poetry – Liz Ahl

After the deadly Apollo 1 fire, one of the groups investigating what happened to try and ensure the safety of the astronauts and program moving forward, was the “Sneak” Circuit Analysis Program. By “sneak” they mean surprise, essentially – an unplanned event caused by a combination of conditions, an event that seems to exist outside of normal or predictable cause/effect dynamics, an event that tends not to be detected during systems tests – not a hardware failure, but, to use astronaut Frank Borman’s words, a “failure of imagination.” A failure to imagine as much as possible of what might or could happen, or where, or how.

When I (fail to?) imagine the work of hunting down these circuits, I imagine dogged, optimistic focus, a relentless search for the thing not thought of, for the not just unintended but unimagined consequence. The work of believing that sneak circuits exist and can be found. The work of thinking the unthought-of, imagining the unimaginable. Of redefining “think” and “imagine.” Countless permutations of hundreds of what-if threads, versions upon versions of the circuitry. The work of examining what you thought you knew through a new lens, a lens that might be called “not-knowing.” (Forgetting what you [thought you] knew?) A curiosity – but a new curiosity that has been somehow untethered from the assumptions that structured the old curiosity, the assumptions that were so invisible as to seem . . . sneaky.

The word sneak suggests a degree of malice that those diligent engineers all know is impossible for a non-sentient machine to actually conjure; but that non-existent malice may nonetheless usefully inspire said engineers to conjure a personified adversary down in the circuitry, the “sneak circuit” biding its time like a hidden trapdoor or bomb. So the engineers’ job is to find what’s hidden, to imagine and root out paths to catastrophe (always catastrophe?) that no one had imagined yet; to worst-case-scenario all the possible choices.

The Apollo 1 fire was caused by frayed wires, and/but, more importantly, a huge failure to imagine what might happen if, while the vehicle was still on earth, at sea level, just running a test, a spark were birthed in a tiny space pressurized with a 100% oxygen atmosphere; a failure to imagine how materials believed safe might become explosively flammable in such conditions; a failure to imagine how the escape-hatch design meant to protect astronauts, to ensure that it wouldn’t open by accident somehow, would in fact get sealed shut by the internal pressure of the sudden, deadly fire in the capsule. The fire wasn’t the result of a “sneak circuit,” but if we think of our mental processes of imagining and planning and designing as circuits, something unimagined definitely snuck through.

Conventional wisdom around the fire and its aftermath is that the tragedy and the rigorous back-to-the-drawing-board degree of self-scrutiny it inspired probably saved the Apollo program in the long run. Some in NASA, engineers and astronauts and administrators at the time, have explicitly said that they believe there would probably not have been a moon landing had the Apollo 1 fire not happened. As I listen to their recorded voices and read their words, they seem gravely well-aware of what a heavy thing that is to say. To imagine.

One engineer, John Rankin, guesses they found about a thousand sneak circuits in various components at various times over the years of the Apollo program flights.

Apollo guidance computer schematics detail. [SOURCE]

***

I was planning to write a poem about sneak circuits, and may yet, but instead I have found myself thinking through this longer, sprawly prose about making poems generally, about the possibility of both “composing” and “editing” ultimately being processes of revision. How composing is a process inclusive, necessarily, of revision at all stages. Or a process that cannot exclude re-vision. These notions about the writing-as-revision process are definitely not me “discovering” anything new; rather, the lens of the “sneak circuit” work, in the context of some current editing and revising work I am struggling with, invites me back into these ideas.

It doesn’t feel particularly revelatory to describe or imagine revision as a search for and analysis of (or just a noticing of, a speculation towards) “sneak circuits” – a “circuit” in this metaphor being the author-chosen language (word choice, syntax, white space, sentence length, usage of capitalization, punctuation, arrangement/sequence, repetition of various types, etc.) which was presumably chosen for reasons (“intent?” “desire?” “purpose?” “pleasure?” conscious and/or unconscious?), toward some kind of end or effect (for the writer? for the reader/listener?).

(Ugh. Are all my compulsive parentheticals and slashes themselves sneak circuits undermining everything I am trying to say, even when what I mean is to clarify, or to include a multiplicity of possibilities? Well, they sure don’t sneak. They are anything but sneaky. They are something, but they are not sneaky.)

I don’t mean a metaphor of “sneak circuits” in the potentially reductive sense of a poem being a coded fortress which can only be broken into by an “expert” like a critic or English teacher, or which is only truly accessible by The Poet. I don’t mean to confirm the suspicion that poetry is by its very nature an arcane, miserly, specialist code to be cracked, that sense that poetry is only for special people with special knowledge. (OK, yes, yes, language is maybe a sneak circuit, yes, language itself is ALSO A [DE]CODE[ING] but I have to move along. I just do.)

I am, however, thinking very much about an author and their language, their desire to create (summon?) an image, an impression, a meaning, a communication, or . . . something. (To make/to uncover/to reveal/to conceal/to create a dynamic of revelation and concealment.) I am thinking this as I delve with a very attentive editor back into poems I wrote pre-pandemic, in a world both chronologically and emotionally so distant.

Delve, in that last sentence, is a verb I’m inclined to revise – it connotes a kind of assuredness or fearless excavation that I don’t feel about this work. Do I dip? Scratch at a surface? Flirt? Tiptoe? Toe-then-foot-then-calf-et cetera? I look but do I actually ever leap? Do I creep? Do I sneak? I am, on average, six years distant from the initial composing/revising of nearly all of these poems, from their “origins.” My feelings about these poems, my relationship to them, to their origins (?) have changed since I submitted this (finished, I would have called it) collection to presses for publication. Part of my struggle here is the distance I feel, across pandemic, across forgetting, across other transformative life experiences, from those origins; origins I feel pressed to revisit now, with the guidance of an editor who is suggesting a lot of changes.

***

The editor I am working with is attentive and engaged and kind – early on in our work together, she was explaining her philosophy around insisting on doing this close editing work face to face (via Zoom), instead of via back and forth emails. She offered that she and I might have different ideas about the effect of language in a particular line or stanza or image, and that she wanted to be clear about communicating hers and understanding mine. Explaining how important dialogue is to her, and wanting to avoid potentially negative points of disconnection or disagreement about the poems, she reassured me, “you can teach me differently.” Not an argument, not a back-and-forth horse-trading, but an opportunity to teach, to learn, to be taught. The process has, indeed, often felt like a dynamic of teaching and learning, moving in two directions. This feels, fundamentally, like revision – revisiting the manuscript with an ally who doesn’t carry the baggage of feelings about my poems’ “origins” that I carry. An editor-ally who believes the manuscript is “worth” publishing, who indeed accepted the manuscript for publication, even while thinking it was not quite “finished” yet.

In one of the poems I’m working on, I’m revising a stanza wherein I consider the implications and possible revisions of a word choice. (Kind of like I do with “delve,” two paragraphs ago.) I repeatedly use a particular word in the poem, then wonder in the final stanza about my choice of that word, my motives for those choices, about what it might mean if I chose other particular words. The stakes for the choosing of the word feel significant to the poem.

So, I’m revising a stanza about revision. From a years-later standpoint, I am revisiting a poem’s attempts at language about considering how language can create (and distort and obscure and reveal) realities. I’m revisiting the poem’s attempts (my attempts, the attempts of years-ago me) to “show the work” rather than just changing the word and erasing the evidence of having considered a “wrong word.” But the “wrongness” (or the attempting, the grasping, the emotional significance of choosing “wrong”) is a big part of the point. More so in the latest iteration, I think (I hope?) than the earlier.

I remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, feeling and feeding a big urge to play out all possible versions/combinations/choices/consequences/(circuits?). I would read one version, one series of choices, then trace my paths backwards, testing out alternative choices as I went, somewhat systematically. I don’t know whether or not I kept any kind of track of my methods, but I can easily imagine younger me keeping a tally, some kind of accounting or mapping of all my different routes. Apparently I’m not the only one who had that kind of desire.

Of course, there’s no “correct” or “incorrect” version of a Choose Your Own Adventure, except perhaps if you just read the thing through, page by page, in the order of the page numbers rather than in the order of your particular choices. That might be considered “wrong,” but also maybe really interesting. I wonder if my urge towards slashes, parentheticals, etc., in this essay, in other things I write, (though not as often in poems) is me seeking a way to have all possibilities at once, to not have to choose and make the wrong choice? A delusional planning for, and inclusion of, every possible outcome, good or bad, so as to be seen (!) as not making a mistake.

As I work on my poems with this editor over several months, as I piece together this essay in fits and starts alongside that work, some language finds its way to my feeds, from a poet and thinker I admire, Keith Wilson: “A strategy for revision is to put the poem away in a drawer for a while. To come back to it when you are less emotionally invested. To see it with a cool heart and mind. On one hand, I am doing that when I find an old poem. But what else I am doing, when I hate the voice of my youth, is discovering myself in a drawer. And finding that one can never divest themselves from themselves—I am still invested in this snapshot of my soul, and if I find it ugly, it is not a rational part of me finding it ugly, it is a rational part of my finding an excuse to look for flaws, now that I can pretend I am looking at a page I have moved fully on from. I am skilled in the art of bias against myself.” Here’s Wilson’s full essay.

The poems I’m working on have been in the figurative drawer. Some part of myself, in the drawer, yes. But if anything, I feel more (differently?) “emotionally invested” than I remember feeling two years ago, and my heart and mind don’t feel “cool” about it. I am grateful for (and anxious about) how Wilson’s words and ideas invite me to think about what I’m doing in this composing/revising/editing. What I say (to myself, to others) I’m doing.

***

I feel an urge today, in this new paragraph, in the weird, fractured present tense of my experience writing this essay in fits and starts, to account for the passing of time. The continuity implied by the equal spaces between the paragraphs is a false one. I’m returning to this essay after a couple of months away from it. I started writing it nearly a year ago. It has been in and out of a drawer. The poetry manuscript I’ve been editing, pending the final (?) word from the editor, is . . . finished? I don’t know what word to use now.

I am acutely aware that there will soon be published versions of several of my poems which are very different from one another. The “old” versions, in literary journals, online and in print, and the “new” ones, in the book. One conventional narrative arc of revision is “the new versions are improvements on the old” or “the poems are finally finished,” but my capacity to comprehend “final” has shifted, is shifting. It’s unsettling. I hope it might mean new things for me in poetry, in living. But/and I am anxious: what if the newer versions aren’t “better?” What if they are better than ones I had felt were “finished” earlier? What if I just can’t tell the difference anymore? What if I don’t care about the difference, or care differently about what such differences might mean or teach me?

I feel an urge today, nonetheless, to finally (!?) finish (?!) this essay. To end or to be done with it. I notice as well my urge to put a turn here, a volta of some kind, and I want it to be about sneak circuitry. About the catastrophes I fear, the ones secreted away in little machines of language I scarcely understand but which I made, re-made, may yet continue re-making. Strophe (a term related to stanzas and “turns” in poetry, like some use “volta”) and catastrophe conveniently (poetically?) share an etymological root.

Yes; revision can be (among other things) a “reversal of what [was] expected.”

If I’m really engaged with the work, not just dusting and polishing, perhaps the catastrophe of revision is not only unavoidable, but desirable. Even as it makes me anxious. I think I feel anxious because I’m experiencing this particular revision process as twofold: not just changing the poems themselves, but (for the first time? more intensely or intentionally than in the past?) revisiting and somehow (re)seeing the structures or systems within which the earlier versions were made. The circuitry from which the poems emerged, itself a made thing. Sure, I am probably (always? inescapably?) replacing old “failures of the imagination” with new ones. “Better” (?) ones. But, as Cornelius Eady wrote in his poem, “Dance at the Amherst County Public Library,” the final poem in Victims of the Latest Dance Craze: “even the failure was a sort of dance.”

Here’s a little more of the poem leading to that line, for context:

This is how I wasted my time,
Trying to become the Henry Ford of poetry,
And mass produce a group of words
Into a thing which could shake
And be owned by the entire world.

Naturally, I failed.

Of course, even the failure was a sort of dance.

Cornelius, my teacher from years ago (and still, always, inescapably, teaching me), inscribed my copy of that book in July of 1986. It was one of the first books of poetry by an individual poet I ever bought, the first ever signed by the poet, I think. The spine is broken in a couple of places. The cover features a photograph of a pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars on fire. I had to pull the book from my poetry shelves so I could add his lines at the end of this essay. How glad I am to have it in my hands, to read it — all of it — again.

creativity

The Thousand

April 26, 2022 lizahl

Black and white close up of a man's hands folding an origami crane with white paper — the fingers / of my brother, folding

In memory, cranes have wings –
but in the now, this one’s flightless,
its wings somehow folded safe
inside the wrinkled body.

Some folds seem familiar
like streets I’ve driven twice,
but with the inevitable wrong
turn, the incorrect fold.

My brother taught me to fold them
with a trained patience,
talked me through and showed
my fingers what his already knew.

I thought I’d fold a crane a day
until I hit the thousand –
transcendence, wishes granted,
the number of will and desire.

Like other plans, this one
never took shape, never fleshed
out past the mere bones
of an idea. Today, though,

I’m suddenly needy for it,
wanting to do it, or just
to know I know how to do it –
but I can’t call it back.

I forget so much: the wristed
trick of cat’s cradle, the folds
for hats, boats, and the squared-off
finger fortune tellers from school.

I learn. I forget. I remember how
my brother gave me a gift
of one winter afternoon when I asked
and he agreed and he was my teacher.

The thousand cranes I never
folded? The wish never asked for
or even imagined? Maybe today
they call to me, try to remind me

how to gather and fold –
this crease a beak, that fold
a wing – an envelope
that’s closed and open, containing

and becoming the wonderful news
of itself. The paper-thin whispers
of the not-yet-cranes, and the fingers
of my brother, folding.

(first published in Prairie Schooner, 2003)

About Writing, creativity, Poetry, rumination

Poems in hand

April 8, 2022April 8, 2022 lizahl

A poem sometimes comes, a draft

(a thin breath of air through a faulty window seal? a sip of ale drawn from a cask? a conscription of the unwilling? the distance from waterline to keel?)

and language itself is maybe the first transformation, and already it is wrong, the poem, it can never be right—and the body changes, and the world, and the understanding wrought between them, and I come to the poem a draft from a different direction, I change, I change, the language

is insufficient, a reaching, a lie, and so I change it, and I change it again, and then I change, and so I change it, and it changes me, and I change, I’m conscripted, poised always to dodge, eye on the northern border, and how did war come to the page where I meant nothing of the kind? my mean-ing wages itself, weaponized, against an impervious breeze—

I spent most of January at a very rural, isolated retreat, a place I love and have visited before. I brought with me some printed drafts I’d forced myself to write during three month-long daily “grinds” in 2021. I’d completed my commitments to write a poem or poem-like thing every day for those three months; then, for the most part, wrote nothing in between the three grinds; with a few exceptions I didn’t even glance at those drafts again until I printed them, didn’t give them any kind of deeper look until the retreat.

When I was finished with each printed forced poem draft, finished writing on it, crossing out, circling, adding – after I’d typed it into a word doc or given it up to the unfinished, the forgettable – I found myself folding the paper copies into cranes. My brother taught me how to do this years ago. This didn’t mean I was “finished” working on the poem, only that my work with that particular paper copy was over.

When I was on “work study” at the Vermont Studio Center, a dozen years ago, for a month-long writing residency, my job was to work breakfast and lunch prep – I can’t remember how many days a week, but not all of them. It was a very early morning shift, in the small dining hall/kitchen, and that early dark work shift was a boon that particular July, given the smothering heat wave that had settled over northern Vermont. My job included setting up/making the coffee and hot water for tea, putting out the coffee/tea fixings, topping off and putting out the cereals, setting up the breads at the toasters. The other piece of my job was prepping the salad bar for lunch, which meant that I had to duck into the walk-in cooler, frequently, respite from both heat wave and, as the other morning-duty worker got the hot entrees going, the blazing griddle and burners. I liked also that the work shift got me up and going so early in the day, because even if I had a totally unproductive, stuck, distracted failure of a writing day, I could console myself with the fact that I had helped feed us. I had made something. With my hands, a physical thing.

I spent some of the past pandemic year and a half folding and tearing and gluing and sewing paper. I was taught some new techniques. While I was doing it, it often felt more real or meaningful or grounded than writing poems did. Most of the poems I drafted felt forced because they were forced. But/and, that work sometimes seems all of a piece – the folding and tearing, the writing and even the not-writing. The threads, the glue. Even the forcing.

I made a list, called “options” at the beginning of the January residency. I tacked it to the bulletin board over the desk. I didn’t want to spend time having to think of something new to do or work on when I was tired of doing or working on whatever I was working on. I made a list that included different kinds of things – a handful of revision and writing projects, sure, but also writing letters and postcards, or doing counted cross-stitch, or listening to a podcast, or reading a book or article or literary journal issue I’d brought with me. I didn’t want to get hung up in potentially paralyzing “productivity” imperatives, yet I didn’t want to squander the incredible time and space I had been granted to “do my work.” I think this list was trying to be generous about pace and scope and rhythm and what might constitute work, or conditions that might make work rich, rewarding, surprising, sustaining, sustainable.

After I had folded a lot of paper cranes, I found the feather. The feather from a bird, a real bird, some kind of brazen flicker. Enough feathers spread across a section of the grass near the fenced in garden that it seemed like there might have been a squabble or an attack.

Thread. Revision having to do with picking up threads, or following them, or discarding them. Thread of thinking – like a theme. Here – literal thread – borrowed from spare skeins from the cross stitch amusement that was Not Writing (an other thing, a thing to do with my hands) – links the one work with the other. Or suggests a set of linkages. Like a trail? Like a leash? Like an umbilicus? From the folded words to threads to wings.

My old cigarette-smoking hands, my idle hands, my hands that wanted something more than a poem at hand, wanted a poem in hand, for folding. Some occupation. No more smoke-breaks for this iteration/version/draft of myself. Folding, sewing, reading, listening, staring, taking the cranes out into the landscapes. Re-reading via crane-folds.

I finished my planned cross-stitch project – a bowling towel with The Dude from The Big Lebowski on it – and had a set of small patterns but no big project left, so I experimented a bit with using random “wrong” colors of thread in place of the suggested colors in those small patterns. This made me remember someone I knew — a poet, actually — who did paint-by-numbers but instead of following the instructions, wherein paint #1 would be added to the sections marked #1, he’d use #1 to paint all the #7 sections, and so on.

Transform, re-form, re-figure the paper, fold, press the creases, then press them against themselves. Fold new lines against the old, printed ones. Fold with the grain, fold against it. Consider and reconsider the materials. Follow part of the pattern, ignore part of the pattern. Recombine. Recycle.

Bring an edge closer, push what’s at the center to an edge, reconsider here, and there, scope and relation and perspective – one window, another window, edge and ledge –

COVID-19, Readings/Events, rumination

Books on the Road

November 27, 2021November 27, 2021 lizahl

This past summer, in advance of anticipated autumn travel, before Delta fully unfurled and the Covid numbers painted the U.S. map almost entirely red, I had optimistically ordered copies of my book to have on hand during the trip. I was vaxxed, maybe more people would get vaxxed, maybe things would actually be better/safer/more accessible. I thought I might hit some open mics, some readings. There were a couple of series where I knew folks and which might be up and running.

I don’t remember more than the fuzziest contours of that small, sweet, brief optimism I permitted myself — to maybe read poems aloud in person to strangers, to hear the poems of others read aloud, in person. To travel in the ways I have traveled in the past. Along with eating inside restaurants and, well, doing anything maskless in a public indoor space, giving readings in person is a thing that did not happen during my travels, and that has not happened since March 2020. Other things happened on the road, good things, interesting and strange and profoundly uncomfortable things. I’m very grateful to have been able to travel at all, even within limitations I have tried not to resent too deeply.

At one point, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, we happened to encounter one of those little free libraries, and I ended up leaving one of the copies of my book there. I signed it “Passing through Santa Fe,” and included the date.

This isn’t an “official” little free library, so you can’t search for it on the LFL website, but if you’re heading south from Santa Fe to Madrid, it’s on the right, just past the turn off to the horse hospital.

Later on this trip, I decided I’d make it a point to find more Little Free Libraries where I’d leave a copy of my book and pick up anything that I was interested in reading, as is the spirit of the enterprise. In Chicago, visiting a friend, a fellow poet, I asked for a copy of each of her books so that I could leave them in the Little Free Libraries along with my own as I made my way home.

I visited a total of five more Little Free Libraries after Santa Fe — Boise, Idaho (#23842), Ogden, Utah (#32414), Cheyenne, Wyoming (#125480), Erie, PA (#53892) and the “Little Pink Library” in Corning, New York (#81419). Here are some photos. That first one is an image from Google Maps of the Boise LFL — I like the shadow. The rest are by me.

It felt satisfying to leave copies of my book in places where nobody (or okay, maybe one person?) knows me, where my book would probably never enter the book ecosystem more organically. I signed the books, always indicated that I was “passing through,” and included the date. It helped me get rid of some books, got me off the interstates briefly, and was another kinda-social-but-at-a-distance experience to add to the growing list of such experiences. There was something mildly therapeutic about this small ritual — something about me dealing with having dared to allow myself even a small optimism, feeling stupid for having done so.

I might make this a new road trip tradition moving forward, to make it a point to visit Little Free Libraries when I travel. Not necessarily with my own book, but because they are interesting, such a great project overall, and sometimes so freakin’ adorable.

About Writing, COVID-19, Poetry, rumination

The Next Step

August 8, 2020August 8, 2020 lizahl

I make myself go outside. It is nice outside, not too hot, but sunny and robin’s egg blue sky. A light breeze to keep the bugs off. To have to “make” myself go out into such temperate loveliness is so absurd. I am glassy-eyed and dimwitted from hours, days, weeks of screen work punctuated by the social media work-distractions which also serve as my sole contact with most of my people these days, and it is a nice day and I have a book of poems to finish reading and it is August and I am sad and frustrated and the fall semester of teaching writing (online) is looming, and winter is coming and so out I go.

There’s some windfall from the remnants of tropical storm Isaias. Acorn-studded bouquets thrown down from the skyscraper oak. Last year’s paper wasp nest gust-scrubbed from the skylight frame.

(I have not been writing poems. These words about the nest and the oak have the vague feel of poetry, but don’t pull me into drafting a poem the way they might have in March. That next step, such a habit, ordinarily such an optimistic impulse for me once I’ve got some initial image/language down, escapes me these last pandemic months. Where I once stepped confidently, almost thoughtlessly, many times before — nothing. Or nothing solid. Air, or something else. Some place I don’t want to tread.)

I sit down to read but want to scoot the potted celery over so I can set down my notebook on the picnic table. As I shove the pot over, I reveal a toad. He is not amused. He was not expecting this turn of events.

img_7088-1 — The toad scoots back underneath the pot, where it’s cool and safe, for now.

I think about the metaphors I want to make from the toad. The contemplative distance between my wanting to and my doing it is nearly nonexistent. First I consider the sudden exposure, the moments of disorientation and maybe fear, and then the finding again of that cool, dark space. I think about all the time I have spent inside over the last months. Then I’m thinking about how the few times I go out now, masked and skittish, I feel exposed and worried and strange. E(strange)d. And I am lucky enough to have a long-term partner at home, someone with whom to talk and cry and laugh and eat and be. And maybe I should just let a toad be a toad. I do not have a good history of letting toads be toads, however:

I wrote that poem almost 15 years ago. Maybe longer? I was still teaching Introduction to Literature, which I think I only did my first few semesters on the faculty at my university, where I will start my 20th year in a couple of weeks.

It’s (e)strange to read this poem now, to revisit its long-ago March (or April?), and to think back to this year’s pandemic shut-down right after spring break. Hubris. Being on the lookout. Toad as soothsayer. Spring full of flood, earthquake, astronomical rarities, weather extremes, and my own casual imaginings about what “plague” might descend next.

Later, after reading some poems and pausing to stare at the sky and reading some more poems, I notice a caterpillar, on the picnic table, making its way somewhere. When I first see it, it is caterpillar-ing confidently forward, like it knows where it’s headed. But when it hits the edge of the picnic table, it seems fully unprepared for the sheer drop, the next steps suddenly gone, suddenly air. It reaches and reaches into the void where the path should be.

If I can’t let a toad be a toad, I also definitely can’t let a caterpillar be a caterpillar. I mean, they transform (!) into moths and butterflies (!!) for crying out loud. They can’t let themselves be caterpillars. They spin cocoons of self-generated silk around their bodies and mutate into a new form, often one dramatically different from their caterpillar embodiment in terms of color and texture.

Out on an errand last week, I wore a face mask as usual, but also happened to be wearing a hat and sunglasses, and I’m pretty sure someone who has known me for 15+ years did not recognize me — they are a brassy, call-to-you-across-the-crowded-restaurant extroverted person who always notices/sees me, says hello/engages in chat when we run into each other. They were oddly standoffish, and it wasn’t until I was back in the car that it occurred to me that maybe this person had not actually known it was me. Had not recognized me.

This didn’t make me mad or upset — instead, it reminded me of when I was new to the area all those years ago, how nobody knew me from Adam, and also about how much I enjoyed, for the first two thirds of my life, the opportunity, given and given again, of being a stranger, being unknown, being anonymous. Being new, and maybe transformed by that newness.

Was I enjoying the notion of (possible) rare anonymity in pretty much the same instant I was mourning spending 95% of my time physically — and emotionally — apart from the world beyond our front door? Was I remembering a more itinerant life, when I rarely lived anywhere for more than a few years? When I was somewhat regularly renewed by…..being new? By being the stranger?

Screen Shot 2020-08-07 at 9.44.32 PM — From Etymology Online

What is my current relationship to estrangement, anyhow?

I make myself look at the sky. Then I take a photo of the sky. I am documenting and archiving, which feels like a thing I can do to disrupt the strange stillness of just looking at the unmediated sky. Or observing, without recording, a caterpillar.

I have never succeeded at meditation, as far as I know. (I have also perhaps not tried very hard.)

sky

How long was I outside before I was putting all of it to metaphorical purposes? Did I bring the purposes with me out onto the deck, with my book and notebook and iPad, or were they only revealed to me (like a toad!) after I got out here?

I wonder if there can even be an unmediated sky or caterpillar if I am there looking at it, camera or no. Aren’t I just a camera? I’m not even sure I want to let the caterpillar just be a caterpillar, or a toad a toad, or if that’s even an option, given language, given my hungry, narrating gaze.

Two ways I think about ending this writing. First way — another video, with my foolish narrating voice calling a melodramatic play-by-play for an inchworm who, in “the end” (of my documenting/narrative framing) succeeds, survives, makes it across the gap, doesn’t get eaten by the toad, etc., etc.:

Second way — I consider how the caterpillar and the inchworm, in their reaching with the whole front ends of their bodies into the empty air, across the gap, remind me of the first card of the major arcana of the standard Tarot deck: The Fool.

On the left, the Rider-Waite (classic, popular tarot deck) rendition of the Fool; in the center, a more contemporary riff on the traditional Fool iconography in the “Light Seers” tarot deck, and on the right, the Fool from my own tarot deck, the Hanson Roberts. The significant common image: the cliff the Fool’s about to step (or fall) off of.

At Tarot.com (the Hanson-Roberts link above), this is part of their description of the Fool:

“Modern decks usually borrow from the Rider-Waite imagery. Most Fool cards copy the bucolic mountainside scene, the butterfly, and the potential misplaced step that will send The Fool tumbling into the unknown. Don’t forget, though, that the earlier versions of this card represented already-fallen humanity, over-identified with the material plane of existence, and beginning a pilgrimage toward self-knowledge and, eventually, wisdom.”

The gap. The fumble and reach. The unknown. Fools of all stripes, neither fully innocent nor irredeemably fallen, poised to take that tumble or leap or step.

That next step, such a habit, ordinarily such an optimistic impulse for me once I’ve got some initial image/language down, escapes me these last pandemic months. Where I once stepped confidently, almost thoughtlessly, many times before — nothing. Or nothing solid. Air, or something else.

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Summer 2015 Reading Challenge [updated]

June 2, 2015June 9, 2015 lizahl

Like Ron Mohring, I am responding to Oliver de la Paz’s 2015 Summer Reading Challenge. A good idea I hope will go viral. I can’t resist lists. Here’s the gist — make a list of fifteen books to read between now and the end of August. Three books from your list should be poached from the lists of others. So it will be helpful to keep linking to lists you know of, I guess. As you finish a book, post some kind of…response, commentary, review, what have you.

I aspire to read more than this over the summer, but this feels like a strong start. And I know I’ll be loving reading others’ lists, so link ’em up! I’m adding the ones I know of from time to time below my list.

Here’s my list — 2 nonfiction & 13 poetry:

No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture (Matthew D. Tribbe)

The World Without Us (Alan Weisman)

Bluets (Maggie Nelson)

Hoodlum Birds (Eugene Gloria)

The View from Saturn (Alice Friman)

Our House Was on Fire (Laura Van Prooyen)

Talismans (Maudelle Driskell)

Twine (David Koehn)

The New Testament (Jericho Brown)

Bloom in Reverse (Teresa Leo)

Mimi’s Trapeze (J. Allyn Rosser)

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Ross Gay)

Slant Six (Erin Belieu)

Last Psalm at Sea Level (Meg Day)

How to Be Drawn (Terrance Hayes)

Others who have made lists for this challenge — please add your link in the comments if you join the challenge:

Wendy Call

The Black Sheep Dances

Josephine Ensign

Crista Ermiya

Jeff Oaks

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Making it home, April 1970

April 17, 2015September 26, 2015 lizahl

Forty-five years ago this month, the “failed” Apollo 13 mission actually became “NASA’s finest hour” because of the incredible creative and technical work done by so many folks to bring the crew back home. The story of Apollo 13, which first unfolded the week after I was born (!) was what first inspired me, years ago, to retell some Apollo space program stories via poetry. In the spirit of turning failures into successes, and in honor of the great feats of Apollo 13, here’s one of the poems.

Trajectories

–Apollo 13

To make it home, they had to keep
hurtling away from Earth, gathered by gravity
into lunar orbit, the dark side never
quite this dark before.

Until the final burn they wouldn’t be allowed
to hold Earth in the window, where it belonged,
to burst towards it rather than let it fade
over their shoulders, shrinking to moon-size.

They had to turn their backs on home
and trust the stripped-down physics
of momentum and return. They had to surrender
to the old forces and attractions.

To make it home, they had to fly away
from every instinct urging them to turn
around right there, as if the crippled craft
could turn on such a thin dime.

They had to believe in the machine,
that the spindly lunar lander as lifeboat
could do everything it wasn’t designed to do —
like them, it was supposed to go to the moon.

The nature of the adventure shifted
from the journey to the return — coming home
was the new, untried frontier
as Cronkite called the play-by-play.

To make it home, they had to resurrect
the old imperatives, re-enter the race
that had already been run and won,
they had to want to make it home

like they wanted to make it to the moon.

–Liz Ahl (originally published in Salt River Review #38, 2010)

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Catching up on catching up on more (more) reading

February 26, 2015March 24, 2021 lizahl

Lucky duck that I am, I was able to spend another four weeks (Jan/Feb) at the Playa Artist Residency program. That’s the pink view from my desk there one afternoon. Once again, I brought some literary journal reading to catch up on — and once again I read some stuff I feel moved to share, to encourage MORE reading. And literary magazine subscribing. And enthusiastic (re)sharing.

Crab Orchard Review continues to be a reliable source of memorable poetry! From the Winter/Spring 2014 issue (19:1), I want to recommend “Deer Rub” by Sara Eliza Johnson, with its sharp couplets of terrific imagery and its canny movement from the deer, widening to a consideration of war at a global level, and panning over seamlessly to a more interpersonal notion of warfare. What a poem!

Another poem I really liked from that issue was “Nuclear,” by Steven D. Schroeder. I just got a kick out of all the wordplay, and how that “play” was part of a larger manipulation of tone that veered from technicolor fifties and sixties imagery and allusion to the philosophical darkness of the nuclear age. It’s also a poem that does some things I aspire to do in poems — and of course it is also interested in history, which I am, and interested in a part of history I’ve also written and thought a lot about. Right in my wheelhouse!

Finally, “Killed Boy, Beautiful World” by Lauren K. Alleyne. This poem articulated so well, so perfectly, the mashup of agony and beauty that is living, especially in a world that can seem full of nothing but death. It’s a poem that ends either in a moment of transcendence, or a moment of surrender. I’m not sure which. But, wow, it’s a poem I’ll be sharing with others for a long time to come.

These poems are not yet available online — eventually, Crab Orchard Review will post a PDF of the issue online, but don’t forget that YOU, TOO, can have great poems delivered TO YOUR HOME by subscribing to COR, or other journals.

Another journal I brought out to Oregon with me from my gigantic New Hampshire home-pile was Measure (8:2) from 2013. For those who don’t know, Measure is a journal devoted to poems written in traditional form(s)/meters, like the sonnet, or rhymed/metered couplets, etc. There were three particularly fun parodies/responses to famous poems. Kathleen Naureckas wrote a kind of rejoinder to Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse,” taking on the point of view of the parents. The first line: “They fuck you up, your girls and boys.” Alan Nordstrom brings us “Sonnet 130a,” again with an interesting switch in point of view — not the “Master,” not the “Mistress,” but their dog. Martin J. Levine re-imagines Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death” as “Stop for Death,” in which Death gets stuck in traffic.

Finally, I wanted to mention a poem from the October 2014 issue of Poetry that I kept paging back to, drawn by the rhythms, the dynamic lines/stanzas/syntax, the sometimes weird images. I’m not sure what else to say about “In the Woods” by Kathryn Simmonds except that it totally had my number.

I’ve gotten into a habit from my youth — I cut these poems out of the magazine pages and scotch tape them into my current writing notebook. It’s nice having good work close at hand. Thanks, poets, for writing it.

About Writing

Holiday Shopping and Beyond

December 5, 2014 lizahl

This summer, I spent four weeks working on my own poetry at the Playa artist residency program in Summer Lake, Oregon. While there, I met many talented & hardworking artists and writers. One in particular, poet Charles Goodrich, had brought some of his books with him to share via the common building’s little lending library. I devoured them all, and of course had to buy copies. I bought an extra copy of his most recent poetry collection, A Scripture of Crows, for a former student who I thought of when reading it. Another of Charles’ books, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, made me think immediately of my friend Tabitha, a master gardener, and so I bought her a copy, too.

I loved giving them these books, especially since it was not particularly likely that either Dan or Tabitha would stumble upon them otherwise. I felt like I had found treasure to share.

For me, writing and reading poetry is largely about making connections. Sure, there’s a ton of solitude at the core of being a writer, but for me, if there’s no community at some point, I start to wonder what the point of making art is. I’m definitely more of a Whitman than a Dickinson. (I love me some Emily, though; don’t get the wrong idea!) My writing wants a reader. My reading wants a conversation. I love the communities that can spring up around the making and sharing of stories and poems. As New Hampshire Writers’ Week draws to a close, I’d like to emphasize the importance of reading and sharing and gifting books.

As this item from the New Hampshire Writers’ Project suggests, an important way to support writers is to buy their books. And at this time of year, many people are shopping for gifts for others. No-brainer, right? Below, I’ve listed just a few Granite State authors you may or may not have heard of before, along with information about their books. Add your own NH authors with books for sale in the comments! And, here’s what I really want you to do:

1. Buy one or more of these books by New Hampshire authors as a gift for a reader in your life. Yes, you may gift yourself.

2. Consider buying aforementioned books at (or ordering them through) an independent New Hampshire bookseller.

3. Consider requesting that your local/town library order copies of these books, so that many readers — especially those who might not be able to buy books — can enjoy the work of New Hampshire writers.

Happy reading!

Katie Umans, Flock Book (poems)

Pat Fargnoli, Winter (poems)

S Stephanie, So This Is What It Has Come To (poems)

Jennifer Militello, Body Thesaurus (poems)

Lisa Rogak, One Big Happy Family: Heartwarming Stories of Animals Caring for One Another and Angry Optimist: The Life & Times of Jon Stewart (nonfiction)

Kathy Solomon, Transit of Venus (poems)

Jessica Purdy, Learning the Names (poems)

Kristin Waterfield Duisberg, After (novel)

Martha Carlson-Bradley, Sea Called Fruitfulness (poetry)

Ivy Page, Any Other Branch (poetry) and Creative Writing Workshop: A Guidebook for the Creative Writer (edited with Lisa Sisler)

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Flirting with Robert Frost

December 3, 2014December 4, 2014 lizahl

Yankees are what they always were.

-Robert Frost, “Brown’s Descent”

When the paved road faded away to hardscrabble gravel and ruts on Bridgewater Mountain, my Toyota started rattling like a bad carnival ride and I considered stopping and turning around. No one was expecting me up there, so no one would miss me or wonder where I was. I could just pull off into the next long driveway and make my way slowly back down to the pavement, across Clay Brook, and back to the house I’d moved into a few weeks before. There was still some unpacking and arranging to do – shelving books, finishing the kitchen, hanging the solid old mirrors – and I still had some work to finish on my syllabi for the fall semester. Should I keep going? Turn around?

The pros and cons rattled around in my head as the car rattled up the mountain. Familiar, shorthand arguments I’d played out dozens of times in my life when I moved somewhere new and didn’t know anyone yet. That day, I was still living almost anonymously, in the space before really settling in, before making my first big forays into connecting with the place and the people. I’d met a couple of neighbors, but was mostly spending literally days without speaking to anyone, and not really minding it. Would I stay silent in the comfort of my solitude for a while longer, listening to music and alphabetizing record albums, or would this be the day to step outside and admit that, yes, I actually lived here now? I kept driving. The road got steeper and there hadn’t been any homes for a few minutes – just thick, dense second-growth forest on either side, the occasional stone wall stretching back into the trees, a reminder of those who’d lived here long ago and gone away.

My destination was the Old Town House on top of the mountain, the 103rd Annual Old Home Day Observance in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, population around 700. Old Home Days were a tradition started by the governor in 1899, partly in response to declining New Hampshire population. He came up with the idea of an “Old Home Week,” when those who had been born in New Hampshire and moved away would return to their hometowns to celebrate, reunite, and reminisce with family and friends. A neighbor who had introduced herself while I was moving in told me I absolutely had to come. She had even given me a tour of the “mountain” in her big truck a couple of weeks before Old Home Day, narrating so much history, ecology and gossip that I wish I’d been taking notes or surreptitiously recording her. It was too much to keep track of – the families who’d lived here so long, the community dynamics, the black bear and moose, winter weather. My neighbor’s family had deep Bridgewater roots, and she showed me their land up on top of the mountain – old camp cabins, a broad meadow, and breathtaking views of other, distant mountains, the names of which I forgot as soon as she mentioned them. She seemed to enjoy showing me around, introducing the new girl to the neighborhood. After the impromptu tour, her husband made us Manhattans in enormous tumblers, and then sent me home, a little drunk, with a bunch of cucumbers.

Growing up a military brat, I became an expert at being The New Girl; grew so accustomed to it, I rarely imagined being any other kind of girl. When you’re new, you’ve got every excuse. Out of state license plates make for great ice-breakers, and help forgive the occasional traffic gaffe, and pardon the confused requests for directions, advice, et cetera. I love the permission I’m granted, as New Girl, to be a little wide-eyed, a little fresh-faced. Moving every couple of years growing up, I learned both to treasure being new and alone, a tourist in my own life, and to shed the newness and just plunge forward, as if these kids on the school bus had known me since kindergarten, as if I belonged the way they belonged. But I’m not sure the newness ever fully faded – and if it came close, it was probably time to move again.

Everything my neighbor told me about Old Home Day intrigued me – the fact that it had been going strong for over one hundred years, that families who’d been here for that long (and longer) regularly attended. Now I lived in Bridgewater, and this just seemed like the next logical step. Never mind that I’d only lived here for a month – I’d just head on up with my camera, my Nebraska plates and my New Girl game face, walking my favorite tightrope: armored in my outsider status, yet trying to inch my way inside.

About a week before Old Home Day, I had spotted my first moose, a hulking cow, drinking from a ditch next to the road. She’d slowly lifted her head, a thin stream of water pouring from her wet, round muzzle. I slowed down, and we eyed one another as I crept past, then left her; in my rear-view, she bowed her head again to continue slurping the cool water left by long-awaited showers.

Though I used the moose to mark my arrival in New Hampshire, I had actually seen the moose in Vermont. I had been to Bread Loaf for a friend’s afternoon poetry reading and I was driving home on Route 125, a “memorial” highway to Robert Frost. When I first noticed the signs that memorialize him (the Frost rest area, the Frost “interpretive nature hike” down the road), I scowled a little. Frost wasn’t from Vermont. Wasn’t he from New Hampshire? He’s ours. Ours. The embrace of those vowels, the way I invoked the third person, the “us” I insisted on becoming a part of. Already, in my head, I was defending our ownership of Frost, using Frost as the crotchety old crowbar to squeak my way into the “us” of New Hampshire. He’s handy that way. And Vermont borrows Robert Frost. I guess I borrowed the moose. A fair trade, though maybe I needed the moose more. And truly, Frost is the U.S. of A’s.

I was a student at Robert Frost Middle School in northern Virginia, where my family lived for a three-year stretch. It was, overall, a wretched experience – hundreds of thirteen-year-olds doing time in the purgatory between elementary school and high school. Some days, the teachers insisted that we were grown up now, that we should be more mature and responsible and upstanding. Other days though, we were treated like the babies we suspected we still were. It was horrible. That day at Bread Loaf, I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a few years. Somehow, we discovered that we’d both attended Robert Frost middle school – so on the drive home, Frost was already on my mind, just a little bit, somewhere in the back.

In high school, as an aspiring poet having just barely escaped middle school alive, I read and dismissed Robert Frost – he seemed too traditional, too old-school, too nice. In college poetry classes, I was similarly unimpressed. I wanted Plath and Sexton. I wanted Ginsberg and Rich and cummings. I wanted to write free-verse poems, work which Frost likened to “playing tennis without a net.” Later, in graduate school, I came around a bit, attracted by the notion that Frost was not, in fact, a sweet, endearing poet-farmer, but rather a skilled (re)maker of his own image and sometimes cantankerous grouch, even in the poems we were taught to love and accept as mere reflections on the rural, natural world. Consider “The Road Not Taken,” one of the “greatest hits,” of high school graduation recitals, offered and interpreted as an invitation to “take the road less traveled by” as some sort of brave, adventurous, morally superior choice in living. At its heart, this poem is more aptly read as pointing to the randomness of choice, with its repeated emphasis that both the roads looked pretty much the same that day; that no matter which way you go, you may find yourself years later, second- or third-guessing yourself. Frost himself admitted that the poem was written to poke fun at his friend, Edward Thomas, who was always berating himself after their country walks, constantly convinced they should have taken a different path. This poem, elevated to some kind of credo by American culture, is just one excellent example of Frost’s grumpy mischief-making. It is recited, on “appropriate occasions,” with the very bizarre combination of wistfulness and grandiosity that Frost was poking fun at in the poem. Starting to read Frost in more depth and with the benefit of more life experience allowed me to make a little more space for him in my personal canon.

From 1911 to 1912, Frost lived in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and taught education and psychology at what was then known as Plymouth Normal School. I, too, had come here to teach – to start my first full-time, tenure-track job as an English professor at Plymouth State College. Among the classes I teach is the poetry workshop, which met, when I first joined the faculty, in the renovated and expanded “Frost House,” where The Man Himself lived and wrote at that time. Occasionally, as I taught my first few classes, I wondered if there was any kind of Frost “vibe” still lingering in the walls or in some dank, undiscovered sub-basement. Is Frost a friendly ghost? As I drafted my first lines about a mushroom growing in my yard, I felt him as a poltergeist, rearranging the furniture in my poetry-house, cackling as I rolled my eyes, shook my head. A poem about a mushroom?

After a few more bone-shaking minutes on the road, I came upon Old Home Cemetery, behind an old stone wall and shaded by enormous trees. Even from the car, I could see that the thin stones jutting from the ground, some at skewed angles, some broken, were very old. A little ways past the cemetery, I came upon the first few cars and trucks parked on the side of the road, and then, around a gentle bend, there was the white Town House with its small front porch. It was late morning, nice and cool for August, and people were already gathering on the green space around the Town House, some on lawn chairs next to coolers, mingling, enjoying the weather.

Inside, benches were lined up, like church pews, facing the front of the building, where there was a raised platform, something like a stage. On the walls were dozens of framed photographs – spanning nearly a century – of the town gathered together on Old Home Day, posing as a group in front of this very building. I studied them, imagining how still everyone must have had to be as those earliest photographs were made, men in summer suits and hats, women in long white dresses with cinched waists, some holding parasols. Beneath the photographs, around the edges of the room, were tables with crafts and baked goods for sale. I bought a brownie and a book from the Historical Society.

As people continued to arrive for the day’s events, I strolled back down the road a bit to the cemetery to take some pictures and poke around. A woman was there with her son, pointing out gravestones with familiar family names, telling him who was related to whom, tracing from ancestors to current neighbors, to relatives, to him. I recognized one family name – the ancestors of the guy who collected my garbage each week. And another – the ancestors of the man who lived down the road from me and worked in the hardware store.

Aside from the neighbor who had given me tour, I didn’t really know anyone at Old Home Day. I met a couple of people who used my car’s Nebraska plates as a conversation-starter. At noon, we watched the hand full of Bridgewater Boy Scouts, who’d camped out the night before, raise and salute the flag in front of the Town House. Following the flag-raising and some remarks, I posed with everyone else for the annual town photograph. Standing for the picture was standing on a familiar tightrope – I was so new, no one knew who I was, and yet I lived in Bridgewater now, so I got to be in the photo, which would serve as the cover of next year’s Old Home Day program. I stood in line for the “Bean Hole Beans,” which had been cooking overnight in huge cast iron cauldrons buried underground. As they had been doing for years, the “bean crew” had come the night before, prepared the beans, dug the pits, started the fires, buried the cauldrons. As they had been doing for years, they unearthed the beans as the rest of us watched, using a rope pulley to hoist the cauldrons from the pits as everyone applauded. As they had been doing for years, the residents of Bridgewater, the “summer people,” and the folks from other towns lined up with paper plates and plastic forks to get their (our) beans and bread. I wasn’t able to stay the entire day – so I missed the children’s games, the annual meeting, the hymns and historic flag presentation, and the evening’s square dancing. But even as I headed down the unpaved road, to Bridgewater’s edge, where my rental house was, I kept thinking about the photograph, about me in it, about having my own tiny part in the enormous tide of years and tradition. I imagined, briefly, fifty years into the future, this year’s photograph framed on the wall of the Town House, with the others.

Reading my recently acquired Bicentennial History of Bridgewater New Hampshire, 1788-1988, I discovered that at Old Home Day in 1915, Robert Frost gave a poetry reading. Further, the book notes that Frost “summered in Bridgewater at Webster Farms for several years” and “wrote ‘Brown’s Descent’ based on a local story.” Even little Bridgewater gets a piece of him. Even me, imagining him there, here – he as a part of the “us” I was continuing to pursue in my first few years as a New Hampshire resident. A New Hampshire writer, for whatever that was worth. Of course, it’s impossible for me to ever truly belong to the “us.” Even if never leave the state again, even if I die here, I’ll still be “from away.”

I love the honeymoon with a place, when romance is still alive, when there is mystery and adventure to be had. During that first year in Bridgewater, in New Hampshire, there was so much that shone in newness for me – the brook babbling at the edge of my yard, the gray flying squirrels living in the walls, the transfer station with its gossip and treasures, the wild turkeys in the field up the road. Tax-free booze. Living in a whole house all by myself, a house with an upstairs and a basement, with a mud room and a garage. The wood stove. The wood pile, with its resident chipmunk. “Live Free or Die” license plates. The town spring, icy cold water perpetually running from its pipe that sticks out of the side of a hill and into an old cement trough. People are always there, filling bottles and jugs. The town common, with its gazebo, on Main Street. It all felt so fresh. Even the heating oil tank in the basement seemed exotic to me – but it was just another enormous, dark, common thing, like the moose I suppose.

I both longed for and dreaded the inevitable time when those new things would become common to me, when the landscape would become a mere backdrop to my daily, normal life. I longed for it because it’s a great feeling – the comfort of a home you’ve been in long enough to take for granted. Growing up, I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to really live somewhere, for a long time, for years, to know and be known in the thick of a place and its people. I dreaded it because, for most of my life, I’ve been the New Girl in nearly every way that matters – the world has shone for me in its strangeness. I have moved through it, always, as a stranger myself, each house or apartment a way station rather than a destination. Most people outside my immediate family remain deeply mysterious to me – so unknowable – distant childhoods, extended families, history I’d never even think to ask about. This is just how most people seem to me – distant, but attractive because of it. I don’t feel isolated by this distance, or, rather, that isolation is just the life I’ve lived, the only way I’ve known to live it.

When I’d lived in New Hampshire for a year or so, people asked me whether I liked it, whether I’d stay. Now it’s over a dozen years later, and I’m still here. I’ve bought a house with a partner I love, achieved tenure at what’s now known as Plymouth State University, made some great friends, and come to love so much about the state and my town. I do like it here, very much and for many reasons, but I’m still baffled by the question – will you stay? – that is mostly one I ask of myself silently, from time to time, when an old itch to move on strikes. Will I stay? For the first time in my life, I could do it, I could stay. But how will I know when I’ve decided that? And how to decide? And why decide? In the spaces between these absurd questions, I can just make out the plaintive, over-rehearsed voice of the high school valedictorian: “And that has made all the difference…” I don’t imagine most people decide to live someplace all their lives; they just do. I know that when things start to feel common, I usually get antsy and start eyeing the horizon. I think I have feared what lies beyond the newness, because, to me, that unexplored terrain has been the truly strange landscape: years unspooling, unquestioned, into a dim and distant future. In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, poet Mark Doty considers the “fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go.” He puts into words what I’m wondering, at least partly: “how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.” Settling down. I still can’t imagine it – I feel like I’ve got no frame of reference for it. And yet I think I’m doing it. Or I’ve done it.

I still keep my eyes open for rare moose and all the other sights and sounds and experiences that still ring new to me; I keep my eyes open for the black bear, the “ice out,” the Old Home Days. I say “I live in New Hampshire,” but not “I’m from New Hampshire.” I still roll my eyes a little as I write lines about the mushroom, the chipmunk, the wood pile, the acorns, the sugar maple. And I suppose I continue to nurture a flirtation with crotchety old Robert Frost, who, to be plain about it, was originally from California.