to be of use

I think of this poem often. It is a traveling poem. Part 1, line 3 is in my head constantly these days. Right now I'm wondering what to do with this blog. How many times have I started and never finished? How many times have I started and never finished a lot of things?

I'm making changes in my life. Here is the current plan:

graduate with a double major in english literature and spanish.

travel. travel anywhere. travel anywhere that i can be of use. orphanages, houses for teen mothers, teaching english, teaching spanish, harvesting land.

grad school.

everything, everything, everything, everything and then:

the great inevitable surprise.

(and, of course, there will be hula hooping, slacklining, flower-smelling, poetry reading, and mad, mad joy involved in all of this)

Three Poems of Departure

Charles Wright

I.

Sitting again on the front porch of the first cabin.

Grind of the deerfly, hone of the bee.

Someone is mourning inconsolably somewhere else.

Yellow of goldenrod, bronze of the grass.

By the creek bridge, the aspen leaves are waving goodbye, goodbye.

Silence of paintbrush and cow pink.

Take the dirt from the old trail up in your hand, Pilgrim,

and throw it into the wind.

I walk through the door of my parents house. Mom is singing to Bon Jovi in the kitchen and I stand in the foyer--she doesn't know I am watching her. How many more times will I walk through this door and see my mother, in good health, making lasagna, so young? And how more distant will I have grown from this world next time around? I want to keep you, mother, and keep this house and all the work you've paid to have done in it. I want to hear dad coming home from the office, loosening the collar of his shirt and sitting down to dinner. I want the awkward dinner silence. I want it just as it was and just as much as I never wanted it when I had it, and never want it for my future self. There were wrong things here, and there were right things here and I am bound by nostalgia. But upon departure, things will become real. I expect my backpack to weigh heavier on my shoulders when I return.

"You don't have any concerns about this path?" I ask them.

Dad looks me in the eye, aware of all of this: "No." he says.

II.

The meadow surrounds us on three sides,

Steep woods to the north;

It's fifty-one miles downriver to where the highway begins.

I leave by the opposite way,

over the summit

Through deadfall and clear cut and shell-shot snow of July.

Already sundown has passed you and follows me up the road,

Color of dragonfly wings.

On the other side, as I start down,

it passes me too,

Your voice now flat as a handkerchief

folded away for miles in its pine drawer.

Neruda-loved mountain of Macchu Picchu--I will brave you then I will descend. But tonight, under the blankets in a room alone, I sit with all of these things I will never own because everything, everything, everything is wind. Mother. Father. Brothers. Friends.

III.

28 August and first frost

Like a horizon across the meadow.

The yellow top

of the signal tamarack

Sticks up like a stalk of goldenrod from the southern mountain,

Autumn starting to pull in its heavy net.

Thistle spores tumble like star-webs between the trees.

The slough grass is brown in the dry channels.

Tomorrow we leave for the desert,

almost two thousand miles away.

But tonight, under the white eye of Betelgeuse,

We'll point out the pony stars, and their gusty hooves.

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Journal entry: August 5, 2008, 11:00pm
watching Old Faithful

"Tyler, Mom, Dad and I watched the geyser at night--the milky way was clearer than I've ever seen it. It was like we were in a globe of stars--a geyser globe...Beautiful white force from the bottom of everything...and I felt content, whole for the first time in a long time."