Telling Stories, Saying Poems

I believe in parables. I navigate life using stories where I find them, and I hold tight to the ones that tell me new kinds of truth.

- Barbara Kingsolver


The impulse to tell and listen to stories, the poetic pattern of cycle, repetition, movement and simile, is one with that of image-making, and surely is as old as humankind. Witness the Neolithic picture writing, at once familiar and mysterious, on cave walls at Lascaux in France and Altamira in northern Spain. The stuff of our imagination, we sometimes think, was laid down in early childhood, or drawn forth as sensibility matures, and there is truth in both of those convictions. But imagination is also older and more profound, and we come upon it, are moved by it and find new meaning in it, if we are open to a gift that is more primordial than our conscious minds can encompass.

The great German scholar of India's history, Heinrich Zimmer, reminded us that the disparaging word "dilettante" is derived from the Italian verb dilettare, "to take delight in." Coleridge's phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief," suggests something of that life-giving spirit. The world of soul and imagination is at once illimitable and inexhaustible, like the gift of manna, the casks of wine at Cana, like the perennial imp and shape-shifter, Coyote. In that spirit, consciousness is most truly nourished, the old stories and the new are most truly received, transformed, passed on afresh, the seeds, in Zimmer's words, "waiting to be touched.... reappear.... as fresh and green as before."

I want to initiate this section of Reckonings with one of Stanley Kunitz's poems, so it is appropriate to end this introduction with his own words: "Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, never more desperately than now, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race. At every true act of the imagination, whether in art or science, they stir fitfully."

These pages will come to harbor other poems, brief stories and other short prose, juxtaposed with images that may in turn suggest a stream of association, a poetic or narrative response. The fragment of jack pine in my photograph here, shaped by age and weather into such intriguing form, rests on a hospitable granite shelf, itself cracked, rounded and molded by ice, rain, wind and sun. Jack pine exposed at high altitude in the mountains of New England grows slowly. Its shapes bear the marks of its home and history, much like the coastal cypress of northern California.

We begin, then--not only for the sake of its title--with Stanley Kunitz's loving and painful response to a child's hard question, a tender plea for forgiveness and an evocation of the inextricability of life, love, art and language.

Kunitz died last spring, 100 years old. He served some time ago as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that until recently was known as U.S. Poet Laureate, and he won virtually every prize in the literary pantheon, from the arbiters of prosody and from his fellow poets. His poems have been my close companions for thirty years.



THE RECKONING

"What have you done?"

Pigeon, who are to me
Language and light
And the long flight home,
Your question comes with coils
Like years behind,
Which I am crawling from.
Be patient with my wound:
Too long I lay
In the folds of my preparation,
Sinuous in the sun,
A golden skin,
All pride, sores, excretion,
Blazing with death. O child,
From my angry side
Tumbles this agate heart,
Your prize, veined with the root
Of guilty life,
From which flow love and art.