Pentimento

Writing for Spirituality

Mallory Bowen
December 8, 2016
From my Grandmother’s House in Maine

Hopelessness dances out of my mouth

while coffee spills into saucers

I bought because the sound of china kissing

reminds me of the smell of the dust in my grandmother’s home.

The saucers stacked high with tiny lobsters dancing their rims

lie collecting time as she slowly loses all recollection.

The Von Trapp children are on their carpeted shelves,

and she’s there too.

Sitting, knees bumping against Lisel’s spine

backing upwards and away

as each piece of eight

slowly seats up the stairs.

Naivety beams out of her wrinkled pores

while she sings “adieu to you,”

and gazes out into the crowd

for some frä ulein to guide her home.

I try to listen to my shoes click

on black and white ballroom

instead of the voice that reminds me

she’s forgotten she’s said it before:

the words she’s been saying all night.

But my attempts at white noise

fail to do anything but

punctuate her salutes.

I clench my hands tighter

around the crease in my elbow

as I try to loosen my grip on her song.

She’s said goodbye

every night since she moved to this new home

where everyone is her senior,

and the bisque at lunch

makes her miss her lobster saucers,

and she doesn’t understand why

the only sets anyone is talking about

are the ones that come early on.

From the Arcade

Before the chill began to bite

or the lights dim,

I placed my palm beneath a florescent house

piled high with plush nostalgia.

Cheek to floor,

a hand claps linoleum

in search of forgotten dimes.

The thrill of fingertips

and sterling ridges.

Clinking copper

tossed to meet the town

sounds the start of your chrome chandelier copout.

Moving

left, right, forward, and back.

Your slight figure,

wrapped in what could have been wax paper,

tumbles out of iron clutches

again.

Slotting the coin.

Dropping the claw.

From the Telephone

I often thought I would feel a call

like a grapnel hooked in my chest

held firm between cages of ribs, and

sense the unmistakably Divine

tug from the rope’s end.

Instead, I open my eyes to see

a thousand different glinting

lures each catching their own beams.

Twisted rust robed in metallic difference

catch me in their curves. So I run

to my grandfather’s tackle box and

return each hook. I lie there on the dock,

sun scorching my bare skin, the smell of algae

coasting overhead, and vow to cast no new lines,

and let new waters lie unconsidered.

When I haven’t cast that far in a moment’s time,

I feel a sting in my index finger

and look down to see a silver hook,

so well intentioned and sharp,

has found a hold in calloused skin.

All at once I am unsure.

So I return to wonder, which turns

to worry. Casting again a million

different lines and lives in every direction.

I hear my brother’s voice faintly through

the wall of my thoughts and the distance

over the phone. Concerned as ever,

But you’re supposed to believe, he tells me.

I believe in him, and a chorus of

you’re supposed tos rings in my ears again.

I hear his goodbye course through the line,

and feel him go. Confusion creeps in

through cracks I’d sworn I plugged

with thoughts parsed thin. So I think my way

to thinner thoughts that give way too. My head

tilts against the cold paint of porch walls

and I remember it ‘s autumn. The cold whips

around my neck and across my cheeks, while the

rest of my body toasts inside the waxed walls

of my coat. I trace my hand along bubbled paint

covering the stoop. The tiny air pockets bump

against one another all painted the same

shade of pale green. The green of tackle boxes

and the last perch caught in pale green ponds

as summer comes to a close, and we linger there

like the smell of algae in the air lingers with me now.

The scent the cold cannot take whips around my neck

and across my cheeks. I am back there again,

even if only for a moment, sun scorching my bare skin.

And suddenly our woes are smaller than we thought.

Reflection

Besides just being enjoyable, this class has given me a kind of solace about so

much that I find confusing. The first taste of this solace came when we read Rilke’s

Letters to a Young Poet. His advice to “Live the questions” has been putting my mind

at ease ever since. In recent years, I have found life to be much more ambiguous

than I am often comfortable with. At first, seeing this ambiguity felt like doubt,

something I had been told to avoid at all costs. But it seems to me now that

accepting ambiguity as a part of life is a way of admitting there is so much I cannot

know, and resolving to “live the questions” instead of pretending to have all the

answers.

As I mentioned before, I find the ambiguity of life quite uncomfortable at

times. This theme has come up in my writing more recently. In thinking about how

it used to feel so much simpler to just hate or turn away from what I couldn’t

understand. Now it doesn’t feel authentic to ignore the fact that I see more mystery

than certainty, not that the two must be at odds. While I know reality is often

mysterious I do miss the certainty I used to have, and I wonder how much of it I can

have now.

While writing doesn’t bring me to certainty necessarily, it at least makes the

not knowing fun. In a way it turns a lack of certainty into mystery, which I sort of

just think of as fun confusion. For that reason, I found Victor Judge’s description of

writing particularly compelling, “Writing provides a momentary stay from the

questions.” I find that writing lets me back into mystery when I have become

discouraged by confusion. It either allows me to sort out some of the existential

questions I have run into or it lets me out of my head and into the beauty of the

seemingly mundane. On either occasion I have found poetry to be an enormous

restorer of hope in my life, first in reading and also in writing.

I have also appreciated learning about more poets I hadn’t heard of in this

class. I was reading an excerpt from Charles Simic’s The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

and one quote really struck me, “Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts

with ambiguity. As a "picture of reality" it is truer than any other. Ambiguity is. This

doesn't mean you're supposed to write poems no one understands”(Simic). Simic

acknowledges the questions the world holds, so many that it often feels absurd.

However, Simic makes clear that life’s absurdity does not justify writing absurdly. I

find it to be quite challenging to write clearly when I find ideas or experiences

confusing.

I have been thinking about the relationship between feeling like the world is

unclear and writing confusing verses of poetry to cope with that lack of clarity. It

doesn’t seem particularly constructive to add salt to the wound of confusion. I think

this is part of why I am so taken with Billy Collins’ and Wendy Cope’s poetry: they

are unmistakably clear. In my experience of reading Collins’ poems it seems that he

is able to be so clear by constantly grounding the abstract in the literal. This

grounding of the metaphysical in the physical, or the supernatural in the natural is a

constant source of clarity for me. Poetry is a place I can almost always count on

finding this particular form of grounding.

What I am trying to say is there is more than I can understand, and poetry

allows me to have a bit of clarity. Poetry is a constant reminder to pay attention to

my questions but it also provides a way to not be overcome. I am confused about a

lot surrounding my faith, and I think this confusion is part of why I have found

writing to be so enjoyable: it provides a way to slow down and remember that I

don’t need to be in a rush to understand.