Learning to move


There is a different type of movement for each moment in one's life. As I endeavor to find the right sort of movement in the here-and-now, I find myself back at the bookshelf, searching for poetry. When all prose fails, poetry might teach us to move, trading slaughter for symbol, stopping abruptly at the tip of a tongue to begin another line, to continue metered rhyme, to say in style what we never learned to say in all seriousness.

David R. Slavitt's poem, "Change of Address", deals with leaving a too-tired love story, where the act of packing itself is studded with mementos. John Keats' "On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour" evokes the happiness and satisfaction of true friendship, when what is sometimes so hard to leave might be as fleeting as a wonderful night of laughter and conversation. Alan Paprill courts the typical Saturday-night, small-town disillusionment in "Leaving Home".


Yet we still tend to move cautiously, reluctant to part with a history that has yet to be interpreted. Seeking meaning, we nurture Memory. Perhaps it is as simple as the fashion of writing inscriptions above doorways through which you may never return, as in China:
"In the Tang dynasty, every successful candidate who passed the imperial examinations would have to climb up the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and wrote poems and inscriptions there. This ritual would symbolize a soaring career in the future. The fashion of writing poems and leaving inscriptions on the horizontal bars over doors and stone frame-works by successful candidates of the imperial examinations went on as far as the Ming dynasty." Likewise, when my grandmother passed away, my mother and her sister engraved lines from her favorite poetry in the woodwork of our mountainhouse. One of my better ex-boyfriends carved our initials into a tree (he still goes back to refresh them from time to time), which tempts me to think that sort of forever is enough for me.