I’ve been thinking about Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use”, and the final lines, The pitcher cries for water to carry/ and a person for work that is real. This poem could be sort of the rallying cry for my family — of social workers and occupational therapists and foster parents and nurses. People who are in the “helping professions” have a tendency to volunteer and an innate need for social justice and all of the make-it-right quixotic, tilting-at-windmills types of behavior… and then, there’s me. The writer. My family looks upon me indulgently. They look lovingly. They look, in some cases, faintly condescendingly and often confusedly. I mean, I’m a writer. I don’t “deal” with people. I don’t “know” “how it is.” I mean, a WRITER, for goodness sakes.

And, what kind of job is that?!

Like the women Hawthorne criticized as scribblers, I have internalized that scornful question to the extent that I am super, super-busy doing “helpful” things, things to prove to myself, and to others, that I am useful, I am helpful, I am worthy. That I understand labor and trying, and striving. I am become as a pitcher brimming, and I am carrying water importantly to the …sea.

I am a person wasting my time when I should be writing, trying to make sure that I’m someone of whom my family can approve.

I don’t wonder why artists tend to go insane.

with apologies to Marge

The work that I love best
Comes after moments of silence
Of sitting, stock still, tracing the track
Of dust motes in a sunbeam.

And then, a flurry of lines —
Scrawled hard, leaving dents; typed fast, a staccato cadence
Outpacing pulse, but not quite matching pace of mind.
The coup de foudre of the Muse
A heady love affair, which burns white hot, and then, gutters.
And silence resumes:
The careful miner digs, seeks, and taps another vein.

The work of the writer is common as mud,
As common as grocery lists and permission slips
Hackneyed, it produces stilted verses and purple prose;
Inspiration does not visit every clean white page.
But a thing worth doing is done well
And every sweating attempt
Brings with the next draft, a closer step
To words immortal. And every halting word
Is worth the try.

I ran across some Rossetti this weekend, and realized once again why she is one of my favorite 19th century female poets. She’s best known for her Goblin Market poem, a completely fantastical story in which she takes the element of fantasy and blends it with real life so seamlessly that it makes an allegorical kind of sense. She even does that with her strictly religious poems – taking elements of the ordinary and holding them up to the light – and transforms them into something else.

A BETTER RESURRECTION

HAVE no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall–the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perish’d thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.

“A Better Resurrection” is from Goblin Market and other Poems, by Christina Rossetti. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862.

This poem has been arranged in a four part choral piece – it’s popularly done for high school choral competitions. My favorite stanza is the second one, and the lines, “My life is like a frozen thing/ Nor bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall — the sap of Spring…” It reminds me of the Maya Angelou poem, “Still I Rise,” and, as long as we’re doing poetic free association anyway, it reminds me of the phrase, “She did it anyway.”

the green blade

life – eager, compressed –
surges – blooms – unfurls. Rises
like the certain tide.

heart music

triumphant muscle
the barbaric yawp, “I Am”
counts cadence each breath