Someone Digging in the Ground.

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.

W.S. Merwin

There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being:
the need to make.
                •
We are creatures who need to make.
                •
Because existence is willy-nilly thrust into our hands, our fate is to
make something— if nothing else, the shape cut by the arc of our lives.
                •
My parents saw corrosively the arc of their lives.
                •
Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
                •
But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book,
a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation
between two friends, a meal.
                •
Or mis-shape.
                •
Without clarity about what we make, and the choices that underlie
it, the need to make is a curse, a misfortune.
                •
The culture in which we live honors specific kinds of making
(shaping or mis-shaping a business, a family) but does not
understand how central making itself is as manifestation and
mirror of the self, fundamental as eating or sleeping.
                •
In the images with which our culture incessantly bombards us,
the cessation of labor is the beginning of pleasure; the goal of work
is to cease working, an endless paradise of unending diversion.
                •
In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the greatest
luxury is to live a life in which the work that one does to earn a
living, and what one has the appetite to make, coincide— by a kind
of grace are the same, one.
                •
Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
                •
My intuition about what is of course unprovable comes, I’m sure,
from observing, absorbing as a child the lives of my parents:
the dilemmas, contradictions, chaos as they lived out their own often
unacknowledged, barely examined desires to make.
                •
They saw corrosively the shape cut by the arc of their lives.
                •
My parents never made something commensurate to their will to
make, which I take to be, in varying degrees, the general human
condition— as it is my own.
                •
Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
                •
Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
                •
Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat
oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.
                •
I abjure advice-giver.
                •
Go make you ready.

From Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, Louisville, 2002, pp. 14-17)

-Frank Bidart

                                             — Portland

My Dear —
          If not from dream, before dawn,
When the rain has not perished over the house,
And you have sworn off four nights of sleep,
And I have wrestled with a mind of airplanes and birth,
And to know that you are leaving again in the morning,
With me staying — or is it the other way around,
Me leaving, and you staying, or both of us
Boarding another flight to a strange city?
— And always, too, both of us wondering
If any of this exists,
                    sleep, skies, birth,
Mumbling in the frontiers of hotel rooms,
Hauling our slender passports.
Plus: Speaking in forgotten tongues
Made up from the peasant poems of the Jews
And the soft-feathered hymns of the Cherokee.
And you so happy when we strolled through
The Dixie Classic Fair that autumn day
                    in Forsyth County, North Carolina,
Because the caramel apples were made by hand
And the tender pigs raced so hard
Around the swine track for their cookie,
And the blue ribbon chestnuts and sunflower seeds
Lay in their trays like hearts,
And the ladies from First Baptist
                    serving fried tomatoes
Whispered to us
That we must avoid the brownies but it’s OK
To eat the sweet potato pie,
And then, all day, not one Carolinian
Stopped us to talk about the trophies of eternity.
But, remember, all of this does exist —
Including the windy Moravian spires
And the dazzling bright Sunday hats,
Including the creeping lawns trimmed out to the roads,
Including the Avenue of the Arts
                                unzipping after dark
With its four-colored roosters
And fried chicken on Trade Street
And secret marriages
And the bronze whiskey at Finnegan’s Pub
Brought over by svelte girls with shaved heads —
And the two of us exhausted with drink
                                            and, finally, quiet,
So quiet, as if we could hear clarity
Bobble up from the bottom of the earth, so quiet,
Lushly quiet, leaf-by-murmuring-leaf quiet,
And now home,
Home in our own room, a nest
Above the garden’s light, and waking.

—David Biespiel