by Amber Flora Thomas, Poetry Editor
Hello! It’s National Poetry Month and I am thinking deeply about the power of attention. To this end, I am letting my dog, Violet serve as muse. It’s Sunday morning breakfast, and it seems like love when she stares at me with a concentration that freezes her entire body and widens her eyes, which water and soften at the same time. Her gaze is so intense I have time to memorize the wheat-like flecks of brown in her golden irises, the natty bit of sleep salting the fold at the corner of eye, then follow the white blaze that begins in between her eyes and falls around her plump jowls into her mouth. Upon exit, this white spills along her neck to her chest and belly where it narrows briefly in a flushed bow before cascading again along her back legs to two white tipped feet. Really, she is patient and mission-oriented because there is half an English muffin and a puddle of egg yoke on my plate, and eventually, I will place the plate on the floor at her feet.
During this brief meditation on Violet, my breathing has slowed down, my shoulders have relaxed, and frankly I have forgotten myself completely.
Attention is intimacy between our whole selves and that which we give, well, our attention. For the past six years, few days haven’t begun in a similar fashion, though most days I have the radio on and am listening to the news. I am already thousands of miles from my kitchen, being pulled further from what is intimate to what is most often the darkness and wickedness that feels most prevalent in the world, especially in the last year and half. It takes effort not to be spun by events that are destroying the world and its people.
Now that it’s National Poetry Month, I want to encourage readers to seek out moments of deep attention. Poetry through its heightened engagement with language, sound, and image is one of the clearest methods of connecting intimately with the world. When we shift our gaze or sensory awareness to the textures, sounds, smells, and colors of what is nearby or at hand, we slow down and our breathing regulates. When you read a poem, the same attention the poet has captured settles on the reader too.
Often when I am teaching undergraduate poets about the necessity for attention, I’ll turn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which invites readers to look with the poet at the light emanating through a stone statue of Apollo, sans head. The poet’s gaze moves deeply into his experience of “the curved breast” and “translucent cascade of the shoulders,” going so far that the stone seems to “burst like a star,” and awakens in Rilke, but also the reader, a realization that what he sees is also seeing him. The final lines are: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” I have always understood the final sentence to be emphatic: we must make the changes in our lives that allow us to take time and really look deeply at what is before us because what we see outside ourselves is also an inward reflection. This looking deeply outward inevitably throws up a mirror, and we see what our souls most desire to address.
Most of us are deeply familiar with Mary Oliver’s poetry and might even have a throw pillow with one of her more well-know poems embroidered on it. Still, I must mention her poem, “Summer Day” in which the poet meditates on a grasshopper who has momentarily landed on her arm. From this vantage point, she describes watching the grasshopper eat sugar out of her hand, its “jaws move back and forth instead of up and down” and then the grasshopper “lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.” It is a powerful moment of intimacy with another living being, which then compels a worrisome cascade of questions about prayer, life, and dying, which accumulates in this one singularly memorable question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
In this poem, too, deep attention draws the poet into a realization that intimacy with the natural world, especially when it offers itself to us is key. Not any attention, but a sensory-level engagement.
I know when we slow down long enough grief can catch up with us, and many of us work hard to keep the hard stuff at arm’s length. There is so very much to grief about in the world today. We, each of us, have experienced personal losses, and the number of needlessly suffering, dying, and murdered people across the world is compounding. As balm for this grief, I want to offer you another poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, which was translated by Joanna Macy, and included in In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Raina Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Oprheus. I purchased the book after hearing Macy read the poem during an On Being episode with Krista Tippett a few years ago. This is Sonnet 29, the final sonnet in the series:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
When you can, sit down and read some poetry this month. The point is to slow down and give your full attention to the world that is right in front of you. Be present for the song and light that is reaching through these seemingly simple encounters. In other words, there is an incredible amount of beauty around us in every moment. All we need is attention to reach it.
Links:
On Being episode and the Macy translation: Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower | The On Being Project
“Summer Day” by Mary Oliver – full poem: The Summer Day | Library of Congress
“Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell): Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke – Poems | Academy of American Poets