On Digging Carefully

This week, I have been watching men in my driveway dig deeper and deeper into the earth.  It has something to do with an underground power line that has been defunct for a better part of a year.  The problem in getting the line fixed is that it’s buried below more than four feet of earth.  An even greater obstacle is that there happened to be a heated driveway on top of that.  Think of the heated driveway as an incredibly expensive, complicated crust placed on top of a pie.  It’s summer and somehow easier to see a pie metaphor from June until September.

So the men have been excavating underneath the heated driveway, delicately, nearly tunneling their way out of the light and into the secret depths of the earth.  Think of trying to locate a spicy whole clove in the center of a just set peach pie, by digging into the side of it, but making sure that you never disturb the perfect golden crust just centimeters above your spoon.

Writing can be just like this—the delicate searching for an ideal word, image or phrase just out of grasp.  A blind reaching into the dark after something that we can only sense somewhere ahead of us.  So often, for me writing is a stretch or leap into the unknown, a wrestling with an angel in the dark.   Let me be clear that not all (or even the majority) of my poems are angels, fallen or otherwise.  But it is rare that I ever see my opponent clearly. 

Sometimes writing can be an act of excavation.  Only after going deeper and deeper do I finally catch a glimpse of what I was digging for.  In the case of the men outside, it was a snarl of black utility lines that looked so much like a clustering of black snakes, eager to slide out of reach of the shovel.  There are times when I am so frustrated, dirty, and fed up with writing that I want to throw the shovel into the ditch and bury the whole project.  Nevertheless, somehow, I always keep on digging, if haltingly toward my goals.

While at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, another poet asked me why I wrote poems, why not some other genre.  The answer I gave him was immediate and without thought, “Poems allow me to access my inner life.”  My certainty surprised me.  Poetry, after a handful of years, has become the way in which I make sense of my inner and outer world.  It is the eye through which I order my universe.

A poem usually begins as a question or conversation that I am having with myself.  The words and images arise from that unmappable center I call the inner life.  Others may call it the unconscious, the higher self, the muse or the soul. 

It is the deep place where the sable snakes lie slumbering in the dark. 

It is the single perfect clove has scented your entire kitchen from the middle of a pie. 

That is where my writing, at its best, comes from and it takes a spade, a shovel, and a hell of a lot of sweat to get there.  

Decay and Ruin a Writer's Companions

For some time now, I have been hypnotized by ruin.  I don't mean the moral ruin that I was always warned about in church, but the ruin that comes to everything as the result of time.  None of us is safe from decay.  

My first lesson in ruin came from the continual round of seasons in Montana.  The biting, frigid winters and the sometimes brutal summer sun baked and broke open anything that was left outside.  Wood weathered, paint peeled and the asphalt split and fissured.  Every year hard freezes pushed up a new crop of rocks into our garden.  The elements stripped and cracked the paint from the picket fence, turning the wood gray.  Potholes and crevices gaped open all the roads in town from the freeze-thaw-freeze of spring.

Ruined library books swollen with summer rain.  Rusted cars that I buried in the sand pile only to discover years later.  The small African frog who didn't last long as a pet, reduced to a perfect tiny milk-white skeleton three months after I exhumed its grave.

Growing up in a rural environment taught me that I too would one day be reduced to so many brittle bones in earth.

Perhaps this is one reason that the poetry of Richard Hugo appeals to me so strongly.  He wrote about a landscape in decline.  Boom towns became bust towns in a matter of years.  Hugo's poems speak not only of rural decay, but also of the slow decline of the inner life.  Hope slips away like so much snow melt in July.

I have spent the past two 4th of July holidays in Butte, Montana, perhaps one of the greatest examples of urban decay in the west.  Butte boasted a population over 100,000 people from more than 75 countries in 1910.  Now only 34,000 remain.  Butte, once the copper mining capital of the United States is more relic than the "richest hill on earth."  Nearly one dozen mining headframes dot the landscape.  Uptown Butte displays its former glory in brick, weathered wood and fading advertisements.  It is still standing, but just.

Ruin calls on me to mourn.  Decay resonates with some inner part of me that whispers, "All shall fall to time."  I admit that I am melancholy by nature, but urban ruin also elevates my vision.  My imagination rises to fill in the crumbling walls, empty windows and fades signs with new life.  

I begin to realize that as so many others have faded from these places, I will as well, but perhaps some writer or artist in the future will also wonder about me, in the same spaces--where I called to the past and it answered back.