“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
Richard Brautigan
A dear friend of mine is taking a poetry class. And I am happy to report: she has completely caught the innocent disease. The wild words have sauntered in sideways and conquered her cortex and now their lost letters make her laugh. Better than chocolate or sex, she is beginning to fall in love with the smallest words that contain the largest truths.
She is a young girl again with freckles, her bare feet dangling from her slender legs as they slalom slowly in the crazy creek; those great, green eyes marveling at larvae and the lattice-like spider web of sunshine that glints through the locust leaves above her golden head.
She’s awake again and giddy with gratitude that her jangled journeys have led her back to this bountiful banquet. You can see her thinking with her mouth; her tongue measuring the distance from Inspiration to Magic. She pours out each word like a master chef, massaging the lovely thoughts like warm, steaming dough into shapes that never were and never will again.
Stumbling into Aladdin’s cave, she is pleased to peruse the miles of jewels that stretch out languidly like lazy ladies on some long-forgotten shore; sparkling with shameless delight and challenging her to fling them skyward and watch them acrobat into melting rainbows of radiant angels; bird-like bolts of light that spin and spoon themselves into creamy versions of her best, blessed days.
Harboring no regrets, she stands before the world with her weaponized words; ready to bust the barriers that separate her from her next textured, tortured exit; ready to fearlessly lean into the wandering wind; ready to receive the mad, musing messages mercifully mailed from Marrakesh or Mali. Who says she can’t play this game?
She’s found the combination to the safe and understands the gift within the surprise that’s wrapped around the mystery that fell like fresh fruit from a sweet onion tree that grew from the smooth, stone palace that stood for seven centuries on a peak of mountain too beautiful for words, even these words.
She now knows the lie within the reality and the reality that lies just south of order; buttressed up against the clouds that collect above the sacred grasp of geese who mastered algebra and Arabic and turned it into gypsum weed; the gentle kind sold at the purple drug store on the corner of her daughters’ diamond dreams; curving like the Earth curves as the sun settles like melted marmalade – orange and lavender and pink – before it all goes black and then sings the saddest stories any sailor ever sold to his slim slip of sunlight: his Sue, his Sally, his Trudy-Lou.
You too would see what I see – what she savored and seized — when I find myself falling down the radish hole, the rooster crow, the braided bunch of Ivanhoe. You too would fly like Jesus or cry like Clovis or die like Moses before the parade of roses that rose like Jehovah’s holiest hostess if you unlocked the write, wrong door that stands before the white, long floor and ate the slight, blonde bore before she birthed a box of Buddhas basking in the bare basement behind the breeze that blows so sleek you could swear its Southern.
I’ll tell you what I told her: when we rattle Rumi’s cube, we get a Zen of jazzy zebras grazing like a grove of grapefruit and rows and rows of berry boats, rolling down the street; we get this moment and a bucket of memories that mightily mutate into truth paste and arguments; some stale, staid opinions that gather the minions like dust in the greenhouse before grandpa grew his grand claw; a sharp and shimmering shard of shrapnel that shaved its own shoe into something wonderful and wiry and weird.
That’s what we get, I warned her, from messing with words: we get things all twisted and torn, wasted and worn, accosted and mourned until even our best made hands can’t build a better cup of maladies, salad knees and valid needs. We end up broken and bruised, choked up confused, outspoken abused, beholding cruel views, fused to our blues, making sense of dense gents and terrible, tolerable truths.
And best of all, we get marvelous, magnificent magic that soaks up from below, like freedom it flows from our hair and our toes, pounding the keys on old pianos, one last jaunt, what everyone wants: a key, a candle and cool nonchalance. We’re electric, elastic, eccentric and blue, like Askren’s last run, we’re gratefully true. We are lovely and lonely and lately forlorn, happy to be here, gladly reborn. It’s musical madness, purity’s pleas, welcome my dear to the innocent disease.
And so finally, from my foolish fullness, I offered the young poet this paltry peace of prayer:
Advice to a New Poet
- To be a good poet, you must carefully follow the rules.
- There are no rules.
- To write a good poem, you must be willing to write a bad poem.
- There are no bad poems, except, possibly, this one.
- You know you are a poet when you fall in love with words, especially the orphans, the lost ones who have been waiting all these years for you to pick up your pen.
- Writing poetry is like giving your soul a bath. You feel clean from the inside.
- A good poem does not need to explain itself. Like a piece of driftwood you find on your favorite beach, what does it really mean?
- When you hold it in your hands you know. You know.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
