Everybody Loses the Thing That Made Them.

I moved out West for a nameless meadow.  I fondly refer to this photo of said nameless place as The Goat Meadow Ranch.  Technically, this field lies above the Ashland, Oregon valley, slightly south of Grizzly Peak with views of Mount Shasta on a bluebird day in any season.  It's a place of expansive beauty: brutal winters, thick young willows in the wetlands of spring, Steinbeck summers of silence except a screen door shutting and golden tipped autumns.  And while first seeing this view on a late winter's day, I thought if the light of February in a cold meadow could move me West, then I knew I was heading in the right direction.  Poetically, I moved West so I could write this meadow a name.  But what I told myself was that I moved because I wanted to be in the wintered mountains to ski.  But probably more realistically, I moved West like the many others before me in middle America for something even more elusive and nameless; I moved in search of hope.

I spent hours living on the ranch where this meadow resides just staring at it.  I rarely looked for deer or other prolific critters coming through the thick as much as I watched the sun fall as if learning about the moods of light--shifting tones of early morning blues long before dawn and sitting on the porch in pitch blue ink for an entire night while a late summer thunderstorm lit up the backdrop of larch, x-rayed an entire forest in black and white.  Light was my species of interest that I wanted to learn to identify.  And no matter the season, this meadow would bring every shade and hue.  So vulnerable, so open and so exposed.

Somehow regardless of the season and drastic changes, the meadow would be able to return to what it simply is, a nameless field.  In the depths of winter, the meadow was covered beyond layers of white, but deep beneath was a shade of green.  And maybe that's why I love winter so much.  When the view out your window becomes a canvas of a monochromatic hue, you cannot imagine color or life lies beneath.  You cannot grasp that your current view which is no longer an expansive meadow, but a city orchard of sorts could ever blossom.  Again.  When not even five leaves are left on your neighborhood winter Maple tree, the simple thought of a ripe plum is foreign.  Sure, you can close your eyes and get close, but what you cannot imagine is how like the meadow, the earth can hold such a variety of light and be so capable of so much change.

This February my mind misses the focus on light that I once had while examining the Goat Ranch.  Recently, my mind has been stuck on fixing what cannot be fixed or learning how to accept what is unacceptable. I seem to have lost hope.  The one aspect that first brought me West has felt lost.  Frankly, hope seems like another season and not a direction or color I seem to be able to locate.  I feel at times stuck in some ice cave of white in my mind.

Thankfully, I spend every hour when it is light (and I'm not working) on my skis. But when I return from the mountains and the freedom of frozen water underfoot, I find myself still staring out my window and overwhelmed by the silence.  I see only one color.  My house, a cave of sorts, has been where I go to hide more than hibernate.  So when I find myself in a deep state of reflection removed from the meadow that once soothed me, blinded by the white and my lack of hope, I like do to simple things.  Currently, I really like to shovel.

I cannot begin to tell you the odd joy of shoveling.  The fact I set my alarm earlier to rise, bundle in layers over my pajamas, to be in the quiet of the morning alone in so much cold.  The rhythmic sound of my body breathing, the odd joy in seeing self-created drifts and the pause I take to look up and see the change in light in the sky and slow sounds of other feet on snow in my neighborhood.  The different shades of dawn coming to life.

We are currently in the worst snow storm in thirty years in the valley and I have dug out my driveway twice in the last 24 hours.  Today, the snow has drifted above my waist, the winds are over 35 miles per hour, our local ski hill was even shut.  But the odd thing about today in this storm is I haven't felt stuck.  Not once with googles on and winds piercing my cheeks coming strong out of Hellgate Canyon straight down my street.  And not even once do I feel annoyed.  Somehow in my odd Sisyphian way, I look up to the North Hills and I smile. And then I keep shoveling.

Shoveling your driveway is far less poetic than staring at a meadow.  But what I can tell you is the same principles apply.  A view is simply a view, but how you choose to see it, what color you cast on the scene is truly your choice in the lightness of being.  This is the hard part.  The hard part is knowing which shade.  We too often choose to see only what we've lost.  Which is not light, but only the absence.  But what's even harder, no one can do it for you.  You have to pick up the shovel in yourself and slowly dig out of the drifts.  Trust me, I've snowed myself in on even the sunniest of days.  And you do this full knowing more snow will come, the winds might increase or shift direction and above all, you are tired.  You are so tired.  But you know being stuck and blinded by the walls of white, isn't living.  Being shut away in a cave of yourself is an unlife of sorts.  So you dig yourself out not because anyone will see you, nor tell you how wonderful you are or even "like" a version on Facebook.  You do this simply for yourself.  And you do this for the one thing you came West to find, the hope in your own spirit.  And you know there are no photos of this.  No light can capture what lies within you.

Better yet than my own view, here are the words from one of my favorite hope seekers, Hushpuppy, from the film, Beasts of a Southern Wild, "Sometimes you can break something so bad, that it can't get put back together….Everybody loses the thing that made them.  It's even how it's suppose to be in nature.  The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run."  Or maybe, they don't run, they just keep shoveling to find the light.


The Psalms of Ice

The water of Lake Superior freezes to cave
the coast line,  sheets of pinnacled waves
touch granite greyed to white in layers
of water turned glass.  Walking in
these caves, no fear of bats, darkness
or even lack of air, your breath grows
another layer that lights the walls, frozen fire
burns in a land of wind.  You've heard stories
of men who've survived years alone
to fable their hearts in a hole, burrowed
in the earth away from the echo of clocks
and birds, to fill up their own shadow.
The allegory of cold is a body hollowed
by hunger.  But this is not your story.
In these frozen caves, you walk on water
to go deeper into the white you carry,
suspended on the shear faith in ice
and light, so you can winter your past.

No Rosetta Stone for the Language of Home.

"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chödrön

My final oral Spanish exam in college was spent mostly in the bathroom.  Technically, I kept my partner and professor waiting because I was dry heaving.  Contrary to popular belief, I don't talk well under pressure.  And yes, I can now say some of my favorite conversations have been with people who neither of us shared a common language--gestures, shouting single words, lots of hand movement, barely using grammar and always our faces for inflection.  But it's our faces, our consoling nods, even tears and of course the infectious state of laughter--is the sort language I don't shy away from learning.  It's when I feel I have to have the exact words, I freeze.

I passed that Spanish exam thanks to the young Barcalonian professor with a good sense of humor.  My partner was a pre-med student riding her grades with a focused hunger.  She had no interest in the subjunctive.  She merely wanted the exam to be perfect.  Why she selected me for her partner still baffles me, perhaps because I kept quiet while all the other pre-somethings shouted to be first.  Maybe because my homework was perfect.  I just never spoke.

Years later while sitting on a bus headed to the remote mountains in southern Poland did I realize why I once had a fear of a foreign language.  I really just like to listen.  I like time to take in the inflections, the slurs of z's of Polish, the nasal of French, the sing song to Italian--words in rhythm.  Frankly, it's poetry of people with their mouths open when you cannot know every word.  It's notes hanging in the air.  It's song when you finally learn enough to speak back.

Once while sitting next to a nun on a train, which could have been any train at any time of the day or night in Poland, I heard this word through the walls of another cabin being said with force.  I had only been in Poland a few short days and spent my first weekend exploring a small walled city.  It was dusk.  I had just been to Sandomierz, which is a city I say with fondness both in sound and knowing of its beauty.  But that night with all of us quiet in the cabin which is common practice when sharing a car with a holy person, I learned a new word.

At the beginning of learning Polish, I would just mouth the words or try to, when you are dealing with a language whose basic expression for sorry is prezprasham, it takes awhile.  But that word I heard through the walls was not sorry nor was it sandwich, it bellowed out into the silence with anger.  I thought part of the word was night, nods, so I tried mouthing it silently at first and then tried putting sound to it.  As soon as I said it out loud, the nun, looking straight up at me--eyes wide and and cold--did three hail marys and went back to her rosary beads.  I later learned the word was neither an expression for night or shoot.  Let's say the word involves the act of having sex with one's mother.

I would later hear that word being shouted at an airport in Amsterdam by a man who didn't have the right paperwork to travel to the US for Christmas, heard that word in alleys from men who sat there all day and only talked to dogs and silence and later would I find myself yelling it at a ticket taker on a bus when he claimed I was using the wrong ticket, a man who was using physical force with me to pay him 100 zloty.  But before that moment, I struggled with Polish.

I had come to Poland with the hope of getting a Fulbright to work on translations of Polish poetry.  Thought I might need to learn Polish first to do this.  I had a tutor who spoke perfect English, German and Russian and for two years I took lessons twice a week, only took public transportation and listened to Polish music in the mornings before teaching.  I thought I was a shoe-in for the scholarship.  Needless to say, the Fulbright was granted that year I applied to another University of Michigan grad whose name was Margozha, a Polish American who spoke perfect Polish.

A few days before I rode that bus where I was harassed by a ticket taker, I found out that I didn't get the scholarship and felt really depressed and sank into a state of sadness similar to the kind of sadness I had that morning of my oral exam for Spanish, frozen fear.  Textbooks claim people have flight or fight when faced with adversity.  Me, I just freeze.  I sink in a quiet space of total immersion in a state of hopelessness which is perhaps why  I am so fond of the Poles.  Polish, as you might imagine, have many expressions for ones soul being lost, ones sense of hope being grayed by an impossible future.
Yet what I also adore is the spirit that lies within these states of fielded grief.  Some bright poppy that rises from under the tank tracks dirt.  Hope in Polish is just as powerful as the word soul.

And maybe that's what happened that day, the day I was on a bus and punched my ticket after visiting my Polish tutor for the last time.  I was moved by hope.  I clutched my bag of grammar books and wondered if I would ever use them again and what was I going to do with my dream of translating, looking at the bus window of spring awakening, when suddenly, I was pushed.  Now being pushed isn't odd or startling in Poland, it's actually the norm in large crowds, but the bus had been empty.  This man already snarling pushed me again and told me I had the wrong ticket.  Shouting he told me to pay money in cash, now.  I didn't even budge.  I looked at my ticket and then up to his face and said, this is the right ticket, I'm not going to pay you.  He pushed again.  Shouted closer in my face, telling me I needed to pay.  And maybe this is when my instincts kicked in, when that fight arose.  But I didn't use physical force.  In perfect Polish, I said, go fuck yourself and your mother and stop yelling, stop pushing me.  Stop thinking because I am foreign it doesn't mean t don't understand rude.  He backed off.

I got off the bus shaking.  As I walked back to my apartment, I started to laugh.  Maybe out of relief or as a release, but mostly because I had done what I would never have been asked to do in a university setting, no poem would ask of me to shout back to a man with angry hands, no language tape would teach me to tell someone to fuck off with such clarity.  Such perfect pitch.

And maybe that's why this fall I felt lost the way I felt so lost when I first went to Poland.  I just didn't know the language, I don't speak home.  I felt I would return every day from work to a country whose language I didn't speak.  You cannot buy a Rosetta Stone for the language of home.  But I am learning.  The kick of the furnace in the cold morning, my footsteps on the newly laid wood floor and my view out my bathroom window after I ride my bike in the dark and how I can outline my leaf filled yard, slowly by visual memory as I look out from my shower in the dark.  This new country, my home I know has a language.  I keep telling myself, it's like Polish--a language people never expect someone to learn let alone become fluent.  Why take on something so difficult.  But I remind myself that this language of house is made up of words and it will take time to put into sentences.  Grout, molding and joist are to name a few.  A few I now put into sentences.

Now, I don't travel much unless it's to Home Depot or Lowe's.  But I think of it like a town in this new country, where I need to bring the right guide book along, make sure I have some idea of what I am looking for before I go, maybe I take a tour of say, light fixtures since I now know how to re-wire and install lights.

I remind myself that learning a new language like anything that is worth doing well, takes more time than you could ever imagine dedicating yourself giving.  Giving not because you expect something in return or a scholarship or award, because learning it is the act of being present.  The way learning another language helps you feel close to people so unlike you in history, but so close in spirit.  To try and get close enough.  Present enough to learn a new song, a swear word which might be just the right word at the right time.  Like in the crawl space with spiders and dust, I found myself, as might have imagined, cursing in Polish.  Cursing and smiling all at the same time to the silence of this new land,
this new nest.

My House is Built on Words

October arrives to Montana without the stark color changes and shift in winds as it does in Michigan.  But it comes.  Arrives with a crisp chill in the morning, wet rains that flirt with snow in the late evening and the scent of leaves (even though they aren't the hardwoods of my home) still smell the same.  And my favorite part, biking to work and seeing the peaks dusted white overnight.  October is such a full word, the shape of your mouth saying it--O c t o b e r--is so open like all the o's the word holds.  Open to so much change, so much shifting.

A curious fact about October is that more poems have been written during this month than any other.  Not too surprising since it is the month of shorter days and dramatic sun breaks away from the grey brings great relief.  Maybe since poetry has a way of slowing our thoughts down as does this month when we turn to our beds for longer hours of refuge, cook soups made of squash and drink tea to warm the chill do we have time to reflect.  More time for quiet.

I have a lot of quiet in my home.  Sometimes too much.  I hadn't noticed all this silence during the first few months of painting, grouting and yes I am proud to say even electrical installing of lights.  Bed was the only option after exhaustion.  Sleep a mere respite and then silence filled me.  I hadn't noticed the echo from all the absence of sound until I had to close my windows.  It can be an odd hum, silence, and a great welcome to the other sounds too often overlooked, the clock in another room, the shift of your weight in a chair and even the sound of your feet walking in socks on a wood floor and then the echo of trains passing behind muffled glass.

At night,  silence is the loudest and the least welcome.  I have been filling my days with new activities such as cyclo cross, starting a 30-day yoga challenge and taking a break from house projects.  Trying to fill my days with new sounds in order to find a new sense of myself in this familiar town.  But I must admit, it just feels like noise.  I really adore it all, especially the cyclo cross which exhausts me and asks more of my body than any other activity I have yet to try, but then I come home and hear the shift in sound to my refrigerator, my borrowed cat yawns and it is just the metal of my mailbox opening in hopes of word from afar and then closing that feels a bit empty.  A train calls out and leaves as if reminding me, I don't have to stay.

And so even now in the newly painted walls of my own home, the deed somewhere with my full name rests signed in black pen, I still return to what has comforted me when all I owned was a backpack and a quick smile, I return to words.  Words borrowed, written, asked out loud to all this silence and sometimes even begged in the darkness.  Words I don't know I look up, words that I banned myself  to use I say sometimes when I want to throw up on a hill during cyclo cross.  I try to spit those words out and other words I dare risk to use I whisper to the late night glow of my alarm clock.  I practice. I practice with words because I cannot seem to stop feeling.  And I have a pretty good guess that the feelings aren't going anywhere fast.  Maybe they'll just change to different ones.   I am just going to work at finding better words instead of "better" feelings.  No matter how much work I fill my days with or how hard I sweat and spit out my past, I know if I keep working, I can find new words.  For words are the soft touch to a worried head the cool wash cloth at rest on a collapsed heart.

I wish I could tell you my first word was something monumental, like illuminate or even turtle, it was hot.  One syllable and not even very visual.  Once I dated a man who told me his first word was hedgehog, to which I replied, pretty good, but that's no porcupine.  And so a poem comes from all this silence in hopes to find a new way to look at what lies ahead and what rests.  And what I hope to write.


The Porcupine

We walked out into the night
walked along the road without lights,
summer still on our skin, wind in oaks
caught the dim hum of stars.

Maybe I knew our bodies
were fading into autumn by the scent
no longer sweet in late evening, just earth
cold as night dew.

We held hands and didn't speak.
Gravel under our flip-flopped feet,
our hearts somewhere ahead
of us in October.  Fallen.

Out walked a porcupine
straight down the center of the road
long claws, heading straight,
grunting with each step.

We stopped, hands squeezed, breath
held and stood back to let the rodent
pass.  Squinting to find light, grey glow
of needles at rest, passed.

I tucked my hands in my pocket,
a warm breeze came up and I looked
to the east, not doubting the sun would come
again.  And loss is just a word
for what no longer comforts.

(The) Potential (of No)

Over two months ago, I bought a house.  Within the first ten minutes of holding the keys in my hand, I ripped up the shag carpeting whose musky scent of stale lives lingered for days long after I swept up the particle board.  I pulled up nails, tacks and ripped out trim and that was just in the entry way.  For the first two weeks of home ownership, I slept at my apartment and would drive boxes of my belongings over early in the morning, unpack, scrub, clean, disinfect and then return to my apartment to shower and get ready for work.  I did this everyday for two weeks.  I lived in some kind of episode of Ground Hog day--a continual state of repetition.  And yet each morning, I would wake excited like I was in some kind of new relationship.  And I was.  The summer of 2013 will be the love affair with Defoe.  628 Defoe to be exact.  My new potential home.

What I can honestly tell you is that I never dreamed of owning my own home.  As I said to my father, an architect and confidant, "My ego isn't driven to buy a house, it just doesn't need that kind of ownership." But really in my mind or rather my heart, I didn't want to consider the idea of buying a home, alone.  Homes were places for families, married people or for investments.  The only thing I had remotely of any value was a small budding sense of integrity and I certainly didn't need a home for that to grow.

The decision to buy a house was not made quickly or impulsively.  Thankfully, our economy has tanked to the point that most people cannot buy homes like a new tent for a trip.  Thankfully, I took time to come to this decision and most importantly, I didn't tell anyone I was even considering it.  You see the power with potential doesn't just lie in saying what you are going to do, the power in potential is also finding out what you aren't going to accept.

Let me explain.  This past January I found myself wanting to be single and wanting to leave Missoula.  I had been here for over five years and it had been hard--my husband broke his neck two months after we had married, we lost a good friend in an avalanche and then divorce.  Needless to say, Missoula has been a brutally humbling time in my life.  I felt like I was ready to seek the potential of another phase, to create another view of myself.  To leave this valley behind me.

And so I decided to take an adventure every month under the guise of getting out, exploring towns I had always wanted to visit or re-visit and most importantly connecting with friends I missed--and only in my mind was I keenly searching for a new home.  This route I took for five months included Bozeman, Santa Fe, Bend and with hints of Seattle and San Francisco.  Now the concept of moving someplace new is a lot more comforting to me than staying put.  I would go so far as to say, I am really good at seeking the solace in potential.  Since we are being honest, I would admit I have a lot more experience in only thinking about the future than I do in committing to the present. I am a pro at reinvention.

Every new town I would visit, I would immediately visualize my potential new life--riding my bike to an office at a college under the sun of Santa Fe, skiing volcanos in Oregon, drinking cups of coffee in Seattle with a great new haircut, going out to dinner with all my new hip friends in San Francisco and the easiest to imagine was hanging out in Bend with my bestie sipping tea and talking, finally again in the same town.  But these were all just dreams, potential dreams.

And when the airplane would land back in Missoula and I would gather my bag, text my mom that I had made it and call to the friend I had just left that I missed them, I would find myself in a valleyed shadow of Missoula.  Hearing I-90 again as I stood outside the air port terminal, I would look up at the hills and ask myself Home? Here? As if in that brief moment when you are not in time or place thanks to modern travel, when your soul hasn't caught up with you, you just have your ego to ask.  Which I'm pretty confident isn't the right person for important questions.

Not too long after my trip to Bend for my 39th birthday I was riding my bike to work, missing my friend Emmy and all the ease of being together, was when I asked myself what is it that I am really searching for? What am I wanting from a potential new place? Maybe I should just move back to Michigan to family where I can be Emily Walter only and only that again.  And sure enough, it finally occurred to me while pedaling to the rhythm of a three syllable word.  I wanted security.  I just wanted to feel placed with a purpose.  The potential security of what I thought a marriage would hold, a home shared and of course a future based on a commitment.  And given that I am not married anymore, I simply said, so what if I did this for myself.  What if, I gave security to me.

Now don't get me wrong, I have heard of ceremonies where people marry themselves, but I wasn't about to be that literal. Remember, I am a poet behind all this prose.  And the idea of seeking security in a new place was something I learned in my twenties from all my travels.  I knew I didn't want to start again in a new town when I already had a good job, I pedaled under Missoula sun to a new office, hell, I even had a great new haircut.  So I basically decided to do what most Americans do with abstract desires such as love, security and safety--they buy it.  And so I bought house.  I bought security.  Or so I thought.    

It's really too soon to know exactly what I have done, but this is what I know today. I decided to take all that wanting to be something else, somewhere else and to just be, here.  I decided to say no to potential.  I decided to believe that saying no to someplace else, could be a yes.  A yes to myself.  And to be here, here in the reality of old windows, asbestos in the attic, particle board under shag carpeting and the still lingered scent of lives lived past, is ugly.  The scent of it all can be down right overwhelming and no pun intended, a potential disaster.

But for one of the first times in my life, I can say, I am not dreaming of what could be or could be different.  I am not focused on the asbestos.  I am simply putting on work clothes, painting trim, grateful for the videos off of You Tube on grouting windows and starting with what is here.  And here's what the particle board has become.  Here's my new sense of potential materialized.  Here's my home.

I look forward to writing poems here.  I look forward to committing to what I have been wanting to be ever since I can recall the concept of wanting, which is to be a poet. To be present enough to what I can create here and not to dream of someplace else, the potential of someplace better.  Life is not elsewhere.  But maybe, just maybe I can accept life is good, here.

Safe(ty): An Inside Job

Today Missoula rests under a thick film of smoke.  Each morning I rise and I cannot read the sky.  Each day I listen to the radio for reports which I don't understand as if I feel like I am marooned on some ashened island.  So I have been staring at this photo taken only a week ago along the shores of Lake Michigan while visiting, Leelanau, the land of delight.  Everyday since returning to Missoula, I look at this photo--the sky, the water and in some place in my heart I can hear waves on sand and wind warmed by sun.  It was in Leelanau where I learned to read the wind, sail on this Great Lake for months and swim in its waters regardless of season.  And despite my deep love for this tiny peninsula, I have decided to call Missoula home, for now. This past July I purchased a home, or some land as I like to think of it, in this valleyed city ceilinged by smoke.

This is the longest I have been in one place since my childhood home.  In my twenties, I lived in over four countries and had more change of addresses than I care to list.  I was in a state of travel and transition.  Yet every August except one, which was spent on the island of Sardinia, I have returned to Leelanau.  I returned for the light, the warmth of the water, my family and the opportunity to spend time on a tiny spit on land surrounded by a massive lake.  To swim in an unsalted sea.  To learn how to read the wind. To sail.

And one August, I found myself not wanting to leave.  It was late summer in 2002 when I met Dennis Clarke.  Dennis wore pink flip flops if he wore any shoes at all.  An avid skier, surfer and all things involving wind, water and extreme elements--most of his life pursuits revolved around pushing limits, boundaries and oddly enough rarely did we wear shoes.  For example, he either wore flip flops or ski boots mostly, even while roofing, Tevas were the shoe of choice.

To tell you of how I first met Dennis would be a novella in itself, a short story of happenstance and luck, which I would like to think are the main ingredients for most love affairs, but what I want you to know about Dennis is how he breathed.  He would take deep calming breaths and quietly exhale and for some reason it made my body feel so warm, so relaxed.  As if all the wind he followed, sailed in and rode he could hold and then release through his strong solid frame.  Basically, I felt safe.

I first met the midwest Steve McQueen look alike after I had just returned from Rome and had just finished the six year stint of living and teaching abroad.  Life had never been so open, so full of possibilities and I had also never been so blonde.  I came back from Italy with a strong sense of ease and a real interest in my looks which surprised most people who had known me for my entire life.  Vanity had been something for other girls, especially the ones who found themselves with a lot of attention and offers ranging from being pushed on the swings to being asked to multiple proms.

But that summer post-Italy, people asked me, "what happened? Em, you look," long pause in between followed by a look away from my eyes, "you look, so different, so good?" At the time I thought it was just being blond and the all of 98 pounds I weighted thanks to my charming habit of smoking cigarettes instead of dinner.  But I thought being gamine was the new game.  But really, it was the sense of freedom that gave my frame a glow.

And it was that same glint of light and ease in Dennis, who I had officially met 10 years prior while he still had Jesus in his cheeks at a Polka festival, that I found so attractive.  Dennis appeared older and more weathered, more Westernized, American Westernized with a straw cowboy hat,  surf trunks and a body only found in the likes of Laird Hamiliton and of course, pink flip flops.  And that summer we met, he asked me on a date, to his "place" on Omigisi Trail , a very short dirt road at the very end of Leelanau Peninsula--a few short miles from where this photo was taken.

Now, I may have been out of the country for six years, but I knew exactly where Omigisi Trail was based on high school parties in the summers when we (the local kids) if lucky to be invited to the summer home of some kid whose father owned Firestone tires or Ball Jars--then we got to see how the other summered half lived.  Oddly enough Leelanau is old money, if any money at all.

So when Dennis gave me directions, I was confused by this man who lived mostly out of truck and in a wet suit. And the date? Windsurfing and a hot tub at his "home".  Ideal, right?  Fumbling with his address, I finally located his truck, but could not find a house and while heading toward the beach, I passed what any person or young child would call, a tree fort.  I found Dennis stoking a fire under an old metal cherry box filled with water.  Smiling, he said, "Welcome to my home, want to take a dip?"  Pointing to the metal box. "it might just be warm enough."

And really from there on out, it was a go.  As if the winds were up and in the right direction for over four years where in that period of time not a single adventure was unlike the beginning.  From sailing around Lake Michigan for weeks with a 12 year old dog and a young cat without GPS and a naive sense of following the stars for directions, we managed to island hop and see parts of our homeland from a new angle.  We spent winters in southeastern Colorado and we also cooked a lot together in the confines of a galley kitchen of a boat or in the back of a beat up pick up truck.  When I wasn't teaching, we were out exploring.  And Dennis, no matter the season, followed the wind.

As long as we were adventuring, we were loving.  But coop us up in an apartment, and neither of us were at our best.  Neither of us knew how to be settled.  And neither of us knew how to keep our relationship stable enough to create a home.  And really there is as long of a novella about why we parted as how we fell in love.  And in the late summer of 2006, we parted.

To say I have been haunted by this thought of why we couldn't keep love as an adventure is an understatement.  To try and put your finger on why something didn't work out between two people is about as simple as trying to understand why you have green or blue eyes.  Sure, there's genetics as a guide, but there is also grace and happenstance. The same unknowns which help you fall in love can be the same components of what causes the fall, the winds to just change.

As the winds rise today in Missoula, I don't get excited or think about which direction to move or sail, I think about fire.  The fires that hang and haunt so many of us who live here.  But before the winds and the fire arrived, I moved into my new house--when the air was clear and I had views of the hills that surround North Missoula.  During the first week on Defoe street, I was working an average of nine hours at the cooking school and five hours at home--cleaning, scrubbing, painting and then doing it all over again.  One night I was on the floor pulling up tacks from carpet I had pulled and I was getting angry.  I had had a great day at work and now I was enjoying Zenning out at home.  What was my problem? I went through the rolodex of the day and had no complaints--was I lonely, no. was I tired, sure but not exhausted, was I sad, nope.  But I was still annoyed.  Finally, I just decided to give my brain and body a break and go to bed.  Showered, I climbed into bed and felt my anger was still around as if I could taste it like I can taste the smoke as I write these words.

I tried to just focus on my breath the way Dennis had taught me years ago--to focus even in the midst of raging winds and people yelling to return to breath, your breath as a place of refuge.  As I was exhaling, I heard myself gasp and suddenly my body turned warm, turned calm.  And heard this sentence fall out of mind, I feel safe.  I am safe.

What surfaced was as simple as the change in direction of wind.  What surfaced was an awareness of myself alone in my new home.  I don't think I am any different from anyone else when I say we have relationships for a lot of obvious reasons, companionship, conversation, sex, humor and adventure, but if we are really honest, we have someone in our intimate lives to feel safe.  To feel like our back is watched, our nights are kept guarded by the ears of a dog, the snore of man and the knowledge that we can relax and unwind in the nightlight of someone else's love.  But at the end of the day, a long day, I think we realize that safety is an inside job.  No one can give it to you, design a well built home, locked truck or well lighted cabin without you feeling it first.

Maybe other people figure this out long ago, maybe other people don't have to travel around the world to finally purchase a home by themselves to understand the gift of giving safety to your self first.  Me, I am a slow learner, a sailor and finally someone with an address I can call home, my safe place even in this sea of smoke.  I feel safe, I feel placed.



A Draft

I know a man who seduces me with winds,
not words. He takes me for weeks with compass
and charts to follow the flight of cormorants,
the caws of gulls. At night, we wrap
our bodies in damp air. Stars hum.
Listen, he tells me, my mother only
let me raise pigeons. I taught myself to sail
with only bags of wind. I’m a failure
with twenty-twenty vision. I believe him.
I hear grapes in autumn, wait for fawns
to sneeze. In this hut of my heart,
I am certain of the grace of hurricanes.
A breath inhaled today, a gust
tomorrow. Wind takes what cannot stay.

Waiting on a Train

From the winter of 1996 to the summer of 2001, I lived in Europe.  Two work visas, one student visa and an endless amount of hours waiting, sitting, reading, sleeping, arguing, hiding and even plain ole watching was spent on trains crossing borders and countries.  I miss train travel terribly, but feel lucky enough to have the reminder of their passing echo off these hills in Missoula.

When Jaime and I came up with this idea to both post photos and write about waiting on a train, I unearthed some old photographs which I have loosely identified. I truly wish I had photos of all of you who I spent hours with in between all this waiting.  Here's a very small collection of a cross section of those six years.

It's dangerous at times, this box of photos.  I often think of it as my own personal Pandora.  Or in other words, I believe nostalgia is hope's more complicated sister.  They both have their dark and light.  They both can leave you lost in your own present life.  Believe me, I know. Above all, be patient with your waiting. 

A sweet man who hails from the town Fish, poetry.

(Ryba, Poland, 1997)

Dark soot in my handkerchief, Krakow will shadow my soul. 

(Kielce to Krakow, Poland 1998)

They sound of thunderstorms mostly, trains through meadows or cobblestones.

(Bieszczady, South Eastern Poland, 1997)

Filled with so much youth, no stale taste of loneliness.

(Dirt Road Bus Stop, Spiez, Poland, 1999)

We jumped trains late one night, followed domed springed daffodils.

(Tatra Mountains, Poland 1999)

My brother, French Alps tracks, we skied like a TGV. 

(Grenoble, France 2000)

There is beauty in missing a train, an unearthed stone.

(Orange, France, 2000)

We are all salt drying on the sea, smiling back.

(Italy, 2001)

One of my fondest-missed pastimes, waiting with the best.

(Ali Campbell, me, Brad & Ryan Campbell, Italy, 2001)

A new year in deep winter, it all begins somewhere.

(New Years Day, Bratislava, Slovakia, 1996)

My Essence was Lost in the Mail

Every day as a child, I waited for my dad by our mailbox.  Barefoot in myrtle, squinting as I still do every time I smile, I waited for the sounds of the lone car heading up to the very end of Old Mission Peninsula--some 20 miles due north of Traverse City, Michigan.  We lived in a farm house which had previously been occupied by migrant workers who came as far as Southern Mexico to harvest the cherries that surrounded our modest home.  Everyday, even in the winter, I would wait by the mailbox for my dad, to sing my name and laugh, "Em-i-leee" as he got out of his Oldsmobile.

When I was in graduate school working on a collection of poems, so many images from the era of my bucolic youth, isolation, cherry blossoms and the scent of woodsmoke on wool scarves surfaced.  Plus, I was writing on the shores of Lake Superior after years of living abroad and it felt like I was returning to my youth, all birch beech forest, buffered by a cold deep lake and so much quiet.  One night a fellow poet and I were out at a Sports Bar, drunk on cheap pitchered beer and watched other people play pool, when he said, "Your youth is just too poetic pretty, just too....pretty.  You really shouldn't write poems about it, it's too cliche Emily."

I wish I could tell you I had some quick reply, some retort along the lines of "not every poet is wounded by Saginaw and loss and just so you know, being sensitive isn't the only prerequisite for writing verse.  I can say this because my name IS Emily."  But I didn't.  I think I tried to say something funny and act like it didn't bother me.  But I've carried the comment for years like some shoe box labelled "photographs" of my past I only look at alone.

Ironically, I am drawn to the "uglier" moments in writing--the neglected dogs of Detroit, ice cream stands outside of Auschwitz, dust bowled towns in Eastern Montana where a handwritten sign from some fourth grader scribbled, "say no to meth," men crying at bus stops while you just say sorry in their language, gas stations in Nevada filled with keno machines where people the color of ash sit with so much hope under neon. But when I see these moments, I hear Yeats in my head, "the terrible beauty is born."  And wonder what delight can be risked in seeing these scenes not as merely ugly, but terribly beautiful.  An irony that gets you closer to some truth.

After that night in the Sports Bar in Ishpeming, I took my fellow writer friend's word to heart and tried for weeks to write of anorexia, men who smelled of bad meat and beat their wives behind the thin walls in Poland, our family Collie being overrun with maggots and the man in a Budapest train station with no arms or legs, placed on a piece of wet worn cardboard with just an empty bowl.  I tried for ugly.  And sitting in my thesis director's office after reading my attempt to write about my beyond thin roommate eat handfuls of sugar naked in a kitchen, he looked at me and calmly said, "Emily, you have to love something to write about it, you have to find what you love about anorexia to write it well.  You must love this world, really love it so much to write poems.  Even at its ugliest, it is still love."

And I believe him.  I still do even after all these years of my book being short-listed for publication, my fumbling attempts after years of rejection, I believe love is at the root of writing poems.  I also believe him because for the past few years I have not written a single poem, not even a haiku.  Until recently.  It might have more to do with my obsessive interest in reading every web page and blog on divorce, reading late night articles on "starting over in your thirties", "joys of not having a family", "10 reasons why being single is rewarding" and too many articles loosely titled, "finding yourself after grief" written by a woman in L.A. who is a life coach with perfect bleached teeth and realizing the life coach speaks in steps, adages and programs. Speaks in terms of liner reason. I do not.  I understand metaphor, stories and color. It has taken me awhile to see the towering collection of non-fiction books next to my bed might have curbed my motivation to write poems.  It could also be, I didn't really love anything.  In other words, I had lost my essence in the mail.

Divorce isn't just about changing your name, your address and your route home after work--divorce is about divorcing yourself from yourself. In the terms of foundation, divorce is the great demolition of your spirit.  Despite it's popularity and frequency, let's face it, people understand the complexities of death more than divorce, we all die and yet some of us can remain married.  And given I live in a small town, I was able to develop a new level of empathy for the Scarlet Letter and wear my own cursived lettered D around town.  Sure, this might all sound melodramatic, but this is what I know, even the ugliest divorces still have beauty, somewhere.  Or as Jack Gilbert said in his seminal poem, A Brief For The Defense

We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,

but not delight.  Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world.  To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give that that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

And like my thesis director, I believe the old poet's words to be true.  Most people get to have families and build homes in their lives trajectory of maturation, for those of us lucky enough to get divorced, we get to really learn what it means to risk delight, to loose everything you thought you knew about yourself and figure out what lies beyond.  We get to sniff out our essence.  Before I go any farther, let me make something clear, I do not, I repeat I do not recommend divorce to anyone as a means to go deeper into yourself.  We all know there is no label on a marriage certificate listing the possible affects, side effects and symptoms brought on by divorce.  But if you find yourself with a bad case of loss and hopelessness, you have options.  You can choose to either stay with others coined the un-evolved in some modern limboed hell complaining how life treated you poorly and how the locomotive actually ran you down.  Or, you get to figure out what you really value and want for yourself.  Let me also say, option B, is a very long and slow process with a lot less glory, fun and people to hang out with.  Option B is usually pretty solitary and lonely. 

But thankfully for me, I had a very solitary beginning.  Back in the days of waiting for my dad to come home after spending hours in the woods exploring, I didn't know any different.  I didn't know other people had playmates and buddies all day.  I didn't miss what I didn't ever have.  And here lies the crux of divorce, you once had someone to eat dinner with on a Wednesday, you once shared a tent with someone during a snow storm, you once had inside jokes and above all, you once had the belief in love.  But when you had something once, thankfully, you will know how to have it again.  Or in the terms of food, once you've eaten fresh calamari from the shores of a Greek island, you will remember what fresh calamari tastes like--you can hold the essence of its beauty in your mind and try to recreate it, travel for it, revere it and really know something sublime exists.  You can believe there is still love after love.  There is still music despite everything.  There are still poems.

Speaking of, after all these years, here's a new one.

Finding Lubricant After the Divorce

In a drawer you keep old jewelry 
given mostly by your mother,
you mistake the tube for silver polish.  
The gel paled to faint pink, 
labeled, I. D. Moments has no smell,
no sugary musk sticks to the air.  Unlike 
the geraniums, red-filled confident scents 
your apartment with bold color, 
the same shade of lipstick 
you no longer risk to wear.
You count months born from the divorce 
baby you carry, careful not to over-feed 
or nurse in public.  You hide it like some teen 
who lives with an aunt for awhile. Grows fat
and quiet in another town.  Returns with just new hair.
Thankfully, there is no essence to loss, no perfume
to linger on an old shirt, sheets and underwear.