What Takes a Year and a Day

Back at the beginning of the year 2000, I was studying with a women's spirituality group and had, in the course of that study, all sorts of projects handed to me to complete, all manner of things to examine. In that first month of the new millennium--everything so strange, no one accustomed yet to dating their checks with this odd new century--the assignment came through to undertake a pilgrimage, following that same worn path taken by so many spiritual seekers through so many spiritual traditions. I remember the day I got that assignment: it was a bright, cold, January afternoon, and I was shivering in the room where I wrote in those years, a room with stone floors and windows on two sides. I looked out one of them at the sun reflecting off the snow; I looked at the thermometer, which hadn't gotten out of the teens for a week. I decided that it was too damned cold to even think about taking off anywhere, and for that reason, thought to myself that maybe I could make my own pilgrimage an interior one.

And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.

And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.


Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.

I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.

I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.

But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.

Five Pieces From This Sunday

1.

The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.

2.

I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?

3.

Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.

4.

Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.

5.

Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.

We Walk

...these nights, the dog and I, through the lowering autumn, through winter's coffin, through breathless spring, and latest of all we walk through the summer nights, deep in the dark, long after the last light of the sun has gone. We walk, and through the month the moon comes and goes, and comes again, and Orion hunts what we cannot see, and eventually stalks off to where we cannot see him.

I wonder what it is he is after.

On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.

We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.

There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...

Stories in Three Winter Voices

Frau Holle:

If you're a brave enough girl to jump into the well,
I'll send you back home with a story to tell
About what it's like, life with me here below:
How we tended the hearth, and tended the bread,
And saw to the orchard, and changed the bed,
And shook out the bedding to bring down the snow.
You can tell how you loved me, who is fearsome and old.
When you're ready to leave, you'll go laden with gold.

Tomte:

The tomte comes, the tomte comes!
Set out the porridge, warm up your drums,
And dance at your leisure on this, my own land.
Be merry at Christmas with pudding and plums,
Set aside your old hardships--the tomte comes!

The tomte comes! The tomte is here!
I'll fatten your pigs and help brew your beer,
I'll see to your mares, your best stablehand.
Let go of your worries before the new year:
Though winter is frightful, the tomte is here!

Knecht Ruprecht

Always remember how quickly I can
Get into your house that dark winter's night,
With ashes above me and ashes below,
With ashes to cover me, I creep in
And can see who's good, who's not, and who might,
Most benefit from getting a birch-rod blow...

Which brings me to my stick.

It's a curious thing, how that magical stick
Can show me the whole year just gone away,
And whether a child has been good or not,
Whether he's earned a gift, and the right to stay
In his bed, in his home. But if not...?

Well, and that brings me to my sack.

You see how it's empty, spun of rough cloth,
And I only use it to carry off
The worst of the worst, those who have stayed bad all year.
(If that is not you, you have nothing to fear.)
Heed well the Knight Rupert, heed well Ashen Nick!