchful sleep where one is neither awake nor not-awake, not caught in either opposite but fusing both in a place where mind has gone out of itself but is not yet under the control of what 2 we might call a creative imagination, a giving-in to some sovereign, wider intelligence, the source of simile and metaphor, say. Gregory of Nyssa writing subtle comments in whatever language he did in the wilds of fourth-century Cappadocia, on whatever surface he wrote on with whatever he wrote with, his notes on the nature of awareness as it floats between more nameable conditions, is like driving a car and talking into the rearview mirror, to someone in a far-off bed, as one does with the new OnStar technology. You touch the mirror in a certain place, the bottom left, to hang up, or it is like Thoreau’s concept of economy, what he went out to Walden Pond to explore. He wanted to be careful how he spent the spirit’s energy, his vitality. Like me talking about that, one April Thursday in 1981 to a class of sleepy sophomores who rouse to the idea only when I confess that I never buy shaving cream but rather collect those elusive bits of handsoap from all around the house and save them in a cup and stir that with a cheap shaving brush for lather. Then I ask them their secrets for saving a bit here, bit there. What I mostly get are ways of ripping off vending machines. Warm water poured in the coin slot, the two quarters on a string trick, and a very elaborate bill-folding scotchtape caper. And never pay the toll road tolls, just make a gesture of throwing and drive through leaving them whirring, clanging and flashing in your wake. Nobody ever comes after you, or if they do, say the change is on the ground back there, and there always is some. Where are these clever petty-cash schemes leading, and what are they like? Like something decided-on, a cleared-off campsite on the forest floor, a starting-out place, and Plotinus. 3 Because that master said in Greek in the bright sun of Alexandria, or maybe Rome, playing. The power of growth in plants, in the ground itself, and surely in us, is a form of play, all motion, even the movement of this sentence, leads us playfully toward contemplation, those quadrants of sky the soul aspires to. And what is this contemplation Plotinus says we are all in the midst of becoming? Inner opening into emptiness, where everything and nothing are no longer alike, but boundaryless play inside a single point, the one, where I have gotten enough sleep, where I feel calm and ready behind-my-eyes, settled and potentially hilarious in nervous system and brain, waiting for the beckoning cabin-call of how we...