November Gratitude Post #9: Words

I am obsessed with these arbitrary combinations of sounds and letter-shapes that stand for things--

photo by the author

—these tools which can be used for the most basic of human survival (help!) and for the most abstract magic of life (shazam!). Words are a shadow of the thing itself—which, when we look and play with them also come to life as things.*
​
In autumn with all the maple leaves falling and their ghost-shadows staining the sidewalks, I cannot resist this mental mantra—two lines from a life-changing poem that play in my head:

“For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf.”**

As a writer, I get the special privilege to play in the realm of giving a second life to words, which is of course a second life to my own first life.***

I live a life that dwells in the world of words, and I love it.****
For this I am so, so grateful.

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* “Literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.”
― Mary Oliver

** Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish (poem copied in full, below). My college poetry professor (shout out to Richard Kenney!) had us read this poem—a metaphoric how-to poem within a poem. 

*** attributed to good old Ms. Natalie Goldberg who famously said that “…writers live twice.”

****Except when I hate it—which I sometimes do.
​(The mantra in my head when I hate it sounds like a line from Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry:”
“I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle…”  
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/poetry

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Ars Poetica
BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

A poem should be palpable and mute   
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless   
As the flight of birds.
                         *               
A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   
Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs.
                         *               
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

A poem should not mean   
But be.

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