“…should not mean, but be”

Deadlining has been a bitch the last few weeks. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to have the work and the people I’m doing it for couldn’t be better. But every time I’ve seen that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, it really has turned out to be an oncoming train — or at least another assignment.

Just one more to go now, so I thought I’d take today off, put my feet up, relax, and (once my brain cleared) catch up on blogging. The weatherperson said today would be pleasant and instead it turned out downright gorgeous. What more could a body ask?

But rather than feeling restful, I felt cranky and mentally crowded, unhappy with myself and with life. All the bits of blog-worthy material that buzzed around my head last week when I was too busy to write them down kept circling my brain. All those annoying mental buzzies got me banging my head on The Big Questions. You know. The ones you can’t solve. The ones a lot of other people think they have the answers to, but don’t. The ones that only hurt if you think deeply about them. I told my brain to quit that crap, but my brain (which seems to be suffering from oppositional defiant disorder) pretty much told me to go &^%$# myself.

Besides, I’m tired. Just plain tired.

So I was sitting outside, resenting my backyard apple tree for having the temerity to cast shade on me on the first sunny day we’ve had in quite a while. And I decided that since I wasn’t good for anything else, at least I could yank weeds. The weeds yielded easily to my grasping fingers. Which led to a pressing desire to scrape moss off the patio with the only tool available, a putty knife. Which would take about a month. But what the heck; it’s not like I have anything more useful to do with myself.

So I’m sitting on the warm patio in the dirt, scratching away at moss and mindlessly plucking all the little weeds growing between the concrete blocks. And all of a sudden a poem I haven’t thought of in years swells full-blown into my mind spirit whole self and takes me over:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

Old English majors will recognize Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish. (Who, as Wikipedia informs us, was the great-uncle of Laura Dern and would be celebrating his 120th birthday tomorrow if not for being dead. He would probably not be celebrating the fact that academics throughout the decades have analysed and parsed his poor poem to death, showing their cluelessness to his famous final point. Sigh.)

Anyhow, Ars Poetica, in all its wordless words and meaningful non-meanings, suddenly just came down and filled me. And changed the day. And changed me. Instead of being filled with mental buzzings, I was just a simple person, simply sitting in the sun, simply scraping at moss and stone — and that was all that was required. Being was enough.

I sat still on the stone, feeling that poem as if it were a message from the gods, then returned to scraping at moss, a different person. At least in that moment. But the moment, too, was enough.

Meaning? Well, I’m sure I’ll bang my head on that again some other day. It’s something I do. But in that moment in the sunshine, the great old tools of earth and stone and greenery worked that strange and common magic that they have and all of life looked different.

A little later, after the sun goes down, I’ll get to blogging some of those little buzzy items, which seem a lot less hostile and annoying now.