Yearly Archives: 2025

43 posts

With Poetry, Small Observations Bring Big Results

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Sometimes, as a writer, an idea strikes you so much that you decide to honor it as a personal truism. You hold this truth to be self-evident; the job, then, is explaining how the sun rose on this dawning.

Today’s poem, by the late Jim Harrison, is a great example of one of these abstract truths made concrete. If you can build the idea to the poem’s last line as Harrison does, so much the better. And if the raison d’être is rooted in imagery (here the sounds and sights of trains powered by coal furnaces), better still.

What I like especially is the concept of something appearing to be eternal: the poet ages from boy to man (subject to both change and eventual demise), but the object of his poem seems to be eternal. For me, this idea often springs from animals and nature, but for Harrison, the old train works equally well. Let’s see how.

All aboard!

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found…
Jim Harrison

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found
a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned
country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam
trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers
shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings
before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom
you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump
when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.
Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night
I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn
an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.
Some complain but I love this night music,
imagining that some of the railroad cars are from
my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled
to my favorite, “Route of the Phoebe Snow.”
To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

I don’t know about you, but I love “In your dark bedroom / you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump / when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.” Even if you’re too young to have known these sounds, Harrison makes them real through his description. This talent is a must in the poet’s toolbox.

Then, the train’s horn: “an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.” And the lovely flourish at the end: “To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.” That says it all, no? And the readers know it, because each of us could replace “a cinder” with something—seemingly small—that makes us excited about life. Think about it.

Though nowhere near as accomplished, my poem “Here and Gone” was going for the same strategy as Harrison’s: the concept of eternity in the form of something from the past (in this case minnows, dragonflies, and small-mouth bass) looking the same while time works its cruelties on its observer. It’s from my second collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

Here and Gone
Ken Craft

excluding a war zone
human death remains
the mad relative
hidden from sight
while nature
files and catalogues
its dead on the public
narrative of roads

why then
looking down on these shallows
at this same school of minnows
hanging in the same green-peg balance
as last month;

looking at
this same dragonfly
stutter-flying the water’s stippled surface
as last summer;

looking at
these small-mouth bass
swimming over the same soul shadows
against gold-gilled sand
as ten years ago;

am I reminded of you

and why would this moment
choose me to endure the eternity
inherent in minnows, dragonflies,
and soul shadows

What about you? What sounds, smells, sights, tastes, or touch sensations seem eternal and timeless in your world? What simple thing makes you excited about life?

Slaying the “Muse of Sluggishness”

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The early risers. It’s a club that just as soon not meet, because what’s best about early morning is solitude—a time when a writer can send his convocation to the Muses. While the house still sleeps, I mean. And only the clock’s ticks can be heard. Or the dog’s breathing. Or the heat radiator’s pings (winter) or the air conditioners hum (climate-changed summer).

Fitting music for writing, the early hours. One can’t help but believe that not only the household sleeps, but the world, for part of the magic of writing in the dark before dawn is the deliberate deception that you are the only one in the world awake. A childish delusion, then. Indoor light reflects your face in the dark window pane, and taking the dog outside reveals only a world with birds on the verge, raccoons on the move, and, weather depending, peepers singing (warm world) and owls whooing (cold, mysterious world).

We are the perfect audience, then, for Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s “The Early Hours,” a poem as much about writing as not writing (or, how writing is often hidden in the act of not yet writing). Paradoxical? Here’s the poem:

“The Early Hours”

Adam Zagajewski

The early hours of morning: you still aren’t writing

(rather, you aren’t even trying), you just read lazily.

Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if

it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacation, when a colored

map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map

promising so much, deep ponds in the forest

like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning in

sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,

but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,

their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed

(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval

figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral;

the early hours of morning, silence

—you still aren’t writing,

you still understand so much.

Joy is close.

A muse of sluggishness? I missed him (and am convinced it’s a “him”) in Greek mythology studies but understand his presence, once announced. Then, the two metaphors—one about a love of maps formed in childhood, the other about that odd moment before sleep, the one where “no dreams have appeared,/but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world.”

Perhaps the biggest pay-off to the poem is how it refuses to acknowledge so-called “writer’s block.” Pre-writing, after all, requires NOT writing. Thinking. Dreaming. Creating and recreating the groundwork for poetry. Until, you can’t help but admit, “Joy is close.”

And that, for this poem’s particular trajectory, is the perfect closing.

Pain, Sickness, and the Desire To Be “Adamantly Elsewhere”

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saint

It was a great loss for poetry world when Tony Hoagland passed in October of 2018. More than one of his poems are shared on this website (just search his name), and here’s another, “Arrows,” with its allusion to Saint Sebastian and his arrow-ridden body. The arrows in Tony’s case, of course, would be the cancer that eventually took him. But for others, the arrows could metaphorically equate to many things that torment us, body and soul, causing us, too, to look up, as if nothing on this earth “was ever real”…

Arrows

by Tony Hoagland

When a beautiful woman wakes up,

she checks to see if her beauty is still there.

When a sick person wakes up,

he checks to see if he continues to be sick.

He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,

looks out the window at a sky

where a time-release sun is crawling

through the milky X ray of a cloud.

* * * * *

I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,

the wires crossed, the panel lit

by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing

out of sequence,

the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,

and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,

the message doesn’t reach its destination,

the angel falls down into the body of a dog

and is speechless,

tearing at itself with fast white teeth;

and the consciousness twists evasively,

like a sheet of paper,

traveled by blue tongues of flame.

* * * * *

In the famous painting, the saint

looks steadfastly heavenward,

away from the physical indignity below,

the fascinating spectacle

of his own body

bristling with arrows;

he looks up

as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,

exerting that power of denial

the soul is famous for,

that ability to say, “None of this is real:

Nothing that happened here on earth

and who I thought I was,

and nothing that I did or that was done to me,

was ever real.”

"Arrows" Tony Hoagland

How Now, Brown Cow?

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Sometimes poetry gets silly. Goofy. Clever for its own good.

Consider Alice N. Persons’ ode to the UPS man. Turns out, it is an ode to the little-appreciated color, brown, as well. “How now, brown cow?” as they say in speech class where rounded vowels are practiced. Let’s take a look at the package wrapped in plain brown fun:

Why I Have a Crush on You, UPS Man
Alice N. Persons

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you’re like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it’s just what I’ve always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let’s hop in your clean brown truck and elope !
ditch your job, I’ll ditch mine
let’s hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I’ll make you my mama’s bourbon pecan pie
we’ll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I’m serious, UPS Man. Let’s do it.
Where do I sign?

Unlike 99.8% of men, the UPS man always brings the right gift because — shazam! — it’s what the lady ordered!

The thought of eloping in a “clean brown truck,” though, is too much. So much, in fact, that the reader is already on board and heading to Brownsville (where else?), where discerning customers and drivers can tempt each other with “luscious brown foods — / roast beef, dark chocolate, / brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies.”

Before long everyone’s hitting the hard stuff. Sweetly, though, in the form of “mama’s bourbon pecan pie.”

It comes without surprise that the ultimate getaway is a “cozy wood cabin” (brown) with a “brown dog or two / and a black and brown tabby” to boot.

The final flourish? Circling back to the routine of UPS deliveries:

“I’m serious, UPS Man. Let’s do it. / Where do I sign?”

Notice how this mad love is offered to someone who remains distantly-named: “UPS Man.” For the purposes of humor, the UPS man is not so much an individual with distinct looks and personality but a type. Maybe an archetype. You know, like wizards and fairy godmothers who have forsaken pumpkin coaches for an always-turning-right UPS truck.

Signed, sealed, delivered, the poem is yours. Thank you, Alice, for making the simple point: Poets can have fun, too.

Tempted to Give Up? You’re Not Alone

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It’s on everybody’s lips: These are dark days, especially between the economy and politics. I’m of two minds, torn between the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. One preaches activism, the other isolation. One says get more involved. The other says quit while you’re behind. Trouble is, I can’t tell which is advocating which.

By way of explanation, here’s a little context: Thirty years ago, my wife and I rented a cottage on a lake with our young children. A pine cabin, it stood on concrete blocks and was equipped with electricity and running water thanks to a pump drawing water from the lake.

When vacationing there, we did not bother with a television or newspapers. For two weeks, we simply read books, played cards and board games, had conversations, swam in the water, dozed on the sun-drenched dock, and listened to the occasional Red Sox game on AM radio.

In effect, there was no “out there.” The world as we knew it was put on hold. Instead, it simply consisted of lake, woods, and a cabin seemingly ignorant of time. No politics. No crime. No national or international news. This isolation was a balm for the soul –– and what’s good for the soul is good for the body.

If stress is so bad for us, it can be argued that turning in and logging off is a great strategy for healing and staying healthy. Thoreau, I’m sure, would approve. Yet for all his walks in the woods and stays in a cabin by Walden, Thoreau was also an activist fighting hard for the abolitionist cause and a man who spent time in jail for civil disobedience. He also lived minutes from his parents’ Concord home and walked home to do his laundry.

That’s why, as soon as I get comfortable with the warm blanket of escapism, I wonder about being a better Citizen of the World. Or, even more difficult, about my own country. If the Republic we all grew up pledging allegiance to is in big trouble, don’t we owe it to the Founding Fathers to get involved? To speak up? To do something about saving it before all hell breaks loose and we fall into “soft fascism” á la Hungary –– and all because of one man’s untreated psychological problems and a cable “news” channel that is doing Russia’s dirty work by spreading misinformation and division (thank you, Comrade Fox)?

It’s questions like this that invite cloud cover over memories of those halcyon days at the lake. On one side I get an earful: Wouldn’t it look selfish and foolish to make like an ostrich and bury your head in the sand just because you just can’t deal with it anymore?

Then, in the other ear, another: If blatant corruption, culture wars, and history repeating itself to the refrain of the 1930’s are only shortening your life, don’t you owe it to yourself to pull back from it all and breathe, Zen-like?

I don’t have any answers. I hear both figures on both shoulders, but sometimes it’s unclear who has the halo and who has the pitchfork, who advocates for the light and who for the dark. Nothing is obvious, and on any given day, my thoughts lean gray as dawn and dusk.

Here’s a Maggie Smith poem that speaks, in its own poetic way, to our assumptions about right and wrong being as easy as light and dark. In a way, it reminds me of the light and dark plying my ears!

How Dark the Beginning

All we ever talk of is light—

let there be light, there was light then,

good light—but what I consider

dawn is darker than all that.

So many hours between the day

receding and what we recognize

as morning, the sun cresting

like a wave that won’t break

over us—as if light were protective,

as if no hearts were flayed,

no bodies broken on a day

like today. In any film,

the sunrise tells us everything

will be all right. Danger wouldn’t

dare show up now, dragging

its shadow across the screen.

We talk so much of light, please

let me speak on behalf

of the good dark. Let us

talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

One of my favorite phrases from the Bible is “Through a glass darkly.” These days, I see a lot of things “through a glass darkly” because so much is sinister in a déjà vu kind of way.

Is it selfish to brighten my own life? Might I then be accused of contributing to the dark forces by failing to assist the various causes for good?

Smith’s poem seems to speak to things that have crawled out of dark sewers and into the light of day. They are the new normal, and they are decidedly encouraged by each other and by their newfound freedom to operate with impunity in fresh air and sunlight. They see each other and are emboldened by each other.

That may be far from Smith’s intent, but the reader-writer compact tells us that there’s a gray area between light and dark, not only come dawn and dusk, but come our daily deliberations over how much or little to be agents of change — and at what cost.

A Word to the Wise: Jim Harrison Goes Aphoristic

I am wending my way through the late Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems – almost 900 pages of them. A prolific writer, Harrison wrote before his death, “This book is the portion of my life that means the most to me. I’ve written a goodly number of novels and novellas but they sometimes strike me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life, though a few of them approach some of the conditions of poetry.”

Here are a few of the aphoristic stanzas from one of the books, Braided Creek, included in this collection:

All those years

I had in my pocket.

I spent them,

nickel-and-dime.

All I want to be

is a thousand blackbirds

bursting from a tree,

seeding the sky.

On every topographic map,

the fingerprints of God.

The biomass of ants,

their total weight on earth,

exceeds our own.

They welcome us to their world

of small homes, hard work, big women.

When Time picks apples,

it eats them with the yellow teeth

of bees.

I might have been a welder,

kneeling at a fountain of sparks

in my mask of stars

Midday silence is different

from nighttime silence.

I can’t tell you how.

Between the four pads

of a dog’s foot,

the fragrance of grass.

What if everyone you loved

were still alive? That’s the province

of the young, who don’t know it.

I’m sixty-two and can drop dead

at any moment. Thinking this in August

I kissed the river’s cold moving lips.

A welcome mat of moonlight

on the floor. Wipe your feet

before getting into bed.

I was born a baby.

What has been

added?

Treasure what you find

already in your pocket, friend.

The Sorrow of Horses

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As a kid reading Jonathan Swift’s classic, Gulliver’s Travels, I marveled not so much at the Lilliputians as at the Houyhnhnms, that society of horses blessed with reason—a society far above the Yahoos, Swift’s derisive name for humankind.

It all came back to me as I read Ross Gay’s wonderful poem, “becoming a horse,” in Tracy K. Smith’s collection, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.

It contained lovely ideas, such as the poet becoming “a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw” or “a fly tasting its ear.” It contained lovely concepts, such as the poet coming to know the world as a horse knows it: “the sorrow of a brook creasing a field,” “the small song in my chest,” “the slow honest tongue.” All that from the simple act of “putting my heart to the horse’s.”

Empathy. The world through another’s eyes—even another creature’s eyes. More than anything, it teaches us the sorrow of being human. Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

becoming a horse
by Ross Gay

It was dragging my hands along its belly,
loosing the bit and wiping the spit
from its mouth made me
a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw,
a fly tasting its ear. It was
touching my nose to his made me know
the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his
made me know the long field’s secrets.
But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know
the sorrow of horses. The sorrow
of a brook creasing a field. The maggot
turning in its corpse. Made me
forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves.
And in this way drop my torches.
And in this way drop my knives.
Feel the small song in my chest
swell and my coat glisten and twitch.
And my face grow long.
And these words cast off, at last,
for the slow honest tongue of horses.

As a writer, you might try it yourself: becoming a dog, a red fox, an owl—whatever stirs the wonder and sadness in you. It is an exercise in empathy and beauty.

Poetry as News Story

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Just the facts, Jack. That’s what detectives deal in when there’s a mystery, and that’s what newspapers deal in when there’s not.

Reporters are more about the 5 Ws and the H: who, what, why, when, where, and how. Or as many of the above as you can find, all presented in the classical inverted-pyramid style, facts first, because we can’t count on the reader to go any further than the first paragraph or two before becoming distracted by another headline.

Question is, can a straight-news, “this-happened-to-me” style work for poetry? My vote is yes, and the title of the following poem by Robert Wrigley, is a good, “just the facts” start. Exempli gratia:

Highway 12, Just East of Paradise, Idaho
by Robert Wrigley

The doe, at a dead run, was dead
the instant the truck hit her:
In the headlights I saw her tongue
extend and her eyes go shocked and vacant,
Launched at a sudden right angle—say
from twenty miles per hour south to fifty
miles per hour east—she skated
many yards on the slightest toe-edge tips
of her dainty deer hooves, then fell
slowly, inside the speed of her new trajectory,
not pole-axed but stunned, away
from me and the truck’s decelerating pitch.
She skidded along the right lane’s
fog line true as a cue ball,
until her neck caught a sign post
that spun her across both lanes and out of sight
beyond the edge. For which, I admit, I was grateful,
the road there being dark, narrow, and shoulderless,
and home, with its lights, not far away.

The poem reminds me a bit of William Stafford’s more famous deer-accident poem, “Traveling through the Dark.” Still, it’s no cinch to just relay facts like a reporter and call it poetry. It has to be rich with the muscle and bones of good writing — specific nouns and action verbs.

And yes, it wouldn’t be poetry if there wasn’t some kind of reflection at the end. Gratefulness despite the brush with another creature’s death foreshadowing one’s own, in this case, with human hungering, as always, for “home, with its lights, not far away.”

Self-Analysis as Creative Source

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The best cure for writer’s block is the writer herself. Consider, writer, your field of expertise. Within the goal lines you will surely find these players: self, ego, and consciousness. Now jump in the stream and, as the psychologists say, let yourself go.

If you do, and you start with the prompt “I always have to be…,” you might come up with a poem like Ron Padgett’s “Think and Do” below. It looks easy, reading it, and nothing inspires an idea-hungry writer like the sensation of looking easy.

From a few things that define you as a person, you just relax on your back and let the stream of consciousness carry you down river. Enjoy the muffled sounds of forest and rushing river (your ears are underwater) and especially the moving sky and clouds above you, framed like art by treetops.

Before you know it, your sense of humor will kick in (it always does once you’re relaxed). And before you know it, you’ve gone from stuff you’re good at to non sequiturs. You know, like Rodin’s The Thinker, a big lug of a statue that holds within its muscular body all manner of contradiction.

By spicing your self-analysis with specificity and thought processes that your friends, upon reading them, would say, “Yeah, that’s just like him,” you’ll have a lively poem to work on in no time.

Looks easy, right? (Cardinal rule for writer’s block: Bring a sense of humor.)

Think and Do
Ron Padgett

I always have to be doing something, accomplishing some-
thing, fixing something, going somewhere, feeling purposeful,
useful, competent—even coughing, as I just did, gives me the
satisfaction of having “just cleared something up.” The phone
bill arrives and minutes later I’ve written the check. The world
starts to go to war and I shout, “Hey, wait a second, let’s think
about this!” and they lay down their arms and ruminate. Now
they are frozen in postures of thought, like Rodin’s statue, the
one outside Philosophy Hall at Columbia. His accomplish-
ments are muscular. How could a guy with such big muscles be
thinking so much? It gives you the idea that he’s worked all his
life to get those muscles, and now he has no use for them. It
makes him pensive, sober, even depressed sometimes, and
because his range of motion is nil, he cannot leap down from
the pedestal and attend classes in Philosophy Hall. I am so
lucky to be elastic! I am so happy to be able to think of the
word elastic, and have it snap me back to underwear, which
reminds me: I have to do the laundry soon.

Hugo’s Rules (of Thumb) for Poetry Writers

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hugo

Rules. More rules. Sometimes rules are good, if they’re “of thumb,” I mean. Unlike compulsory ones, rules of thumb can be treated like Pied Pipers or given the Roman emperor’s thumb.

Richard Hugo’s book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, features essays both memoir-ish and poetry advice-ish, making it catnip for poets at all levels.

Which brings us to “Hugo’s Rules of Thumb for Poetry Writing” (my term for them). Here are a few selected ones from his book. See what you think:

Make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.
Sometimes the wrong word isn’t the one you think it is but another close by. If annoyed with something in the poem, look to either side of it and see if that isn’t where the trouble is.
Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.
Put a typed copy on the wall and read it now and then. Often you know something is wrong but out of fear or laziness you try to ignore it, to delude yourself that the poem is done. If the poem is on the wall where you and possibly others can see it, you may feel pressure to work on it some more.
Use “love” only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.
End more than half your lines and more than two-thirds your sentences on words of one syllable.
Don’t use the same subject in two consecutive sentences.
Don’t overuse the verb “to be.” (I do this myself.) It may force what would have been the active verb into the participle and weaken it.
Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.
No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.
Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
Beware certain words that seem necessitated by grammar to make things clear but dilute the drama of the statement. These are words of temporality, causality, and opposition, and often indicate a momentary lack of faith in the imagination.
Beware using “so” and “such” for emphasis. They’re often phony words, uttered. “He is so handsome.” “That was such a good dinner.” If “so” is used, it is better to have a consequence.
The poem need not end on a dramatic note, but often the dramatic can be at the end with good effect.

Hugo provides examples and elaboration on some of these rules, but I just wanted to give you a flavor. Interesting, no? And in some cases, almost mathematical in their specificity.

Taking these to my poetry manuscript, you might find some good possibilities and some not-so-good ones. Not using the same subject two sentence in a row? What about anaphora? Maximum sentence length, seventeen words? How will you ever channel Allen Ginsberg? And make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it? In the immortal words of four Beatles I once knew, that’s a hard day’s night.

I do like the idea of posting a poem-in-progress where others can read it, though. On the refrigerator at work, for instance. That ought to get a lot of reads, between the “Whose hummus is this? It’s been here for two months!” and the “Who took my Noosa black raspberry yogurt?”

Still, The Triggering Town is an intriguing and at times humorous read. Hugo taught at the University of Montana (of all places!). And, sure as his rules seem to be, he is admirably self-deprecating. In Chapter the First, “Writing off the Subject,” he writes:

I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry-writing class.

You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. I hope you learn to write like you. In a sense, I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write. At all times keep your crap detector on. If I say something that helps, good. If what I say is of no help, let it go.

Is there a better caveat than that? And so, all thumbs in, one thumb in, or none. As you like it. An advice take-it-or-leave-it guy can do little better than that….

The Sea as Healer and Muse

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Something there is about the sea and its curative powers. Physically, the salt is credited with doing many a skin ailment and wound good. Spiritually, though, its force is even greater. Consider Herman Melville’s famous lines from the opening pages of Moby-Dick:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

It even affects landlubbers like Emily Dickinson who live far inland (read: Amherst, Massachusetts) from any ocean surf. Consider this Dickinson poem, connecting the sea’s powers with exultation (no small emotion, that!):

Exultation Is the Going
by Emily Dickinson

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea —
Past the houses — past the headlands —
Into deep Eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

In our ways, we are all “inland souls” who often conflate place with all manner of problems — misery, boredom, social turmoil, failure, depression, etc. What better solution than to move away, start over, make of ourselves a tabula rasa for complete restarts?

But moving from Point A to Point B on land is nothing compared to going out to sea. There’s something about the sound of the ship on the water, the seagulls calling overhead, the sun glinting off the water, the smell of salt, the steely backs of dolphins playing catch in the ship’s wake, the wind tossing our hair.

Even better, there’s something about land growing smaller and smaller as we deliver ourselves to Mother Ocean’s understanding arms. That promontory or lighthouse back there, we tell ourselves, is us. What we were. What we will never be again.

Out here? Out here is complete freedom. The law of nature in its most raw form. Forgiveness. Love. Exultation.

Of course, in Miss Emily’s hands, the whole “going” can be read as “going for good,” but it still flies. Death and the Sea as co-conspirators of liberation. Anyone with a terminal illness or debilitating pain can relate.

Even people who have never left the confines of Nebraska’s landlocked prairies can sense all of this. There’s something mysterious and lovely about the sea. Perhaps it has to do with our ancient origins. Or our foolproof instincts. Whichever, we don’t doubt it so much as believe its dictum: Exultation Is the Going.