Today I am reading a story about a woman who has been struck
by lightning.
She believes she’s a failure at everything – because
of the lightning –
So she drinks whiskey at parties to get past the failure,
past the burning.
I have not been struck by lightning – but I have been
struck by a hurricane –
That burn comes not from heat but from wild, warm slaps of
wind, rain, seawater, --
A slapping that just goes on and on and on – you
would not believe it –
Now part of me, maybe for always --
Did I imagine this hurricane?
My mother once warned me about just this sort of thing. “We need to talk,” she said one morning,
“You’re honest in your own way, but you just make up things
that never happened.”
But mama, so many people are crying and crying – still
crying– we look at trees
No longer there, homes no longer there, friends no longer there,
animals no longer there And we cry without warning
And, for some reason, and this is a mystery, we are ashamed
of our tears.
So, I am thinking: if I were struck by darkening, could I
believe I hadn’t been burned?
And
where does it happen – how does darkening
strike?
And what, after all, do I want to do today?
Having a plan, they say, is a step forward.
I do not want to write an essay,
I do not want to write a book,
I do not, Sam I am, want the rules of punctuation ruling
around in my brain.
I want to print these letters -- letters that, one by one, build
up words --
By my own hand -slowly, carefully, elegantly
gentle.
And I want spring to roll in and I want to roll in spring.
Most of all, though, I want to finish a thought – no cutting
it with sharp-scissored
criticism,
or worse,
rusty-wire cutter edits that seesaw
back and forth, never completing the cut but damaging
the thought away, anyway --
Just one complete, silvery line of thought -- uninterrupted,
unedited – that’s all.
That’s a lot – for a day.
