The Flower Can Always Be Changing

by Shawna Lemay

  A Flower or Something

  ***

  There are days I’m desolate and feel the only thing that would fix the world is if I had before me a perfectly composed and exquisite dessert featuring chocolate and salted caramel, sauces, and lattice garnish at a rakish angle.

  In the long intervals between poems there is the pervasive awareness of separation, the sensation of being in between, which could also be called the experience of ordinary life, which Mark Strand called the masterpiece.

  Part of me wants to talk about my ordinary life—which consists of making dinner from a Pinterest recipe, and pouring the calcium added orange juice at the breakfast table, but also encompasses the world news, and the list of everything we consume in a day—in a more sophisticated fashion. I want to be droll and sly and ironic. I want to be jaded and political. But, like DFW, I know what it means to need to walk away and just “look at a flower or something.”

  Ordinary life is such a weird thing I can hardly keep it straight or remember all the parts to it even though I’m living it right now.

  For example, as I’m writing this I’m thinking about the smoked trout I’m planning to have for lunch, which I guess I splurged on one day at the grocery store because my iron levels were low and I was feeling depleted and sapped, and so smoked trout seemed reasonable. Maybe smoked trout is reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m also thinking about the guy at the library last week, a pretty regular customer who’s recently gotten out of jail. Nice, quiet, soft spoken, always looking down, reads paperbacks because they’re easier to carry on the bus, lighter. He was there to renew.

  Except, though he came in fine enough, right before he arrived he’d swallowed a bottle of hairspray, and when he passed out we had to call the EMS, who said after treating him that there was a fruity smell about him. Which I didn’t catch because my sense of smell is going, who knows why, possibly from living with an oil painter and all his solvents for so long.

  My paperback reader came into the library a few weeks later and I asked him how he was, and he said he remembers coming to the library that day, but not leaving. He doesn’t remember the renewal.

  And I think how he’d make a good portrait, a good subject, but maybe it’s none of my business even if this, too, is part of my ordinary life.

  I spend time wishing we could take a vacation this year to a big city with art museums. But that’s not in the cards. Maybe next year. I try to save myself, reading the poems of others. If the poems don’t have a spark, if they’re not alive, I put them aside.

  Are my poems alive?

  I think about how to enact compassion even in the midst of policy changes and within reasonable constraints, which are in place to protect the safety and well-being of the majority. I’m still figuring out how to tell if a person is going into the darkness, their eyes unadjusted, blind, or coming out of darkness, squinting painfully into the glaring light. I’m trying to feel how disconcerting either of those two things would be. I’m keeping an eye out for stumbling.

  I worry about things like my hormonal imbalance and a possible vitamin deficiency and I feel exhausted and fat bellied and also heavy, while at the same time hoping that I might be uplifting to others at least occasionally. I do what has to be done. I cook, clean, I buy groceries and I don’t mind doing all that but it’s what separates me from writing or thinking and looking out the window. I feel lousy about myself occasionally but have never been even close to the realm where drinking hairspray is a choice.

  In my ordinary life I reflect on how I wish to be and how impossible this is with certain people because of opposing views and old patterns I no longer care to fall into. I reflect on how my level of compassion and attempts to understand those nearer to me are so much more strained and withheld than they are with people I don’t really know at all.

  Late one night I comforted our teenaged daughter who was full of doubt and anxiety and fear about her future. And there I was giving a pretty good late night motivational speech about sticking with what she loves, going where the love is, and just constantly figuring out what she loves and how to stay with that love. Love—I must have used the word a hundred times. And I was thinking, once again, of the oft quoted passage by Rumi:

  “Let the beauty we love be what we do.

  There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

  And so I was trying to get at this, too, that there are hundreds of ways we can find the beauty we love, and the path we begin on isn’t necessarily the one we continue on. The trick is to follow the love, surround ourselves by people who love us, and just make it a habit to gravitate toward those places of love. Also, we should not be afraid to try another instrument. To be open to that.

  We should not be afraid of the word love. We should not be afraid to leave those places where its absence is felt.

  Maybe I was also remembering the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard with regards to photography. Which is: “go to the light.” Open the blinds, let the light in, and go toward the window. Move the table closer to the window. Get out of the shadows, and move to where the light is, move your subject to where the light is. Go to the light.

  I wanted to get at how to make ordinary life a masterpiece even though my own often includes this quite dreary feeling that I’ve forgotten how to live. To be bright eyed, and alive.

  It’s really great to make motivational speeches even if I’m overcome with feelings of complete and tired fraudulence later on.

  The time between writing sessions might become unbearably long. And so can you blame me if I walk around with the last lines inside my head for a few days? I don’t print or save it to an external hard drive or memory stick. I want to defer the return to ordinary life even though I’m not sure that this doesn’t count as ordinary life.

  What I should confess is that you’ve been reading a sincere diary in which every once in a while I pause from wondering what life is, what ordinary is, to look at a flower. Or something sweet. Something filled with light.

  A Certain Faith

  ***

  The black Labrador situates himself on the rug at 1:30 pm one winter afternoon. He arrives a few minutes before the low sun swings past the tall house behind ours, right before the golden stuff swaggers through the Venetian blinds and pours onto the rug where he just so happens to be.

  The Poets Cringe When Their Art is Referred to as Therapy

  ***

  Yet it’s poetry to whom I recount my dreams. Poetry tells me to recline on the chaise longue, has me count back from one hundred. Poetry tells me to go for long walks, hears my confessions, tells me there are thirteen ways to look at a blackbird. Poetry counsels me to cry out with my soul, to sip my tea mindfully, to dare disturb the universe. Poetry holds my hand, keeps me company, draws me to the light places and to the dark places. All my life I’ve wanted my life to be poetry and it has been, though the knowledge of this travels in and out of consciousness. Mmmhmm, says poetry, continue. How does that make you feel?

  The Lesson Bears Repeating

  ***

  Always put paper and pencil beside the bathtub.

  Though of course if you do, it remains blank.

  The lesson also bears forgetting.

  Encouraging Artists

  ***

  I’m asking you to believe I’m in full command of the strategies I employ, even when I don’t so much lack faith in them myself but understand that there is a certain madness in the process, and that what happens in that swirling fever of creativity past any analysis is also a form of hope.

  I’m aware that the word madness is often overused or romanticized or ridiculed. I’m thinking about madness in terms of losing oneself and in terms of the subsequent breakthrough. I’m thinking about how we arrive at these breakthroughs and how delicate and perilous the trip.

  We don’t always know what we mean until years after.

 
It’s difficult to encourage artists and writers because they regularly travel to this unnamed place, which seems silly to talk about and tricky to reach.

  I want to encourage her but I don’t want to throw her off.

  Encouraging artists is difficult, and attention must be given to the nuances of timing. In some cases restraint, in others profuse gushing, and in yet other instances the best approach is to offer minimal praise with elegant and small flourishes. Sometimes nodding, sometimes pure expressions of joy. Sometimes a raised eyebrow and a tipped head, huh!

  The artist needs to be left alone to work but also needs to feel loved. An artist needs to feel the things she is secretly forging will find a sympathetic eye while realizing she will make what she needs to make regardless of any approval.

  One may become weary of encouraging artists but if you’ve ever been uplifted or changed or even temporarily awestruck by a work of art then you understand that artists are very worthy of being encouraged. Let’s not forget that.

  There are many artists making what you might think of as boring art or unresolved art or art that is too abstract or too realistic or art that doesn’t suit your taste and there are some artists who are not really artists. But if you seek out the artists that you think should be encouraged and other people seek out the artists they think should be encouraged then maybe a great many artists of all kinds will feel bolstered.

  As an artist there comes a time when one feels as though one should no longer require encouragement and that one should simply be an artist. The artist becomes weary of needing encouragement. This might be when encouragement is most needed.

  There is the sort of suffering an artist experiences when it seems there is no longer an option to turn back. She has been conducting her experiments in art for so long, it would not be possible for her to get a job checking out groceries or selling electronics.

  At the beginning of my life as a writer, an admired professor launched a new book. I and many other students lined up to get our copies signed and afterwards in the corner, anxiously, some of them wanted to compare inscriptions. Theirs were full of warm regards and best wishes. I didn’t show them mine, which said “to a beautiful writer.”

  Certain pieces of advice act as unexpected encouragement. Always write to someone who is more intelligent than you.

  You are not an employee. There is only one you. You learn by finishing things.

  Random sincerities can be consequential. “I don’t know.” “It will be okay.” “I believe in you.” When a person mentions a connection to a detail or passage, this can be meaningful. When someone says, “I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.” This changed my life, or, this changed my attunement to the universe in this one moment. A person takes the time to see and understand and then conveys some of this experience to another person.

  You will write, or not write. You will paint, or not paint.

  An artist will create regardless of what someone says. Regardless of crickets.

  Hélène Cixous talks about “originary faith,” the thing that allows the artist to dare and that arises from a mysterious and secret scene. It is a matter of luck, she says, and it may be as simple as someone wishing you well.

  Mindsets, the Suburbs, Late March

  ***

  A couple of weeks ago, spring seemed to have arrived. Then a snowstorm came, which has now melted down, nearly, again.

  On one street in the suburbs there is a house with a shovel propped up outside the bright yellow front door.

  On another lawn, there are Christmas decorations: a train, presents, a snowman, and a deer. Dusty, askew, battered.

  Kinds of readiness, kinds of defeat.

  The Secret to the Universe is Not to Be Found on the Internet

  ***

  I spend so much time on that beautiful and futile activity, scavenging on the internet for the secret to the universe, looking for the magic words, the key to everything.

  I have waited for the message to appear in a hyperlink as you might wait by a winter tree.

  If there is a secret to the universe it would most likely be found in a poem. And then, most likely, lost again.

  Mountain Getaway

  ***

  That getaway is a word used for both a vacation escape and a quick departure from a crime seems unfair. What wrongs have we committed but taking everything to heart and positioning our obdurate selves in relation to the frivolous?

  We won’t be caught. As we drive far enough away from the city the voices in my head recede, clear. My breathing steadies. Something to do with the highway? Or maybe the mountains help. Big, old, tired giants. So quiet and secretive and holy. They show us how to be. Even with all the selfies they’re a witness to, even so.

  Reading Poems by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jane Hirshfield at the End of Winter

  ***

  On the weekend at work, I have two separate conversations with people who confide, very tenderly and delicately, how difficult winter has been for them mentally, without mentioning any of the other factors, which there likely are, because in life, there are always what we might call ‘factors.’

  But to just consider the effects of winter on our state of being—no matter how beautiful we find the season, no matter how much we embrace it and let it be—to just consider the harshness of it and sit with that, is important. What it puts us through! And how brittle it’s possible to feel near the end of it.

  The good news is that the end of winter light now reaches my kitchen table in the morning and shines right through the furred leaves of the African violet. Outside, says Thich Nhat Hahn, the trees are standing firm in winter. I, too, have arms for hugging. A daughter with wonderful eyes.

  The good news is that if there is despair, there is also gentleness and tenderness. If winter has made us brittle, it means we have felt it all the way to our bones, and we know winter because we have looked at it carefully and with awe. If winter has left us depleted, we know how disconcertedly fine it will be to soon fill up again, soaking in the sun and the slowly warming air.

  “Fate is sympathetic,” says Jane Hirshfield. Winter, too, is sympathetic. Winter nods, yes, yes.

  We nod back, yes.

  Soon it will be spring. Which is a terribly clichéd thing to say but that’s okay because at this time of year you only half believe it.

  Reference Questions

  ***

  Can you tell me what a ha-ha is?

  Are you referring to the 18th century landscape feature or an expression of laughter?

  This question came not long after I took several courses in 18th and 19th century literature and I had written a paper about landscape and literature. I had lately pored over Mansfield Park by Austen where there is a scene in which a ha-ha figures, as had the questioner.

  What is the best translation of Beowulf?

  ***

  I offer to look up all the possibilities, but the person says, no, I want to know what is your favorite translation. I respond that I’ve only read two versions, the Chickering and the Heaney, and that my personal advice would be to read both, which satisfies the questioner.

  At this point, the course in Anglo-Saxon language I took as an undergrad has served its purpose.

  Before and after these interactions I have been asked many less memorable questions. But these two have always stood out for me. Partly because they seem like set-ups. Tricks. Still, it’s rare that I might feel too clever by half.

  I endeavor to answer questions about dog breeds, brands of air conditioners, dinosaurs, average snowfall, and the distance between two small towns with as much enthusiasm.

  Wildlife Sightings, Suburbs, Seemingly without Symbolism

  ***

  Out the front window at dusk I see the black cat chasing the mid-change rabbit down the front street.

  Driving to West Edmonton Mall listening
to CBC radio, the symphonic crescendo is perfectly timed with the pigeons rising up from under the overpass.

  After most everyone else has gone off to work, robins gather twigs for their nests. Crows thug around. Magpies hither and thither after glimmers and glints. Sparrows rehearse murmurations. The red bird, dear Gwendolyn, is “burning my heart out.”

  Suburban Forest

  ***

  My approach is through childhood as I walk through city streets pulled to those islands of trees in the middle of the suburbs.

  In winter, I take my camera, the dog, and spend hours photographing leaves cupping snow. Now it’s the cusp of a new season and in the spring the only subject is spring.

  A poet I read talks about feeling loved when in a thick forest but mine isn’t a real forest or even a fairytale one. Even when in the center of my small forest I can see the other side, I can see the way out. I don’t bring pebbles or breadcrumbs.

  I know myself. When I breathe in forest, I imagine myself as a double exposure photograph, the gestures of dreamy branches hovering over who I am. The forest doesn’t yet know it’s spring. It begins on the outskirts with catkins and a few furled buds thinking about taking the first chance.

  I photograph a dot of golden sap on the end of one such bud and also a bud to which a feather has attached itself and of course I think of Emily Dickinson. Hope is the thing with feathers. I caption the photograph, “Take care of each other.”