Finding the Poems Under Your Feet

In every poem she writes Naomi Shihab Nye gives us what she calls "the gleam of the particular."

Like the one called "Famous" which I distort slightly by quoting it just in part and as if it were prose:

"The river is famous to the fish," it begins. "The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse…. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom… The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

"I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.

"I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do."

I drove 200 miles earlier this month because the woman who wrote "Famous" was coming to the Smith College campus.

She told all of us gathered to hear her that we should regularly make time for the writing of poetry. "It will keep you in a very distinct relationship with language," she said.

And, if we want to inject fresh life into that relationship we should spend time with people over the age of 90 and under the age of three and I thought at once of my own child at age two earnestly asking "Is today tomorrow?"

Nye’s own relationship with language seems so natural I sometimes feel as if she is standing right beside me, as in her poem "The Art of Disappearing," which I also must distort slightly by quoting only in part and again as if were prose:

"When they say Don’t I know you? Say no… If they say We should get together say why? …

"It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget.

"Trees. The Monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished…

"Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you can tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time."

Our time certainly is limited but only a genuine truth-teller dares say as much in the perpetual adolescence of this age-denying culture.

Once, a young man said to her, "Here’s my address, write me a poem." So Nye responded with "Valentine For Earnest Mann," which begins by saying "You can't order a poem like you order a taco."

But then she admits she likes his spirit and so tells him a secret:

"Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across the ceiling the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."

"Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn't understand why she was crying. ‘I thought they had such beautiful eyes.’

"And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks.

"So, he re-invented them as valentines and they became beautiful. At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet.

"Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems."

In the name of National Poetry Month let’s all try living in such a way that we all might find and be found by such words of blessing and affirmation.

Write Terry at PO Box 270, Winchester, Mass., 01890 or tmarotta@comcast.net