Breathing, and: Poetry Will Never Save the World

Breathing

It happens without paying much attention:the regular rising and falling of the chest,air rushing through the moist wind tunnelsof the throat and nose, that sweet God muscle,life's soft engine, the diaphragm,contracting and relaxing whenever we climbthe stairs or need a little comfortafter a gloomy day.

Strange, then, we talk about it only when it fails.Ted, before he died, had a hard timeswallowing and developed a nagging coughthat made his breathing ragged and difficult.After the accident, Joan's air sacs filledwith fluid; a tube was inserted into her noseand a respirator did her breathing for her.

Maybe in another time and place beyondthe melancholy shore of good-bye,we honor this small kindness,this sing-song, back-and-forth rhythm,two blessed notes sung every dayten or fifteen times a minute.Maybe someone has just lifted a heavy bagof cement or the tires on his car losttheir traction in a snowstorm, and thensuddenly, miraculously,they found it again.

He's catching his breath, we say,as if he'd just been thrown some flimsy ball.And then, the slow, deep intake awakens him. The letting go and pushing out marry himto the body. No thoughts, just the clear,affirming gap between breaths,for one or two seconds the still pointwhen he and the world are one.

Poetry Will Never Save the World

You sit down to read itand the lines maintain a strict, irreversiblesilence like one of those submarinesthat periodically sinks to the bottom of the oceanand begins filling up with cold, dark water.You wait for a radio signal then,a tapping on the hull—anythingto prove those intrepid, young menare hanging on.

But the truth is poetry never surfaces.Its hulk becomes a kind of living reefteeming with seaweed and sponges,colorful fish with evocative names,darting in and out of unseen, unverifiedgrammatical crevices. Yet you seek it out.You open a book,and if you're lucky on occasion,you find yourself sitting against a treein the middle of an ancient forest,all 'round you masters of the climate:wet stones, decaying logs, roots beardedwith lichens, a canopy of green shadows.

And peeking out of the leaves, so you mighteasily miss them, tiny yellow and purple flowersdripping with rainwater. They are the wordsof the poem you are reading,a poem whose only purpose,a spot of time, is pleasure.

I am the people's point of view, a cow,the tropical wind, I sleep under the surface.I am the aristocratic carnivore, I eat form.I drum on cooks' white caps, I drum on their aprons . . .

And the words have nothing to sayor add to them. You listen to them.They take you where you need to go.