Surface, surface, surface
There are times in one’s life, I should think, when writing is simply out of the question. For example, working on a B-314 submarine would be one of those instances for me, the claustrophobia alone making it impossible to concentrate on anything other than the enormous pressure of water all around the tiny metal tube in which I found myself, incessant clanking and bubbling noises, sonar hitting pieces of the Titanic or trash left by Jacques Cousteau, all those small cell-like berthing areas that provide no more than 15 square feet of space per person for sleep and personal belongings, without windows, that forward torpedo room waiting to ignite under the heat of the pressure, living in a 300-foot long, 30-foot wide, three-story building with no windows and surrounded by technology, displacing 6,900 tons on the surface and 7,200 tons when submerged, but I digress.
So, I think it’s fair to say that submarine writing is out.
Writing in the hospital is out, what with the incessant blood pressure checks and code blues and nervousness about what fresh hell might appear next in the hallway. I’d say writing in the bathtub is somewhat limited, given that a laptop pretty exponentially increases the risk of electrocution and legal pads tend to get limp in steam. State Fair ferris wheel writing might be tricky, too. And library writing is so often interrupted by all those silent readers all around you.
But I’m not in a submarine right now, nor in the hospital or a steaming bath or balancing in a rocking bucket above the prize-winning rhubarb jam and pet hogs. I’m not able to write just now because – well, probably for many reasons – but the one I’m most keenly, excruciatingly aware of at the moment is that it is approximately nine kajillion degrees in my unairconditioned house during a heat wave of massive proportions, a humid, sticky, grumpy heat wave that produces sweat that actually hurts its wearer. I don’t do well in such heat; if the sorry truth were known, I become a madwoman demanding that my family eat nothing hotter than 2% Fage yogurt, ice cubes, and pistachio ice cream for dinner in silence, since words are too hot.
And so, in lieu of a 37days essay this week that is the work of a sweatific lunatic, two extraordinary poems sent yesterday by a dear old friend, poems of Elinor Wylie in the 1920s, a poet who died young, writing only for seven years. And such a gift she left us from those 2,555 days.
Here’s to cooler weather, sea voyages above the waves and not below, bubble baths sans writing implements, and a few poems for you to ponder. I’ll be back when the temperatures dip into the 80s.
Three Wishes
Sink out of being, and go down, go down
Through the steep layers of emerald and jade
With warm thin skin of turquoise overlaid,
Where the slow coral spins a ghostly town
Of tower and minaret and fretted crown,
Give up your breath in sleep’s subaqueous shade,
Hold to oblivion; are you afraid
Of cold deep death? Are you afraid to drown?
You have three flashing looks, like fairy wishes;
One burns your eyelids with a lightning-wink
Which turns into a rainbow world, and one
Shows sea-birds brighter than the silver fishes,
And one – the last wild chance before you sink –
A flock of dancing clouds about the sun.
Elinor Wylie, 1923
Atavism
I was always afraid of Some’s pond:
Not the little pond, by which the willow stands,
Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands
In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond.
There, when the frost makes all the birches burn
Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines
Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines,
Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn.
You’ll say I dream it, being the true daughter
Of those who in old times endured this dread.
Look! Where the lily-stems are showing red
A silent paddle moves below the water,
A sliding shape has stirred them like a breath;
Tall plumes surmount a painted mask of death.
Elinor Wylie, 1920
