by Shawna Lemay
When people studiously ignore you in spaces on the internet while lavishing attention on others, or are reticent and at times condescending but then perfectly nice when you bump into them at a bookstore, you have to imagine that they believe the internet isn’t real.
The messages and yearnings I send through my photographs lack precision but even the meanings once attached to flowers in Victorian dictionaries were open to interpretation and speculation.
The bedraggled peony on a clear morning. Purple evening light through the leaves of the full apple tree. A green leaf in the dark forest becomes a cup of light. The rose petals litter the front sidewalk.
I’m trying to tell you something about my life but I have to respect your need for my privacy and entertain the possibility that you might not be the least bit interested. I don’t want to retaliate by forgetting you or giving you the silent treatment, which could be seen as a mystery to you. I have to remember silence isn’t always interpreted by the recipient as resulting from hurt feelings but as a standoffishness or blasé malaise.
The signals I send won’t be received with exactitude. What you need and what you have to give are always in flux and usually disproportionate. If this is true for me then I must imagine it’s true for others. One of the functions of friendship is to reassure each other everything will be okay without necessarily voicing the words.
Our inability to connect might be expressed in a photograph of a birthday cake or a butterfly sipping from lilacs or a bird flying low, away.
A flower held up to the light might express my hope for mutual comprehension and a spontaneous tenderness toward the open space between us. A feather could indicate my tremulous attempt to be the person in the room Rumi talks about, the one who is least in need.
They Accepted the Dinner Invitation
***
It might prove uncomfortable fodder for a novel.
How Do You Come Up With Your Ideas?
***
She had reached the point in her literary career when friends and family had stopped reading her books, leaving her free to immortalize their blessings.
Cloudier
***
The noise of the highway is louder. A poor, obscure, plain and little butterfly comes, goes.
Sitting in the same backyard for fifteen years now. Pondering nearly the same things. Making minimal headway.
Things get cloudier most days. Everything more uncertain all the time. The same unrequited desire for silence. The same melancholy, only deeper now, frayed.
The vine we planted at the beginning, when we first moved here, on the strategically placed trellis we built to hide behind, thrives.
Paradise breaks out at certain times, places, then recedes. Why expect otherwise?
This is the first summer I haven’t been able to summon the stupid mad faith I commonly conjure up.
I’ve lost heart for my usual mantra. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
For all I know in a few years this yard will belong to someone else. I apologize in advance for the mistakes we made. Planting trees too close to the fence. The uneven paving stones.
All the poetry and junk written in this space, maybe it will be felt by future inhabitants. My spirit addressing your spirit. All the poetry read, and read again. The top of my head taken off.
The prayer flags are new this year, and the vine has caught hold and makes it way across, a tightrope walker, to the cherry tree. Maybe this means something, maybe not. It’s a third of the way across and the summer’s not half over. The cherries only beginning to blush.
A Few Things About Working at a Library
***
I can never read at the library. On my breaks I look at Instagram and wonder what everyone else is reading.
I’m at work after a few nights of brutal insomnia and weeks of less brutal insomnia. A woman comes into the library and asks me for help finding books on insomnia. I look up the call number (616.84982) and we both walk to the shelf in a companionable fog.
I commend myself for consistently resisting the urge to weed my enemy’s books from the collection. Once, though, someone brought in a copy upon which they’d spilled coffee and it had to be discarded. Sorry, my enemy.
But for librarian-patron confidentiality, there are a lot of things I could tell you about the people you meet working at a public library.
The Book I Most Want Cannot Be Found on My Shelves
***
I have worked in so many libraries; at home I resist classification systems.
I turn to the internet to look up the colour of the spine.
Mourn Them All
***
Another famous poet dies and I do what all the poets do. I take his book off the shelf and read my favorites. Still good. Next, I take random books from my poetry shelf and read good poems of the lesser known.
Minor poets die every day. Some before they’re born.
Tree Museum
***
After taking a walk on a day illustrating the cusp of fall, I spend the whole day thinking about trees. I read Robert Frost’s poems about the sounds of trees, the stay and the sway of them.
Next I read Howard Nemerov’s poem about the language of trees, and also the silence in them. All of the words to describe leaves, to describe bark. Afterwards I want to go back outside and lay my fingers on the bark of the trees in my yard, to smooth leaves across my cheek.
I read the lines by Czeslaw Milosz: “Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
I want to be a tree. Feel the wind, high up, and the light coming through. To shelter. There is so much to say about trees. I grow silent.
I sway.
I look up Enzo Enea’s tree museum and look at photographs of all the specimens he’s rescued and replanted near Lake Zurich in Switzerland. The chestnut tree from the town square that was used for posting news and posters still has nails embedded in its bark. Trees collected for the museum are shown dangling from a long cord, flying by helicopter to their new home. To be so uprooted!
I hum Joni Mitchell’s song.
I don’t want to be a tree in a tree museum.
I had been speaking with a friend who saw a photograph of my newly acquired bonsai tree and she said she had also just gone to Home Depot and bought a very similar bonsai. We imagine them, our production line bonsais, speaking to each other telepathically across the prairies. We imagine speaking telepathically to each other via our miniature tree museums.
On my walk the sky was that heightened, breakable blue of autumn. The trees were mid-change. Green leaves had mostly turned yellow, but even so new growth had emerged, new green leaves emerging from the yellow, reaching out from the canopies toward the sun.
The resistance of the leaves to change coincides with my own.
I stop to think about various trees from my childhood. The birch tree I leaned against once for hours and no one saw me. I think about the unlikely combination of green and yellow. Magic rings. I think about how when you need to, you can give your soul to a tree and the tree will hold your soul in its branches and return it back to you replenished.
I think about how after fulfilling social obligations in multiple settings, I walked to the suburban forest and took photographs of leaves for half an hour, until I felt like myself again, even though I still carried the sensation of needing to flee in my limbs. I think about my affinity with birch trees but also with albino horses. I fathom their skin.
The original sense of the word fathom, from Old English, “something that embraces.”
I think about Daphne. I think about her fleeing, and how her escape becomes metamorphosis as she enters a static, fixed state. Change is like that sometimes.
I think about that tree flying above, some kind of angel, s
ome kind of contingency plan.
Poetry and Failure
***
As someone who has been attempting to understand the space between poetry and essay, I find it interesting to note that the word essay means, ‘to try,’ and that likewise it hasn’t escaped me that the word poetry contains the word ‘try’ in it as well.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett’s famous line, which a tennis player of some renown has tattooed on his arm. Failure in tennis is a score of love. A poem is something you might learn by heart.
Whenever I hear essay, I hear an echo of the word, sashay. In square dancing, a sidestep. Beckett talks about the beeline, “the course you always take.” But also, “beyondless” and “thitherless.”
Thither to the gap, to the try. Sashay. With love. Learn everything with your heart.
I write on my arm but the words vanish in the shower.
How Would You Feel?
***
We were in the car on the way home from ballet class our tall daughter took when she was six. Mozart was playing on the radio and she said how much she liked the music, and how one day she’d like to meet Mozart. I broke the news that he was no longer with us. She responded, I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that Leonardo da Vinci is dead, too? Well, yes, said I. Her sobs were heartbreaking and lasted until we got home, at which point she went to her room and continued to weep. I told her these people whose work we love continue to live on through their art but this was of no comfort. How would you feel, she asked through her tears, if you found out your favorite artist was dead?
The Sugar Bowl Changes Every Day
***
The sugar bowl changes every day, says Cezanne. The morning and evening light transforms the floral china, the white grains glint, the spoon dips, takes. The bowl empties, fills.
Well. These days on café tables there are packets of raw sugar, Sweet & Low, aspartame, Stevia, Splenda, Truvia, and maybe plastic tubes of agave nectar. Health advocates use sugar cubes to illustrate the amount of white stuff in a Slurpee or can of pop. Studies show rats prefer sugar to cocaine and when forced to quit cold turkey experience terrible withdrawal symptoms.
It’s the bowl I miss. The light playing on the daintily painted flowers. The shadow it casts on the rough table, telling us things about the passing of the days.
The Case Against Artist and Writer Marrying
***
Today the dryer gives up the ghost. The dishwasher has been grumbling and gritty for months. The refrigerator has been admonishing us for years, startling us with its unpredictable leaks, rattles, moans. The oven only burns if you forget to subtract twenty-five degrees. The responsibility of maintaining five appliances at this late stage has been an unexpected and heavy burden.
It is a Delicious Thing to Write
***
“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating,” says Gustave Flaubert, and isn’t this why and how you started out? You wrote because it was delicious, delectable. You wrote for the magic of it, the sparkling, sparking words. You wrote because of who you became while writing and for the places writing took you and because it opened up the universe. You wrote because it’s the place you felt most like who you are, where your soul said, yes.
There’s a wonderful quotation by Ira Glass that has gone viral, in which he tells beginners to the creative landscape that “the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.” And it takes a while, and you have to keep at it, and fight your way through. Which is true and necessary to hear.
But there are a lot of things that no one tells mid-career authors, either. The thing is, you’ve put in the work, you’ve fought your way through. You’ve even published several books. You’ve gotten a few good reviews, you’ve lived through the horrendous ones mainly with the help of a few friends who have also lived through horrendous reviews. You’ve been turned down for writer-in-residence jobs because you’re not ‘ambassadorial’ enough. It’s long been decreed that you’re not one of the cool writers, and maybe in truth none of the writers are cool.
You haven’t been completely ignored but neither have you been made a huge fuss over. Good. There’s a moment, maybe a long moment, when it seems, or it feels, that no one is much interested in your work. You’re no longer the new up-and-coming writer. Nor are you the established older writer. No one really wants to give you a grant, and the prizes pass you by. Years pass, and you’ve published nothing, though, yes, you’ve been writing. The manuscripts pile up. This will make you anxious. Very anxious. And the sounds your refrigerator makes begin to take on deep meaning. The low hum, the strident rumble, the clicks, and down-the-hallway moans. Are they death throes sounds, or minor repair sounds, and how much does a new bottom-of-the-line refrigerator cost these days?
But okay. Freedom. No one is watching you, you can write what you like. You can take a month in the summer, lay fallow, and dream, and remember what a delicious thing it is to write. You can take a minute and unfurl your wings and fly heavenward, bringing all that is light back to your nest. You can create scenes as Flaubert did where you are riding in a forest and are not just the rider, but “the horses, the leaves, the wind.” You can take long walks with your dog, and look at other peoples’ roses. You can look at the time you might, gods willing, have left to you.
What is it you want to write with the time remaining? What is it you most want to give? Sit with that, savor the question, which is really quite a beautiful one. Even if it seems a mad thing to believe, believe that the publishing world will catch up with you. Believe in the one person who will some day pick up your book, that sheaf of paper now languishing rumpled, dusty, and coffee-stained crossways on a shelf in your study along with all the books you love, the ones you’ve read and admired, sighed over and dog-eared.
This is the point where you might lose faith, or, yes, take an even greater leap of faith. This is where you continue. Which is not quite as exciting as fighting your way through. This is where you get to remember and revive the deliciousness, the exquisite taste of writing something difficult or gorgeous or harrowing or wise. You are alone now in a way that you haven’t been alone before in your writing, your art making. This is a gift. You are pared down now, thinned out now, hungry. You know radiance, you know what it is to be illuminated, you won’t settle for anything less than the purity of art, of soul. Continue. This is the way. Continue.
The Answer I Never Give
***
Why did you become a writer?
Because the act of writing has always calmed my nerves. I’m talking about the motion of the hand over the paper, the ink flowing from the fountain pen, the smooth white surface absorbing the ink. I could fill pages with the loops that learners of cursive practice and be happy.
Poet’s Musical Background
***
When I type I dream I am playing Chopin.
The Held Breath
***
Taking a photograph, one holds one’s breath and that held breath becomes part of the photograph. Writing, too, takes into account our breathing. The breath we take at the end of a line is part of the poem. You might say, too, that the poem breathes. In turn, we breathe the poem in and out and so the poem becomes a part of us as we read and after.
My daily practice includes taking photographs and this has refined my looking and changed who I am as a being. When we breathe in and hold that breath taking a photograph, we breathe in light, an instant of light. We enter the vestibule of what is holy. It enters us.
I’ve become obsessed with light and how it changes the way we see something we always see. I’m also interested in how we say what we see. What we put in and what we leave out. Those parts in shadow.
I move back and forth between images and words and I try not to think too much abo
ut how it works because I don’t want to ruin the magic. All the same, I think a lot about how we move from seeing to saying. The photographer Robert Frank has said, “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” That feeling you have when you want to return to a line of poetry, or look again at a picture. I used to think I wanted people to think, but after long years of this practice, I know it’s feeling I’m after.
I want to find and extract the poetry in the quotidian. I think of myself as an artist of the everyday, someone who looks for what is bright in our tired and at times shabby days. I want others to realize that this type of seeking is available to them as well, no matter where they are and what situation they happen to be in.
What I want in my quiet life is to be a persistent witness to splendor.
When people read what I write, I want them to feel the way they do when, looking at a photograph, they close their eyes for a few seconds and breathe the light of the image in as a blessing.
I’m a deep and reverent believer in the daily practice, in the consistent, patient ritual of writing. “Submit to a daily practice,” says Rumi. “Your loyalty to that / is a ring on the door.” Though I’ve been writing regularly since university days, it’s only in the last five years that I’ve also made photography part of my practice. On the surface, the two disciplines look wildly different. Photography often, though not always, takes me outdoors. I’m on my feet, moving. My eyes are wide open, or I am squinting, or peering through one eye. I’m scanning the horizon and looking at how low the sun happens to be. Indoors, I’m adjusting the blinds and opening the door part way to let the light in. On a dim day, I spend more time fiddling with the buttons on my camera. I click the shutter and there it is in a fraction of a second, an image. Let’s say it’s the image I keep. Of course, surrounding this image are all the ones deleted from that same shoot, all the images I’ve ever deleted, and all the ones I’ve kept. Not to mention all the photographs by others that I’ve looked at and returned to and looked at again, trying to figure out what makes them work. Drinking in the magic that a certain image will have for a certain viewer.