This In-Between Month, Day Twenty-Something: Time's a Revelator

Today River and I rode through the mountains. We turned Gillian Welch way up and drove real slow, winding in and out of endless curves cut from sheer rock faces. She sang "Time's a revelator" and as she did it seemed time slowed, our surroundings coming into such sharp focus. The trees, except for a few evergreens, were bare and covered the old round hills in great gray bristles. There were tall slender symmetrical ones that looked like flightless feathers (for what are trees if not the earth's feathers, and forests her many wings). And there were huge white writhing ones too that looked like the skeletons of great lumbering beasts. And the ground, the trees and it seemed every stone was covered in a thick green fur.

After a week of rain the sun gilded the surface of streams and glowed rocks until they burned like coals. The endless bare branches, the sun cutting through with no canopy of leaves to obscure its light meant shadows criss crossing at every odd angle and making a maze on the forest floor. No photo could capture the stillness and the magic of those few moments any more than you can be warmed by a sketch of the sun. We just kept saying "wow, wow, wooooow". Our words, our breath, our movements slowed too. We stopped and stood on a giant rock in a river bend and my son, my own wild River broke the spell by quoting Coleridge which only served to put us back under the spell deeper still:
                                                                                                                         

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Now, in our hotel room, River strums his guitar and I am thinking about time, this short interval of eternity scaled for human reference. Time is a revelator and I suppose we agree, "only time will tell" goes our prediction. We comfort ourselves and promise one another that "time is a healer". The ancient greeks in all their wisdom defer to time as the "wisest counselor of all". But we only have so much of it, and like Dave Perkins sings, "we lean against time with heels dug in". How many on their deathbed beg and barter with time? All my possessions for just a few more days. 

Not much else to say I guess. I hope these scriptures about the time we have now and the time we have left will encourage you, and especially me to trust God more, drink down each day with great breathless gulps, and to get busy about kingdom business, mainly loving on widows and orphans and the lonely and the crushed in spirit. 

“But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hand.” – Psalm 31:14-15, ESV

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” – Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” -Psalm 90:12, ESV

“Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered – how fleeting my life is.” – Psalm 39:4, NLT

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” – 2 Peter 3:8-9, ESV

“The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.” – Psalm 9:9, ESV

“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” – James 4:13-15, ESV

And the one that seems to stay in my mind these last few weeks...

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11

Invisible Keepsakes.

***Warning***

This is the blog where I geek out about:

But before I bore you, there is a particular phenomena occurring in those giant retail bookstores that I find most depressing. It is the encroachment into and onto the sovereign shelf space known unilaterally as: Poetry Section.

Really?

To the left it's the African-American Literature section compromised mostly of Harlequinesque paperbacks and on the right the Western section, both whose ranks are apparently bulging with readership as they strangle poor poetry out of its pitiful existence.

"Nobody writes bigger than Frank Roderus." Apparently Mr. Roderus gets paid by the page.

But the enemies from without are much less insidious, much less subtle than the enemy within. For within the very ranks of poetry books themselves come other cumbersome beasts. The bloated poetry anthology, the poetry writing and reading guides (for dummies), the little faux-gilded gift books of poetry, and of course the banal and bland critical essays.

I don't mean to be callous, but is Poetry on the top of the average "dummy's" to-do list?

And if that is not enough, the Classics section, which has apparently been relegated nameless, sulks alongside the few remaining slender volumes of poetry, banished from the school reading lists, into oblivion; The Iliad, Ulysses, most of Shakespeare's plays, gathering dust a few feet from Bukowski and Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson, her poems unpublished until her death, live on, for now...

Of course among the other poetry survivors are the recent Poet Laureates, hanging on by the skin of their Chardonnay stained teeth, and any famous actor with a rhyming dictionary and a penchant for catharsis, and any singer or musician with a surplus of lyrics. There will always be the annotated Poe's Raven in a cool teen goth friendly font collectors edition and the obligatory Beat poets with their calculated decadence, bankable rebellion.

"Beat Poets" is not an invitation to cause bodily harm to a bard. Above, one of the aforementioned little faux-gilded gift books of poetry.

Thomas, Cummings, Hughes; they soldier bravely on. But fallen is Miss Brooks and noble Hopkins, even the every man's friend Frost has gotten the cold shoulder, living out his life in ignominy on the bargain table between last year's calender of crazy (with a backward z) cats and a hip-hopped up cookbook called "Grillin' and Chillin'."

Party's over, Mr. Frost.

Of course near the registers there are still the packs of refrigerator magnets that offer the midnight snacker the convenience of pouring out their unrequited longings on the fridge front, that is as long as the heart's vocabulary is less than 500 words + punctuation.

It's as if, like Ogden Nash said, "Poets aren't very useful. Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful." But great poets are very produceful! Wallace Stevens defends the poet, calls him the "Priest of the invisible." Dylan Thomas said the poet reveals that "your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

Dylan Thomas in the "Poet's Pose". Ever lingering, ever pensive, ever pale.

Matthew Arnold described great poetry as "the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things." Of it Keats proclaimed "Poetry should surprise—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." Shelly echoes this in A Defence of Poetry (1840). "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

Perennial lingerer? Pensive? Pale? Yep. Percy Blythe Shelley passes the poet test.

Carl Sandburg in Poetry Considered waxes poetic about, well, poetry. "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

No disrespect to the venerable Mr. Sandburg, but this may in fact be where rainbows come from.

On writing poetry Emily Dickinson said "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." And "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting," is how Robert Frost defines it. He says "A poem begins with a lump in the throat." And I suppose, if it's a good poem, ends with a lump in ours.

Savagechickens.com is so awesome I just can't stand it.

Certainly poetry can be priggish, ostentatious, condescending and esoteric. But great poems are written in the universal language in which Christopher Fry says "man explores his own amazement." T.S Eliot wrote, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." And though great poems need not be simple, they need not be complex for their own sake. They need only be the "best words saying the very best things" as Coleridge pleaded.

Poetry then, in the simplest definition is, as Thomas Gray said, "the thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." "It is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words," according to the poet of the path less traveled. Gwendolyn Brooks condensed it to this: "Poetry is life distilled."

Ms. Brooks caught in the very act! And failing gloriously the poet's test! Her poem "The Bean Eaters" is one of my favorites, one I wish I'd written.

Perhaps though the English poet Robert Browning best puts his finger on the eternal nature of the poem, poetry writing and the spiritual kinship it engenders, as we, made in our Creator's image, imitate God, "the perfect poet, Who in His person acts His own creations."