Dear Dorothy,
Thank you for your journals—they are a comfort to me as I wander, lost in my poems.
I admire your selfless contact with the natural world, the way you melt calmly into
trees and lakes, while still keeping enough of your personality to make the scene
different. In the most generous sense, you know how to lose yourself. In your
descriptions, you know how to leave space. And it’s in that space that I now write.
I’ve lived through your journals, swirled through your daily accounts. Your visions
threading themselves together:
We both lay still, & unseen by one another … in lines &
chains & patterns scattered over the mountains … my tooth
broke today … a weary body—a very sharp clear night …
The mountains were black and steep … miniature mountains,
alps above alps … a light came out suddenly that repaid us
for all … I kept myself as quiet as I could …
To make poems, I find texts, move through the words, keep a few of the right ones, and
build from there. Cutting enough to remove the original context, and then shaping the
remains. Images rise up through the ground. I thought your Grasmere journals might
work, and I did make a series of poems. Dorothy, I hope you will see these poems as a
longing and as a record of kinship. I have always had trouble keeping myself in my
writing, but your journals changed something. After walking away again and again
from dismembered texts, I find myself still carrying your words with me, below the
surface, like flashes of memory.
The past few years, I’ve needed to find a space less densely packed than NYC, and this
is the gift and lovely invitation of your journals: you open a world where I can move
through my own wilderness. Circling the lakes with you, recording the trees, stones,
and animals. Recording the patterns in trips around the water. Our world together,
filled with color and texture, comfort and discomfort; moments alone with hills, fog,
and a brother. I can hear the wind blowing, and the trees sound like a road.
Garth
The English Lakes
I cannot remember
my body before the light
but still these hints
linger of a cabin, a voice
a wave of arms
waiting to happen
flickering
through dense woods
toward this dark
loop of breathing
sleeping
and needing
Dorothy,
I feel our wildernesses have merged, outside of time. We’re talking through the thick
woods; we’re walking here together to understand how our bodies want to be whole.
We keep moving to find a way to say something about ourselves.
Like walking, making a poem requires time and surprise. I give up my own shape in
poems: working with the right texts, it is easy to slip through the words, to find patterns
and a new life underneath. But your journals are different, not because of the density of
language, but because of the generosity of space. Your words collide and react with
what is in my air. I keep trying to fit into these words, to pull them across us both, like
a blanket. You make me want to feel more present in my poems. I am forgetful, and
poems help me remember how it feels to walk and record the world with you, drawn
together by the satisfaction and secrecy of the work.
Making poems becomes a question of how to be alone. Being alone is a skill and a
survival, but so is being in the world. You wander for miles with William and wander
miles alone. Repeating daily tasks, becoming lost in repetitions. There, in the cottage,
trying to be alone with him, to be comfortable alone with him. Wanting to be of use
and out of the way, to be essential and invisible—but always, to be in communion.
There is such a seduction in emptying oneself out, and in facing the risk of becoming
entirely lost:
The fire flutters & the watch ticks I hear nothing else save the Breathings of my
Beloved & he now & then pushes his book forward & turns over a leaf.
Dorothy, I don’t have a brother, except in my poems. I feel his weight, feel how he
protects me and leaves me with just enough to breathe. He is out there, in the trees. I’m
not sure how close we are to coming together. In the face of this, I just keep carving
myself out. Carving a natural language: this is what I see happening, and it is
happening: a red light in the trees, many miles away, a sudden pull of space through
the woods. This is personal and happening here—in this physical world, with this
body. This is how poems can seem to be real, to be done. But who knows? If we come
back to this same spot in the woods many years later, would we even recognize the
bodies we’d left behind?
GG
The English Lakes
we’ve surfaced again
in hands and feet, night
after night tracing
trees by their scent
as the woods move
through us
a ripple of fat
in the branches, fluid in
the roots; these trees
are bound to us
and so is the voice
rising up from the soil
Dorothy,
We walk along, navigating the thickets, pulled by a kind of gravity into the darker
woods. We must put a face on this darkness, something that gives us a way to
understand and confront our attraction. Like you did, that night in March 1802: But as
I climbed Moss the moon came out from behind a Mountain Mass of Black
Clouds—O the unutterable darkness of the sky & the Earth below the Moon!
Reading that, I can’t breathe. I feel the weight of the Alps. I’ve only visited them once,
in Germany, but I look at them most nights in an old photograph I found, “Mont
Blanc—Clouds … Wyman” handwritten on the back. In this grainy photo, the
mountains hover, separated from the land by a low, indefinite sky—how are the
mountains taller than the sky? How can we understand trees at this scale, against a
mass too gigantic to be a real point of comparison? Mont Blanc, tallest of the Alps, is
always drawing tiny human bodies into its orbit (another fatal avalanche just a few
weeks ago). It’s crazy what these mountains do to us, Dorothy, and how we go about
life anyway.
William wrote about mountains more by blackness visible / And their own size,
than any outward light, and it’s the black heart of Mont Blanc that I want to explore
with you. We’ll find relief in the intimacy of tunneling inward. We won’t know what
we are looking for; we’ll only know ourselves by moving, by pushing ahead and
feeling what sweeps past us in the darkness, what brushes our arms or punctures our
feet. Dropping to the floor and tracing the feel of gravel, the feel of our hands touching,
we’ll begin to find a way forward, out from ourselves, into the darkness. We’ll find
where our body stops and where the mountain begins; we’ll find what this mountain
brings together and what it shears apart.
At its best, this is a place for transformation. To change this darkness requires an
intense, generous attention that connects one time with another, connects halfremembrances
with an actual body. Moving through the mountain, we leave part of
ourselves behind at the start; part in heavy darkness, stretched into the tunnel walls;
and part blinking in the light as we tear ourselves from the back of the rock face.
Poems help us remember what we’ve left underground.
GG
The English Lakes
I watch the grease
on our books thicken
I lay here in a pile
of soft human smell
mixing with the smell of wood
I rub my skin smooth
write a poem on it
to you, I want to keep
this longing private
but the light slips out of me
into the words I say
into my breath
a tangle of light
that won’t unwind
Dorothy,
What kind of person would bring you here? Tunnels and darkness are not safe. Still, I
feel you have already been here, and I have already been here, and it is hard to travel
alone. The darkness offers such potential, but we must move forward through fears of
being lost.
In my poems, images sometimes do drift up from fear. (In 1999, a fire ripped through
the Mont Blanc Tunnel—a deadly mix of poison, smoke, and melted fat. The flow of
air spread fire, and then the air thickened until no one could breathe. Four months later,
a plane crashed into the ocean. Flying unaided at night, body betrays mind: instead of
moving forward, you slowly descend into a “graveyard spiral.” And even if you
survive the crash, with no light, you don’t know which way to swim for air.) Darkness
removes direction and scale: it turns us loose from our bodies. We are used to the
sound of own heart beating, so the silent darkness can cause hallucinations. In poems,
we latch on to these visions. Leaving a body to exist—for a brief time—in words, and
then leaving those words so that others, in reading, might also leave behind their
bodies: this seems like the best face to put on being lost.
Your journals record a night in January 1802, when you almost vanished into the land:
We were afraid of being bewildered in the mists, till the Darkness should overtake
us—we were long before we knew that we were in the right track but thanks to
William’s skill we knew it long before we could see our way before us. Even
through the darkness, even blind, we keep moving with the hope that our instincts will
guide us. I imagine you lost that night, leading William to a point where he could lead
you home. I don’t know where your words will lead me, but I feel the guiding push.
I read the other day that scientists have detected a cloud of water vapor in deep outer
space with a mass 140 trillion times that of all the world’s oceans. Perhaps there is
some comfort in being subsumed into a darkness larger than we can imagine, but I
have trouble seeing beyond the terror. Still, if we make the choice to trace a path
through the dark, we must give a part of ourselves over to the vastness. And to share
what we have learned, we must be ready to come back into our own unique body and
embrace its own unique utterances. There is honesty in traveling blind.
GG
The English Lakes
beneath this waterfall
of grass, I sit a long time
watching and turning
into an absence
of mountains and birds
remembering
how we found a way
to keep our bodies
apart; alone here now
I feel like at least four
different people, all
miles from help
Dorothy,
Being absorbed into the night, losing our own body to the darkness—how do we bring
back what we’ve found there? We reemerge invisible, so we have to find a way to see
ourselves again, a way to show others who we are. I come back using poems: I wrap
words around myself to see what form I’ve taken, how much I’ve changed. But the
return doesn’t have to be immediate. We can enjoy the liminal moments:
As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridges of the
Backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun—which made them
look beautiful but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind—as
if belonging to a more splendid world.
Isn’t that what we want? A stranger, more splendid world. Perhaps we all require
moments when sheep are sheep, when identity is concrete and simple. To understand
ourselves in the world, though, we need to capture the in-between moments, when we
are not-just-ourselves. Making poems can help strike a balance between being directly
active in the world and still floating outside of it. And we must be active: using the
body stirs recognition. Sounds in the head become vibrations in our throat and lungs.
Last year, I flashed back to a story that I had read a long time before. I remembered
just enough detail to find the story again (in a 1991 issue of the magazine Analog:
Science Fiction and Fact). What I remembered turned out to be a small moment in a
long, complex novella (Scott Orson Card’s Gloriously Bright). A young girl takes part
in a ritual, she’s crazed with an all-consuming feeling of filth, she’s desperate and
nearing death, but then she finds a way to purify herself: giving herself over to the task
of tracing wood grain lines in the floorboards.
In order to survive, we all find our own methods and talismans. We learn to follow
some rule, and follow it the right way, so that we can stop and breathe at the end of
each day. For me, now, this is making poems. The work of tracing a path—whether
through wood grain or found words—is a deep concentration, an immense exposure to
the present moment, a near-total hollowing out. But not total: the small bit of us that
remains is what allows us to walk away with something new. We make ourselves a
container for others; we let them have our senses. Whatever their vision, whatever they
hear, the rhythm beneath come from our own blood. I’ve learned the sound of my pulse
from the sound of your pulse, Dorothy.
More soon,
GG