I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly
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In the early 90's, tumbling into an exciting new romance, I spent the better part of two afternoons typing my favorite poems into the computer at the research lab where I worked at OHSU. I still remember some of them: Curiosity, by Alastair Reid; Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden. There must have been at least a dozen. I couldn't wait to share them with my hazel-eyed crush, for him to "get" them like I had, for us to form a deeper connection around those living, pulsing words.
I printed the poems out one by one, and presented them in a bundle, tied with a ribbon.
A few days later, fizzy with anticipation, I asked him what he had thought of them. "Oh, those," he said. "I haven't gotten around to them yet." He saw the flicker in my eyes. "I'll read them soon. I will. Really."
He didn't, and I swallowed my disappointment, but I couldn't fathom why he hadn't pounced on the poems and gobbled them up like candy. I gave similar gifts to others, later - a book of Rumi, a slender volume of Pablo Neruda - always hoping that the object of my affection would be struck by the same line, the same turn of phrase, that I had been.
It took years before I finally realized that the person I wanted to send poetry to was myself.
That the "you" in the poems I loved most was the "you" of the self I was in the process of discovering. That tiptoeing into the depths of such a poem was like stepping closer to meeting Me.
Kind of like a romance: Heart-pounding. Scary. Thrilling.
The poem above is just such a piece.
Where I am folded, there I am a lie.
Yes.
Exactly.
!
