Keep Rising

Saturday morning I woke up and frantically looked for a Jimmy Santiago Baca poem that I wanted to quote in my book, and I couldn’t find it, though I skimmed the two books I thought it might be in. I knew I’d posted it on facebook four or five years ago, so I did a search of my own facebook posts from years and years ago (well that was a ride). I finally found it after two and a half hours of searching, and then my young and hungry child woke so it ended up to be a whole day of balancing this editorial pass–the printed out pages on the dining table–and the hungriness of the kid, and I couldn’t send him out because it was raining, so I just growled at him to be quiet, then felt terrible. Maybe you know how that goes?

At the end of the evening, once I’d sent the book along, we watched Bruce Almighty (in which Jim Carey gets the temporary gig of being God from Morgan Freeman). It’s such a weird movie, I’d forgotten. As he was going to bed, on a day when terrible things happened to people engaging in prayer, we talked about prayer. It isn’t something we practice, but we agreed that praying to be better is actually quite a reasonable thing to do. Praying to love better or be more patient is as good a way as any to remind yourself that that’s what matters to you. And that’s 90% of the work.

A week ago I went to see (hear?) Eve Ensler and Anne Lammot in conversation and it was pretty wonderful. Ensler closed the conversation with a reading from her memoir:

Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark, be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can’t help but keep rising. Rising.Rising. Rising.

I have read this before, and maybe posted it here, but to hear it in this auditorium full of mostly women was spectacular. Read it aloud to yourself. Maybe more than once. I think this might be exactly the prayer I need.

In my social media searching, I found a post from the summer of 2017, in which I wrote, “If you ever get a chance to study with Susanna Sonnenberg, jump at it.” Well, that chance is here. Tuesday evening, Susanna will be leading Community Building Art Work’s writing workshop at the Torpedo Factory Art Center and there are two seats left. She’s coming all the way from Montana, so this isn’t likely to happen again for some time.

If you’re interested in cracking open your writing, or in the art of memoir, or in being in the presence of genius, you should sign up. Quickly. It’s going to be so good.

Here’s the Eventbrite link. This workshop is made possible by a generous grant from Musubu. I hope you’ll join us.

Our poem today is by Kelli Russel Agodon, whose work is so stunning. Your prompt is to read this brilliant poem from Waxwing (click the title to read it there, might be better to see it with the formatting).

Then start with “The essential idea is this…” and see what happens. 20 minutes, loves. Last week I got a few stunners in my inbox. Keep ’em coming.

String Theory Relationships
Kelli Russell Agodon

The essential idea is this — the man you love is connected to you
no matter what, but he’s also connected to the woman

down the street with the small dog that barks at the lilacs,
and she’s connected to the cashier at the market who’s a bit rough

with your grapes, but he thinks you’re ten years younger than you are
and he gives you free saltwater taffy and calls you

darling — but he also calls her darling, and her dog
darling, and the man you love along with the grapes.

The essential idea is this — all objects are composed of vibrating anxieties
— everyone wants a window or aisle seat and no one wants to sit

in the middle. Call it deniability. Call it the flashlight you keep
by the door never works in emergencies. We are all connected

by the blast that brought us here, the big bang,
the slam dunk, the heavy petting. We can’t always be pretty.

We can’t always be the eyelash and the wink, sometimes we have to be
the ear, sometimes the mouth. You are and are not the speaker in this story —

you are the bridge connected to the bridge connected to the man
you love and the woman you dislike who teaches spin class. It’s not

personal. It’s not personal when the universe says it’s complicated
and you have ten minutes to understand quantum physics.

When the man you love says there’s a new connection called supersymmetry
and it exists between two fundamentally different types of particles

called bosons and fermions, you hear bosoms and females.
You hear he’s thinking about the spin teacher with the nice breasts

and you burrow deeper. The essential idea is this — someone will always bruise
your grapes and someone will end up in the middle. Someone you love

will break your favorite coffee mug and bring you lilacs. And you
will be connected to people who make your eyes roll.

You’ll be connected to others who stand on the bridge and consider jumping off.
You’ll try to care for them. And you will not look your age, but you will

feel sad when you look in the mirror because we all want to live
a little longer, because the small dog has died and the cashier

has lost his job for stealing saltwater taffy from the bin, but he still calls you darling,
calls everyone darling, and today, darling, darling, darling, the flashlight works.