Writing Home
Dear reader, this is a letter.
I hear they’re “old hat.” I am a letter writer. I write my god-daughter, Mingli, my nieces in California and Colorado, son in Texas, sister in Richmond, and grandson in Swannanoa. Sometimes they write me back. I love to get letters. I save ones from family and close friends in a special box. Their handwriting identifies them as well as their words. When I hold a hand-written letter, I connect with history, my history.
This letter is being written in the north woods of Minnesota; mosquito, loon, dragonfly, and pileated woodpecker country. I am one hundred and seventy miles from Canada’s border, seated beside a pristine lake. Lady Slippers are near bloom. The creek flooded because the beaver dam broke, so there is a lot of cleaning up to do.
Yesterday there were white caps on the lake. There has been two and a half inches of rain, hail, sun, wind, rain, sun since we arrived. My husband and I are scraping and painting his family’s cabin. It is a sixty year old mess. We practice resurrection here. I stood on an extension ladder for six hours a day, four days in a row. We got the work done. I love to paint!
I forgot my camera. I write to “see” and feel this experience. I could share a photograph. You could see what I see. A poem allows you to be here with me.
From my recent book, Impossible Brightening, I include two lake poems.
Solitude
At last,
stilled alone.
No guests, chaos, news.
Only pines, lake, pencil.
Cabin Sanctuary
The rain that woke us
rustled the birch leaves.
There are mice,
quieter than rain,
though not as quick.
The voice of the lake?
Today I understand
every lapping syllable.
In her poem, “The Supple Deer” from Come, Thief, Jane Hirshfield gives us an example of being with the poet.
The Supple Deer
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
~ Jane Hirshfield
Mary Oliver invites us into her poem, “The Sunflowers.” I’d go with Mary anywhere. This is the first verse.
The Sunflowers
Come with me
into the field of sunflowers
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
Near the end of New and Selected Poems she includes, “A Letter From Home.”
A Letter From Home
She sends me news of bluejays, frost,
Of stars and now the harvest moon
That rides above the stricken hills.
Lightly, she speaks of cold, of pain,
And lists what is already lost.
Here where my life seems hard and slow,
I read of glowing melons piled
Beside the door, and baskets filled
With fennel, rosemary and dill,
While all she could not gather in
Or hide in leaves, grows black and falls.
Here where my life seems hard and strange,
I read her wild excitement when
Stars climb, frost comes, and bluejays sing.
The broken year will make no change
Upon her wise and whirling heart;
She knows how people always plan
To live their lives, and never do.
She will not tell me if she cries.
I touch the crosses by her name;
I fold the pages as I rise,
And tip the envelope, from which
Drift scraps of borage, woodbine, rue.
~ Mary Oliver
Dear reader, write a letter. Include a poem. Perhaps you will get a reply.
With gratitude,
Carol Pearce Bjorlie