Simply to Make Lists

This morning I resolved to ride my bike- just in the neighborhood, to check its alignment before I frighten drivers on busier streets. But now rain streaks my windows and drools out of the gutters, so I sit squinting at IRS forms and thinking of poetry.

You asked why I don't write more poems.

Quite actually, you didn't, but there I've beaten you to it,

and in bending the truth thus, accomplished that subtle

weave of fact and feeling that I associate with poetry.

But I undid the threads. The truth is, I have internalized Rilke

when he said that perhaps we are here simply to make lists:

House. Bridge. Fountain. Gate. Pitcher. Apple tree. Window.

To say things as they are in their integrity, without embellishment.

So every night at 9:50 I add to a list: Train going by in the dark.

Small singers' hugs. Kitchen table. Two hawks. Dent in my car.

One huge arched cloud trail. Skeletal trees.

I notice the way the rain envelopes and becomes the sky, content to sink through the earth and change its form, abandoning flight and keeping me indoors, where I sit like a reservoir of simple things, making my lists (when I ought to be doing my taxes). Rilke says we ought to speak the lists aloud or write them: as the most fitting beginner’s form of poetry. “There are the hurts,” he writes. “And, always, the hardships. And there’s the long knowing of love – all of it unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see: these are better unsaid.” So I write: the soft way light reaches through the window to rest in stripes on a girl’s brown hair during church. A friend talking about Paris. Unexpected meetings and free food and my hand out the window to feel the warming air and, of all things, Call Me Maybe on 95.5.

These are no more than fragments that I, in listing them, weave into a body. Rilke, again: “And the things which, even as they live, pass on – understand that we praise them. Transient, they are trusting us to preserve them – us, the most transient of all. As if they wanted our hearts to transform them into – o endlessly – into us. Whatever we are.”

I cannot yet call that transformation Poetry. I slowly fulfill my human duty to name things, but it is ironic that I have no name for the Opus that results. There is great and solemn joy in the mystery. To all the spoken and word-upheld world, I say: be.