grateful for you

To: Laurie
From: Charlie
RE: We are not long here

I was thinking about poetry this morning, which isn’t surprising, considering April’s poetry month. Sometimes, when I’m feeling out of my mind, I like to repeat to myself little quotes from poems, the kind that are small and self contained and soothing:

and you feel your heart taking root in your body,
like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.

or something even more contained:

A cicada shell;
It sang itself
Utterly away


Of course, this sometimes backfires. Yesterday was a terrible day, and I was quietly reciting

We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said, What do you want, sweetheart? And you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

under my breath in the hallway. Two or three people passed me, and each on gave me these incredibly weirded out looks; I didn’t realize for ages it was because I was quite seriously, if quietly, talking to myself. I must have looked like such a ninny. An insane ninny.

Despite all that, I can’t help but retreat back to poetry when things are rough.
It’s the recovering English major in me, I think.

I remember Professor Chapman's lectures -- the ones held in the oldest part of the college and where the walls were all darkly panneled wood and the whole class ended up practically sitting in each others' laps because, even though there were only a few of us, we were being taught in the old dormitories -- and finding out how incredibly fond he was of talking about poetry, even when he was teaching literature or fairy tales. Do you remember?

Silly question. Of course you do.

There was one particular time, where it was dark out and we were discussing how incredibly important it was that Tolkien used stylisticly formal language throughout The Lord of the Rings-- I had just gone on a tear about the stylistic elements of the King James' Bible and its importance to a primarily CofE audience, when Chapman stood up and lifted his arms and went on such a tangent. 'Language,' he practically bellowed, 'is the response to the fall of man!'

We'd all heard it before, but this time something felt like it snapped inside of me. Everything he was saying made complete sense in a way it never quite did before.

Before the fall, everything was perfect enough that there was no need of language. Man existed without it. Once, however, the divorce between man and grace occurred, something was desparately needed to express the grief and the wonder of the world, of everything, and in that instant, language was born. It was created in a fractured world, by a creature similarly flawed and broken. And, as such, language, too, is an un-whole and incomplete thing. No matter the effort, there will never be a complete bridging between language and experience.

That's the glory of poetry, that there's an experience, an inexpressible feeling, something you know can never going to be properly described or depicted, but it doesn't matter -- you’re going to try your damnedest to do it anyway. That’s what poetry actually IS – that attempt to bridge the real and the ideal, the untouchable with some sort of tangibility.

And even though you won’t ever confuse me with Yeats or Plath or anyone famous --and most of the time I’m not even writing any of my own, but merely taking comfort someone else’s – I completely agree. It’s in that failure to ever reach the goal, the knowledge of the gap that will never be crossed, that the artistry and the genius of poetry comes to life – when it makes the reader, and the writer all over again – aware of the strain to reincarnate something that is impossible andtranscendent and so much more sublime than can ever be expressed with the limited tools of language.

All of which to say, I am homesick for you.

and when I write you and say I miss having tea and toast with you and Judy while we watch something with James McAvoy for the millionth time, or when we’re picking apart the latest political decision or driving home from a concert and my feet are up on the dash and it’s dark out and we’re eating pop rocks, none of it is going to adequately describe anything. All it will do is recall those memories, which is really nice and helps a little when life is overwhelming me, but it doesn't properly get across how grateful I am you're always there for me, even if it's just to let me call you up and moan about how terrible boys are lately and how much I don't understand them. It makes me seem sentimental and maudlin, both of which I am pretty sure are true, but it doesn't show how important you are my friend.