All births are messy. At the moment of cleaving, the instinctive desire for sterility and restraint vanishes and what’s left is raw, jagged, and as destructive as it is life-giving. We weep, scream, tear our hair, lash out. Properly tucked-in personhood gives way to elemental humanity: getitoutgetitoutgetitout.
The birth of art is the same way. I have carried the heaviness of hurt like lead on my back, like Sisyphus scooting his tushie up that same damned hill with that same damned rock, every day and a hundred days after that. I’ve beaten that lump of lead. Stomped on it, screamed at it, buried it in the backyard at the full moon with eye of newt. By the next morning, it was again on my back, the dead weight of being alive when you don’t particularly want to be.
It wasn’t always the doing of cosmic unfairness, to be perfectly honest. Sometimes I made a pet out of that lump of lead. I held it close on hard, lonely nights, feeling my baby move inside me — it was better than the terror that chuckled and rustled the leaves outside my bedroom window. Sometimes I took grim comfort in my martyrdom, in the aches and terrible fatigue, in the soul-scorching isolation I forced on myself for a pregnancy that made me stand toe-to-toe with shame.
All that heaviness was never wasted. The lump I thought was punishment for my sins, for my wandering from the path of my expected life and then wreaking absolute havoc in the pockets of peace I found there, out of hurt and fear and the dizzy dementedness of love, was actually potential — base metal waiting for fire. Every time I picked up a pen, or told the truth, or simply kept breathing past the pit in my chest, the lead softened. It didn’t vanish, but it began to change. I began to change.
I didn’t necessarily become happy – not all the time. Not even much of the time. I had lost too much that mattered too much, and the future grew weightier by the day – literally, as evidenced by my growing belly. But I started hearing my own voice again. That lump of lead began to sparkle sometimes in the corner of my eye. And then, the poetry tiptoed out from folded-over book pages and mugs of tea gone cold. It whispered to me in inconvenient moments that left me snatching for my notebook. Poetry has always come to me fully-formed, and so in the middle of the workday:
Beloved
Shall I die for you?
I have held a living death
On tiptoe
Then by the throat,
I have held it for you this long:
Arms trembling,
A subversion of desire to will.
You took my future, smiling,
Winding it round a spool, rocking
In your chair by the hearth:
For safekeeping, you said.
One move to rise and you dropped it into the flames.
I have no name and I have no hope,
But I have a friend.
The black thing smiling with teeth like blades
Holds my hand;
His name is Rage,
Beloved.
It left me breathless – and the fires of rage at betrayal, at force, at subversion of will to desire (yes, I saw what I’d written, and it burned) were, momentarily, banked.
They came back, but they came leading truths by the hand. Truths that unspooled themselves into words, words that curled softly into rhyme and rhythm. I began to create.
I still carry that heaviness, but it’s no longer entirely lead. There are cracks where it sparkles with the unmistakable purity of gold. I carried it through the fire – I carried myself through the fire – and the raw, ugly perfection of newborn beauty is what remains.
This is what remains.
Into Idlewild 