Engagement, participation and Richard Siken's litany

Yesterday I met with Rahim, founder of Unheard Voices Outreach. We met at a coffee shop at 9:00 and I was shocked when I looked at my phone and found three hours had passed. Topics ranged from yoga, Breema body work, smart phone tutorials, documentaries about formerly incarcerated individuals, crypto currency, the school-to-prison pipeline, meditation and chakras, and more. I had met with him, hoping to volunteer in some way with his organization, but also just wanting to meet him because I felt we had numerous common interests. I left that coffee shop inspired to live a life more fully engaged, to participate in life with intention, to find some way to use my gifts to add value to the world.

I started that participation and engagement this morning by watching the sun rise from my little redneck inflatable hot tub. It sits in the middle of the back yard on a large patch of leveled sand that is occupied by the Craigslist above-ground swimming pool in the summer. The air temperature was somewhere in the 30s this morning. The faintest sliver of amber lined the darkened horizon. A nearly full moon was still bright in the dark sky directly overhead. Everything was still. I was settled in the warm water before the first bird called its voice into the morning. I heard it: a faint chirping in one of the trees near me. Then a call from a different type of bird in the neighbor’s yard. Three crows flew silently overhead, passing under the moon, flying to the north of where the sun would soon rise. Steam from the hot water billowed and drifted off in puffs. I heard the rumble of large trucks on Hart Lane. The noise from a passing train three blocks away took over then slowly faded. Etched against the barely perceptible brightening sky were the backyard trees whose inky black limbs branched off into crooked fingers then intricate, delicate webbing, silhouetted and almost cartoonish for their lack of detail. Then my own sweet chickens woke up clucking their protests or praises to the morning. “We survived the cold night! Let us pray!” More crows flew to the south and I heard their distant caw. Cicadas began to call from yard to yard. Squirrels started chattering and running along the branches, which began to appear less silhouette and more real life, as morning light illuminated bark and differentiated far from near.

I tried to be present for it all. I did some loving-kindness meditations. I made silent intentions toward healthiness. The kind of healthiness that healthy choices bring. The kind of healthy choices that take into account that quiet, solid knowing. We’re all doing our best, aren’t we? It’s not easy, but look how far we’ve come. I continue to move further away from that depression that had me in its grips last year, but I’m still ever wary of its return, and the fear of such informs nearly every decision I make.

Yes, I’m getting around to posting a poem. This is still that blog. I needed a moment to feel like a writer again myself. To participate and engage with life. Thank you, Rahim, for the inspiration. 

Olivia sent me a link to this poem recently, and I have read it about a dozen times now. My hot tub morning is not an adequate introduction, but I’m doing my best and I will no longer postpone participation while waiting for perfection. (This poem was found on The Poetry Foundation’s website. You'll have to look it up for yourself to see the proper line breaks and such.)

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken 

Every morning the maple leaves.

                Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

            from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

                                 You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

         of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

                   Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

         and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

                                   You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

                  Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

            Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

                                                               flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,

                that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.

I’m not the princess either.

                           Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

               I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

         glass, but that comes later.

                                        And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

            shut up

I’m getting to it.

                                    For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

                                                 the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

          young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

            but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

                                            and getting stabbed to death.

                                    Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.

          You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

                  What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re

            really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

                                           Let me do it right for once,

             for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

                   Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

                                                and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

                               Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

             Hello darling, sorry about that.

                                         Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

                                    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

            Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

            to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

                  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

                                 against a black sky prickled with small lights.

            I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

                                                I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

                                                                       Crossed out.

            Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

                   Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

                                                           reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

               forgiven,

even though we didn’t deserve it.

                                                       Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up

            in a stranger’s bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

                           from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

                                                          darkness,

                                                        suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

                                  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

          bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

             my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

                                              of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

          smiling in a way

                    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

          up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

                                                I looked out the window and said

                                This doesn’t look that much different from home,

            because it didn’t,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

                                           We walked through the house to the elevated train.

            All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

                                                                    mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

            smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

                                                        just couldn’t say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

                                 is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—

                        here’s the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

            is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

            Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

                                                                               Jerusalem.

                            We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

             a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

             another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

             Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

                                                               Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

                                        Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

             in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

             lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

                                                the blue rings of my eyes as I say

                                                        something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

             and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

                                                   There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

             and the grains of sugar

                              on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry

                                                                         it’s such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

                     we have had our difficulties and there are many things

                                                                                    I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

             years later, in the chlorinated pool.

                                      I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

             these luxuries.

I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

                                                 We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

             When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

                  I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

                                                  Quit milling around the yard and come inside.