Something so familiar lies beneath the smokeless fire.
It burns stealthily and slow, under wraps for now.
Its essence is sentient in female form.
And it resembles the creature I used to be.
Now, I know. It’s time to let the ember catch fire.
I feel ready to cross the threshold now.
It’s time to re-emerge as that woman:
sultry, sensuous, and deeply expressive
in the most corporeal way.
Piraye usually went to the movies by herself. In part she preferred it that way. And in part, she found it hard to round up a friend with the same tastes. The movies. Sitting in a velvet chair among strangers. Enveloped in dark, wrapped up in a fictional story. Theater offered escape, entertainment, and diversion from the lonely life she led.
On this particular day, she walked into the art house with only five minutes to spare before the film began. Indie Cinema showed only art and independent movies. She was forced to take a seat near the front row, although her preference was the middle of the theater, second seat from the aisle. The previews were playing as she excused herself past five already seated filmgoers. She tried to ignore their looks of annoyance. She looked sideways to the row behind hers and caught the gaze of a middle-aged man, also sitting alone. Instead of smiling, she cast her gaze quickly downward until she stood in front of her seat and turned to face the screen. As she sat, she caught his gaze, again. Nice-looking, 30-something man. He wore a plaid sport jacket over a wool sweater. He placed his gloves, and hat in his lap before raking his fingers through longish, thick hair.
Piraye seated herself quickly and removed her navy coat. She turned to her coat over the seat back. And this time she smiled at him. He nodded back just before the lights dimmed and the credits began to roll. Even in the dark, she sensed his eyes on her. From his seat across the aisle, he had a clear view of Piraye’s profile. Turning her head in an innocuous halfway gesture was out of the question. She felt certain his eyes lingered on her neck. She pulled her black woolen hat tight around her face because any overture – even the most benign of stares from a man –suggesting even the slightest bit of interest — made Piraye self-conscious. She learned to be wary of men long ago. Wary of male strangers who tried to strike up a conversation on the bus. Leary of guys who dropped by her desk for no reason at all. On early dates, she became guarded if comments of an intimate nature suggested the man knew her better than even remotely possibly. In the end, her wariness had made her retreat to a place that no one could reach. To a place that made it nearly impossible for her to experience pleasantries, flirtation, let alone physical intimacy with a man.
Enough, she thought. Piraye fixed her focus on the film set in pre-WW1 England. Two would-be lovers, an aristocrat and a working-class man, are about to confide in one another. Childhood friends, the two confess their love on the same evening they are torn apart. As she watched the characters take the winding staircase and walk quickly down column-lined corridors, Piraye imagined herself in that mansion being followed by the stranger one row behind her.
For me, reaching for a book of poems and reading a melodic string of words that conjure nature images, sounds and textures is a form of prayer. Reading poets who write about the natural world is my way of seeking comfort when solace is hard to come by. Like nature itself, poems with descriptive, evocative, and metaphorical references to nature offer me a space in which to restore.
It is the rhythmic phrasing describing the natural world – shaking aspen trees, dew on a spider web, shape of shade under a leafing tree—and my imagined relationship to them—that lifts the weight in my heart and the clutter in my head. If only just a little bit. It is the works of such poets as Mary Oliver that instill faith and the belief that life—like the cycle of seasons—will bring renewal.
This World
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.
—Mary Oliver
from Why I Wake Early
