RYNSA: WORDS

Poetry died for me today.  Poetry in the form of an East-Texas, overweight, sixty-something sweetheart, stained and mouthy, a firecracker Bodhisattva with the earthen name Yazbek, now stillborn in a bed in the backroom with a trio of old dogs.  After a brief competition with cancer (we all know the score), Poetry slipped into the void on the back of a silver snake, coarse and wet with an endless length.  She was wailing in the rolling ascent, rocking and wailing, gone for good.  Amen.

Poetry was at home in Arkansas.  The electricity went out for days under the hammer of ice and tooth-ache cold, the metallic, Mason-jar lid of an Ozark winter sky.  One cannot breathe under such conditions.  But that was always the plan.  Poetry finds a crack in the most unlikely surface of time and sorrow.  Poetry grows in spite of its harrowing circumstances, and Poetry dies, again and again, with only the slightest degree of change, tiny transformations witnessed in the radical minutia at the atomic level of our genetic selves, where babies gather their heavenly scent, where I will always love you and you will always love me.  Poetry would have it no other way, like a flash of aromatic green at the precise moment the sun disappears below the horizon.  Bring on the night: Poetry sleeps for the promise of a new day.

Poetry once confided in me, from the fat couch in the corner, her wisdom obscured by blue flickering television light reflected in the lenses of her glasses, that she could never cook a meal for just one.  She always made enough for the house, and leftovers like an afterglow for weeks.  Poetry was accessible like that, with an insatiable appetite for the joy that is us, together, around a table, tongues coated in a singular taste, swimming in the warm language of ‘we,’ present and engaged, the greatest care.

God almighty, you will be missed, Brenda Moossy, amen.  My second mother, amen.  You are a treasure, the blessed word itself, amen.  Come back to us as soon as you can.

This evening I ventured down to the St. Kilda Night Market at O’Donell Gardens very near St. Kilda beach.  I was accompanied by Xu Yan, our mutual friend Li Haizheng (English name Ellen), her parents on vacation from Changsha, China, and the unbearable slow death of the Melbourne summer heat.  The purpose of our trip was ostensibly to introduce Ellen to another good friend of mine, Michelle, and one of the co-coordinators of the market itself.  But I think also we all wanted to get out of the house and into the well-known cool night air, the same air we’ve read so much about in numerous passages of verdant fiction.

This was my last Thursday in Melbourne for a long while.  In a few days, Yan and I will leave out for Sydney and then, with my father, who has not yet arrived, on to Adelaide and Perth and many a hiking trail and camping site in between.  So this final trip to St. Kilda was somewhat sentimental for me, as I honestly do not know when I will be able to witness that particular warm, beach-front, hippie spectacle again.  For that matter, I just don’t know when I’ll get the chance to come back to Australia.  My time here is quickly slipping away, and theoretically forever.

Yes, it appears that Yan and I will be making yet another move overseas; a transition of material possessions, currency, and hopes and dreams.  While we both fervently look forward to our new (in my case re-newed) life in Tucson, Arizona, there is more than just a little sorrow that we will be leaving a city and a people that have generally been very good to both of us.  The sadness of this reality would be difficult, to say the least, if I wasn’t already deeply familiar with the tiring process of packing up and starting all over again in a totally different place.  For me, and to a certain extent for Yan as well, this is old hat.  We’ve become accidental experts at not having a place to call home.

Quite frankly, I am thoroughly unsure as to whether or not this move from Australia back to the United States is really a good one for either Yan or myself.  It feels very much like a crap-shoot, a roll of the dice, and this after months and months of careful consideration and earnest conversation wherein we weigh the pros and cons of each culture, the ups and downs of the global economy, the value (or not) of my academic training, including this new Master’s degree, the pull or repulsion of a given natural environment, and the potential — especially the potential, blessed and heavy as it is — for both of us to accomplish the things we want to accomplish in this or that city, state, country, or in our lives as a whole.  It was not an easy choice, coming home, and I still hold many legitimate doubts as to the wisdom of our final decision.

I must say, mainly because the story is conspicuously present in the global media these days and I would be foolish not to address it, that I do take some heart from the recent election of Barack Obama to the office of US president.  While I have not bought in to the messiah-like status many of my fellow countrymen and women have ascribed to this man, I do feel that he at least appreciates the importance (and stress) of a needed change in direction.  The rhetoric is redundant in this regard, and sometimes quite tiresome, but it’s also, I think, especially pertinent to our collective circumstances in these complicated times.

In trying to correct the severe mistakes (I’m being very generous to leave it at that, actually) of the previous eight years, Mr. Obama is of course working on a macro level that extends out into the whole of the human species (I don’t think I’m exaggerating here).  My microscopic, individual little experience is certainly no match for this monumental task, but I do feel a certain resonance and camaraderie and empathy with Obama’s message of ‘change.’  It seems a significant change is coming in myself as well as in my country.  It’s probable that I am not alone here.  A change is coming… for us all.  It’s coming for Michelle and Ellen and her family.  It’s coming for Yan and for me.  It’s coming, and I accept it, even despite my sleepy heart.

This is my prayer:

May I meet the challenges of this and every change with the courage of my forbearers, the bloody razor’s precision of now, and the grace of an unimagined, ungrounded tomorrow… and may I have a little bit of fun in the process.