12/3/03
I am seized by horrible paroxysms of fear when I attempt to write -- like climbing the ladder up, up, up to the high dive. There are pictures of me age 3 or 4 in Chandler Pool, frozen on the edge of an immense water, learning it. I assume everything can be traced back to childhood. It's amazing that you can be present in time and not remember it, to have to be shown what you experienced firsthand. My awareness of time passing is a claustrophobic tightening in my chest. Elizabeth Bishop felt it too. I have an abundance of fears. I'm in O'Neils, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" playing. Sometimes I despise writing because it isn't living. It's pitching a tent inside time. I want to understand everything: Kant's philosophy, the exact location of Borneo, Latin for circle. "The suspicion that poetry, her poetry in particular, was somehow beside the point stayed with Elizabeth for a long time." What is my ultimate destination as a poet? There's the problem -- needing to arrive. Am I in love with D? There are moments when I forget his lips, the sharp chin -- when he is simply a globe of soul beside me, or caught on me, like a sweater snagged on a closing screen door. Writing is impossible. We never get at what we mean to get at. I'm thinking of that afternoon my mom and I spent in the Titanic exhibit at the NC Museum of Natural History. Those boarding passes we received with the names of actual passengers -- I was Emily Alice Brown, 31, from Stroud, England, with a husband and son -- and all that touring, the studying of artifacts, wondering all the while whether or not we had survived. It was so much like what I do now: see the present moment already embalmed. My mother and I placed our hands on the block of ice in the iceberg room, school children leaned in cheeks and eyes, like greedy primitive fish, I was afraid, for both of us, but in the end, the museum attendant told us we lived.
0 comments:
Post a Comment