#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
A friendly fungus
For poets and artists, the substance of a poem or artwork—that is, its truth-telling—must alter the substance of the human soul, orienting it toward greater compassion, bending any thrust toward violence to a greater good. This is the transubstantiation of the word and the work; its mystical capacity is why men and women keep coming back to it to listen or to make or to look in times of stress or need or spiritual hunger.
~ Excerpt from the Foreword from “свобода freedom
an anthology for Ukraine,” by the Editors of Hole in the Head Review & Nine Mile Review
The woods are friendly, this morning. A fungus greets me from a fallen log. Someone has scratched a cheerful greeting on its top. I feel warmly greeted by the earth. It’s sunny; not warm, really, but the sky is optimistic, white puffs floating over the river and wetlands. I have a passenger in a pack on my back, so I am getting a good workout, and he sleeps. I want to listen to something, but I don’t know what. Nothing newsy or intellectual; something emotional. First thing I find in my podcast library in Poem A Day I play: turns out it’s a wonderful poem by Bob Hickok about an elderly dog, almost exactly like Suzi, just a bit older:
She does this thing. Our seventeen-
year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.
Our mostly dead dog, statistically
speaking. When I crouch.
When I put my mouth to her ear
and shout her name. She walks away.
Walks toward the nothing of speech.
She even trots down the drive, ears up,
as if my voice is coming home.
Excerpt from “Unmediated Experience,” by Bob Hickok
What’s more is that it gives me an idea for the poems I was working on yesterday. Poems which have nothing to do with dogs, but it’s only after listening to Hickok’s that I get the flash of a missing line. When I get home I put what was missing into the poem and feel that it’s closer, closer. Better than it was before. I break in the afternoon from my desk and visit a dear friend. My daughter drops me after an errand. I want to walk home. I just want to be outside again in the late afternoon with the spring coming on. The sky still boldly blue and the clouds light and soft and the black branches against this backdrop over the wetlands. I get an acceptance on two poems from the letters. Frank calls from the road, having flown to a new destination, arrived safely, but not yet home. We talked this morning, too, while I walked and he drove, and this was a deep conversation, not just a quick check-in. How grateful I am that we get to have both.