April is Poetry Month: Day 14

Little Girl as Earthquake Lit by Stars

She is embarrassed by the steadiness

Photo image created by Jean Doolittle
original 9/2015, Greenport, NY

of adult life.  Don't they know,

she wonders, there's a wind

beneath the ground too.

that birds soar through the roots.

When she was three she wanted 

to be a field of yellow grass.

At four she was determined 

she would grow up to be gravity.

Now though she wants to be

an earthquake.  What unsettles us.

She will stop us from ever standing

still too long.  A pacemaker,

like Uncle Jack's but this one

for the heart of the earth.

Sometimes she dreams of meeting

the perfect boy, one with hair

like sawdust, one who will grow

to be a star.  Not one of those greasy guys

in those movies her mother watches

in the afternoon, but

that real light that shines

across dark miles, something

measured only on its own terms,

by intensity and speed of flight.

Imagine as she does what a girl

as earthquake and boy as star could do

together.  As if we might love

our own light enough to curl within it,

to fall towards ground that trembles

in anticipation of our landing.  As if

light and earth could join and move

beneath us, jolt us into dance.

Imagine as she does what it is

to grow up and become rain or river,

symphony orchestra or garden, or one tree that stays

very tall no matter how far away from it 

you go no matter how high you climb.

                                --John Reinhard

From: The Kiss of Pages Turning, The Loft Literary Center, 1998.

"Life begins at 40" is often associated with a book written by Walter Pitkin in 1934 and has become something of an axiom in the 20th and 21st centuries.  People in previous centuries weren't saying that because the average lifespan was so much shorter in the past; there usually wasn't much life left after 40.  In our lifetimes, however, modern medical advances and decreases in infant mortality gave more and more people the opportunity to add other chapters to their lives in the years after establishing careers and childbearing and childrearing.  The "mid-life crisis" was born along with that opportunity.  If you had more life, what would you do with it?

I remember feeling somewhat overwhelmed with life's responsibilities at that time, sensing that I should have had more figured out and put into place by then and since I did not, just wanting to get away from it all.  I had even picked out a place to disappear to...White River Junction, Vermont.  Having never been to Vermont, I had no real idea of what it would be like there; just that Vermont was far away and seemed quiet, pastoral and the leaves would be beautiful in the fall. 

I never packed up and went to Vermont and I don't think my family ever knew how seriously I was considering it.  Instead I did do sometimes for myself outside of my home.  I signed up for writing classes at the Loft.  One of those classes was poetry writing with John Reinhard.  The other aspiring poets in the class were enthusiastic and very talented and we continued to meet and critique each other's work long after the class was over.  Several have published their poems in books and poetry anthologies...talented, indeed.

John is a great teacher and an outstanding poet.  A few years after my class with him, he was one of the winners of the 1998 McKnight Arts Fellowships for Writers and his work was published in this anthology that I'm featuring, along with some other powerhouse Minnesota writers you may have heard of: Leslie Adrienne Miller (poet, collage artist and professor at St. Thomas) David Mura (Japanese-American poet, non-fiction writer, playwright and performance artist), Kate DiCamillo, Newbery Award winning children's writer) and William Kent Krueger (best-selling mystery writer, known for the Cork O'Connor series). 

I love the imagery of this poem and I remember that John told us about it origins; I only wish I remembered the story he told, but somehow I find myself singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" when I read it.