Poets, like humanoids of all stripes, play a balancing game on a daily basis. Grade papers. Run to meetings. Teach classes. Run kids to events and activities. Check in with the spouse. Dust once in a blue moon. Throw leftovers in the microwave. Eat. Run some more. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s what Ekhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, calls “finding a balance between human and Being” (104). The human part of us is the ego, which is wedded to the roles we play–poet, teacher, wife, mom, etc., etc.–while the Being at our core is timeless, disembodied, the Spirit that transcends all our earthly errand-running, role-shifting, ego-propping, power-grubbing, material-minding chaos.
Today, it’s meeting with the WMDs (Women of Mass Dissemination) to tweak, update, and generally improve our web sites. Tonight it’s marking draft poems for students who are (generally) more confident about their fiction.
But soon–not now, but SOON–it will be just the page and me. Setting the “human aside.” Connecting with poetry. Just . . . Being.
Rich (right), with writer Audre Lorde (left) and Meridel Le Sueur (middle) in Austin Texas, 1980 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the memory of Adrienne Rich, one of our country’s finest poets who died last week, I offer the following poem, penned a couple of decades ago and revised very recently:
The New Androgyne
She will be like the deaf mute turned composer:
ink will pulse through her veins the color
of half-lit midnight when grass sways slightly
By turns she will be gardener and stargazer peasant
and prophet bag-lady and carpetbagger
pointillist and modern dancer
delivering mother and midwife delivering
the mother and her child
You will see her gradually
rising with the sun her origins uncertain
her language raw and bold her hands stained
strong-boned her eyes deep as Andromeda
She will take by the first two fingers
anyone who will enter the labyrinth listen
to the crackling of leaves as she infuses them with breath
and witness her gypsy dance as she steadily
wrenches an arc of bone from her side
–Kathleen McCoy
In the past two weeks I’ve had a house fire, attended a magical manuscript conference, and lost Adrienne Rich. While I won’t forget any of these occurrences, one of them I can now acknowledge with this piece. For the way she championed the oppressed of all types–gays and lesbians, men and women of color, the imprisoned, the marginalized, the impoverished, and the politically oppressed (all people who have been silenced or ignored)–and did it with beauty, grace, and always, compassion, I am deeply grateful.
The Real McCoy 