abundance

I was in the mountains with my friends. We were looking out the window, animals on the hills, and for the first time I wanted to write a poem about it. White cow, nudging my jumper with its big oil slick baseball nose. Wild cockatoos, array of napkins flung across the sky.

Our lives had been colliding into each other with new canonical events in recent months, every time multiplying with a new group chat. It was all so funny, everything so abundant and related, I felt acutely a part of Mary Oliver’s ‘family of things’.

I’ve been reading too much of her. These same friends introduced me to her poetry, in a zen tatami mat house in the mountains a year ago. I picked up Felicity because of the pink trees on the front cover and Mary Oliver tried to convince me I was in love. I scrunched my nose at this, wisely exercised my epistemic humility, held myself at arm’s length like a dispassionate scientist inspecting a contaminated sample. You poets, I thought. All you want to do is gaze at the ocean and be in love.

A kookaburra laughed. How terrible would that be?

*

That week, like I rode at the helm of a shooting star. That week, I looked at the sheen of the strawberry tarts in the shop, I listened to the same song over and over again, I kicked my legs up and down on the swing. I kept trying to blow that balloon of my heart bigger and bigger, privately daring it to burst.

*

My virtue is not in being a particularly happy or straightforward person, I am a failure in this respect. My wants exceed what I can ever satisfy, I am greedy to take every apple in my basket until it breaks. It is sometimes frustrating to like things because the joy becomes unbearable, I need to beam it back out to everyone else and it is never good and never accurate enough, I can’t tell you how yellow the belly of the wet mushroom I cut from the ground was, how short the miniature ponies were at the top of the hill, and why it made me so happy! It’s all just so good that it makes me angry. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not straightforward.

It also makes prioritisation hard: I want to sit and listen to you tell me about your day. I want to go to America still. I want to do something great with my life. I want to write my goddamn novel, fuck. I can’t do all of it at the same time, but I get to do some of them, and it’s good. I am not always good at being happy but I am good at feeling all of it is worthwhile.

Rilke’s Ninth Elegy is a poem that makes me feel that I’ve already died and am looking back on a life, any old life really: the sum of its good and bad and ordinary, the dogs with folded ears and the sour grapes and the standing at the corner store, and I know from that distant chamber that all of it was worthwhile.

But because just being here matters, because
the things of this world, these passing things,
seem to need us, to put themselves in our care
somehow. Us, the most passing of all.

The fear of scarcity and impermanence is an ordinary human folly, my moral duty is to challenge it even though, and especially because, I will lose.

*

Sometimes you thunder into my imagination. You in the morning, the window light cut by your jaw. You in the evening, the room gleaming with gold edges. I look at you and marvel about how much there is there. It’s reassuring, it means the things I say matter, because I know you will bear witness to them and do it well, the flame of your attention flickering between the lines of my words. You are ironic and sincere at the same time. Your sentences are a straight bolt arrow of thought. You keep a routine like you’re your own dog. You send detailed emails. You make me laugh. You are private. I have known you without having to try to. What we do with each other is simple, you ask and I tell, I ask and you tell, it’s mundane but never ordinary. I want to give you more than what you need, but what you deserve. All I want is for us is to make each other more brave. More, more, more.

*

But later, under the stars—what good would it do
anyway, then, to describe these things?
For the traveler doesn't bring back
from the mountainside to the valley
a handful of earth, which would explain nothing
to anyone, but rather some acquired word, pure,
a blue and yellow gentian. And are we here,
perhaps, merely to say: house, bridge, fountain,
gate, jar, fruit tree, window—at most,
pillar, tower? But to say them, you understand—
to say them in such a way that even the things
themselves never hoped to exist so intensely.