When I picked these two poems to post on the fall equinox
earlier in the year, I didn’t realize how appropriate the timing might be. Both
relate to balance, the patterns of light and darkness that illuminate and shade
my mind.
It has been a strange few weeks. First we had company for an
annual long weekend gathering to celebrate our geekdom. Then without a pause,
we began preparing for Hurricane Irma. Last week, we cleaned up the aftermath.
This week, we kept one eye on Maria, hoping we didn’t have to prepare again, as
we tried to remember where we were and get back to our routine.
We were fortunate and took no damage from the storm. But we
didn’t know that when the forecast track a day before landfall centered what would
have been a major or even catastrophic hurricane literally right over our
house.
The Saturday morning before the storm, I felt like a Viking
ready to burn his boat on a foreign shore and cast his fate to the Norns. “I am
Edward son of Edward. Destiny is all.” We had done what we could do and were
down to helping others. By Saturday evening, we were buttoned up tight behind
plywood backed by hurricane-rated windows, to the point we couldn’t see almost
anything outside.
We had prepared in ways we never had before (in a lifetime
of living in Florida), even during
our record 2004 season. Things like photographing and bagging paper copies of
every account and important document we had so we could reconstruct our lives, having
the cat carriers, collars and vaccination records in the laundry room (our safe
room), having Karen choose the jewelry she absolutely couldn’t live without,
and creating and waterproofing a bug out bag with what few items we couldn’t
stand to lose. Yeah, we were that spooked by this storm.
I’ve listened to a number of people discuss what they
grabbed to either evacuate or to put in waterproof bags on high shelves in case
of the worst. These are personal choices that no one can really argue with.
Choices that show what each individual values. For some, it was family photos or
videos. For others, irreplaceable heirlooms or jewelry. For a few, it was
mementos, music or books. For still more, it was more practical items like
clothing, tools or food. Most included copies of important documents. All that
had them included their pets.
My personal go bag only contained a triple backup of all my
writing and blog photos (a hard drive and two memory sticks) plus a favorite
leather notebook. After the fact, I thought I should have added the small,
handwritten book of my poetry. Though in reality, the words themselves are more
important to me than the packaging. The only other thing I might have grabbed
was my pipe. But that I could (and probably should) live without.
So if I had to walk away, everything that I deeply cared
about would fit into a satchel smaller than most women’s purses. No
photographs, no mementos, no books, no games, no jewelry. Everything physical
can be replaced. It’s all just stuff to me. Have cash will travel. And rebuild.
My writing is my identity. I have lost words before. Twice
I’ve been hit by computer crashes, one that took out the backup at the same
time as the primary. Both times I salvaged everything with some help. Only once
have I lost a piece that I was unable to recover, that from my own carelessness
in not saving off an email about my perspective on a water drop falling in the
shower. That one still haunts me. While I know the general outline, I also know
I can probably never recreate it to my satisfaction.
As I said at the beginning, both these are somewhat timely
poems about the way I think about writing, as well as about distractions and
fragility. They both continue to give me perspective.
Through My Eyes I started in 1990. I don’t remember the specifics
of when it came to me that year. All I found is that it starts on the fifth
page of my oldest notebook and then gets edited maybe a dozen pages further in.
I may have worked on it some during our at-sea demo that year. Or it may have
come to me as I started detoxing from a long year of deadlines and overtime.
But I can still hear that opening line in my head in my own
voice. It rings like a mantra and is still true to this day. It very much
captures the way I end up working, waiting for the fog to lift to where I can
get the ideas down. Writing is not always a natural process with me. Stress,
distractions, headaches, some amount of any of them can enhance my creativity.
But too much ends up shutting me down entirely. Once that happens, it can take
a long time before my mind convinces itself that it’s safe to focus on
something other than survival.
I very much remember writing Before Surgery. This started as
a line that when I wrote it down I didn’t think it was a poem. I only decided
it was when I stumbled across it sometime later.
I wrote it the day before I had gallbladder surgery. Once
again, I had been under a lot of stress in the previous year. Exactly a year
before, I had transitioned from engineering to writing and was still trying to
ensure my budget calculations were right. As well, the previous August, I had
come down with shingles which wiped me out until nearly December. Just after I
recovered from that, I caught a spider bite on vacation that saw me sleep for
twenty-three hours straight. Then I went to the ER from what I (and the
doctors) thought where back spasms that really turned out to be from gallstones.
Somewhere in there, I started counting the number of times
I’d been under anesthesia in my life. I got nervous, I’m not sure exactly why.
Probably from too much familiarity with bell curves and random chance from
gaming. But I remember sitting in the office the afternoon before (which was
still the library then) and reading Carolyn Forche’s Against Forgetting:
Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, a book of poems she gathered and edited
from “significant poets who endured conditions of historical and social
extremity”. In other words, authors who witnessed the grimmest wars, genocides and
social repressions the century had to offer.
Many of those authors did not survive the events they
recorded, some in heartbreaking fashions. One I specifically remember involved
a political prisoner from Hungary
in WWII who was sent to a forced labor camp in Yugoslavia.
He wrote in a small notebook as he was force marched back to Hungary
just in front of the advancing Red Army. He died weeks before he would have
been liberated. He and a score of other survivors were shot when they arrived
back home because there was no room in the local hospital for them.
Reading it reminded me how fragile our lives can be. That often
that fragility comes from events beyond our control. And that during such
events, as writers we need to take charge of the elements of our lives that we
can control in order to make sure our voices are heard. Many of the pieces I
read that day were both powerful and haunting. As a young writer, it made me
wonder what I might have had to say.
Older now, this one continues to resonate as well. Some days
I still wonder when the ideas dancing through my mind outstrip my ability to bring
them to completion. At least now I feel I have something to leave behind even
if I don’t feel that body of work is yet complete. I may never feel it is. At
that same time, I try to allow that thought to motivate me. Time moves forward.
And while time itself may be eternal and enduring, our time on this earth is
not.
As we were reminded at the height of the storm when Karen
received a text from a friend. Fifteen minutes earlier, her friend had given up
and gone to bed, thinking the worst of the storm was past. Her husband remained
awake in their living room on the couch. A huge tree came crashing down,
crushing their garage and landing across their neighbor’s roof right in the
part of the house where people would be sleeping. Her husband rushed out into
the teeth of the storm to make sure everyone next door was ok. They were, but
it left a bit of a psychological mark all around. If that tree had fallen just a
few feet to the left, it might have been him as well as the garage that was
crushed. Life can change in an instant.
Which is why, when we are able, we have to do the things we
love as best we can. When we can’t, we must cling to the hope that one day we
will again. And as we reflect on both these times, we must remember the balance
of the equinox, that just as light creates the shadow, sometimes shadow defines
the light.
© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III
