The Conversation

So many things happen in the form of conversation. I think of marriage as a long conversation between two lives. A garden as the conversation between the gardener and the earth. A long friendship, a conversation of shared trials that spans seasons, deepens. I am grateful for these conversations and for the way they define my life, pave the path I walk, plant flowers beside it. If I had not shared my life with the same best friend for the past forty-odd years, I don’t know if I would be able to look back as easily, track where I come from and how I got here: the men I’ve been drawn to, and the ones I wish I’d wanted; the dreams I’ve realized or buried, the ways I take the world more personally than I should.

If I didn’t hold a conversation with the page, I’m not sure I would keep myself as honest about my triumphs and failings, be able to take stock of years well-lived or spent aimless. When I write a poem, I always want to know what lurks beneath the surface of my initial telling. And then I want to know what’s under that. It’s like picking up stones and finding underneath the story I always told myself, some other story, and then another. The world keeps opening itself, rock by rock. If I write long enough, can the stories disappear, altogether? What comes after a story?

What I love about these conversations is that they don’t end. The questions they raise reverberate in the tunnel between this world and another. Even when someone dies, I keep talking to them. With them, even. Listening for an answer in the silence, sometimes hearing it.

The conversation on the page is similar. I hear the echo of my former self when I read a poem I wrote years ago. Or when I read a poet I read when I was young. Reading Rilke’s Elegies will always bring back a certain apartment in Berkeley where I studied with my first teacher and he read the Ninth Elegy aloud in class, leaving us to ponder whether Things exist in order to be named, spoken into being.

When I think of faith, I think of my long conversation with the wind.  When I sit and feel it blowing against my cheek, I feel accompanied. Whatever happens, there is always the wind––sometimes benign, sometimes a force that can lift the house off its foundation. But it is not stagnant. It is movement, which is life.

And today I am grateful for these conversations, and so many others. For the way the long conversation of life leads me into more knowing, more unknowing, a broader view, a wider field. I love that teaching allows me to sit with the big questions, inviting others in.

What conversations do you most treasure? And what conversations do you wish to begin?

I wish you the blessing of conversations with flowers, the wild ones that grow behind your house: dandelion, lupine, wild radish; with the light that drops behind the hillside at the close of day; with your favorite tree; your best friend; with your own dear, patchwork of a heart.

Addendum:

And speaking of conversations, I hope will treasure with me this conversation I had with poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield, (printed in the September/October 2023 issue of Poets &Writers Magazine). I almost didn’t mention it, but then I realized how it’s a natural tributary of this conversation about conversations and I thought of how much I want to share Hirshfield’s questioning and presence with you. It’s called The Tiny, Immense and Immeasurable Gift, a line lifted from her description of the wonder of poetry in her life.