Mushing & Poetry: More on the Trail to Braeburn

I think about that conversation with Brian as a gift we afforded ourselves, an opportunity for discovery. If it truly couldn’t have transpired anywhere else, at any other time (as I’m certain it couldn’t have), then it was a happy accident wrought from long-suffering patience in the respective planning of our races, the training of our dogs, our own personal accommodations & contortions in service of endurance & cold & solitude. We had submitted ourselves to the trail, to its slow vector through that endless landscape, & in carving out the space for the encounter through a magnitude of work & commitment & passion, it was permitted to be. 

I think of a poem, a successful poem, the same way. I have a cardboard box of things I’ve written that I will never revise, never call back into my thinking life, because they succeeded only in existing, in providing me the practice a craft demands in order to create that rare thing that breathes. A ditch choked with leaves browning & brittle, & one still hung upon the bough, aureate & streaked with a bold vermillion. & what I’ve written that succeeds according to my own rubric is a painfully slim handful of lines. Consider Keats’ wastebasket, for Christ’s sake. Hopkins’ journals. Consider every perfect line Ben Gocker unbannered into the air, drunk on the fire escape, while the rest of us strove & failed & knew better than to do anything but listen. Every word carried off by the breeze. Joseph Buoys’ chalkboard. 

Those encounters, though, with beauty or with truth or with what is of genuine meaning in our lives, whatever the permutation, are provided for only after the tireless efforts directed into their cultivation. No yield without the prior exertions. I’ve seen enough how slow commitment forged in patience brings about the things most indelibly & enduringly precious to us. A homestead in a swatch of boreal forest. The heart’s dearest & deepest affections. Our children growing through the years. 

& the thing of it is that if I think of those transactions with the world wherein I felt all of its electric humming & the full force of its grandeur, they were at the end of labors that dropped me over the edges of every known map. In moving to Alaska & burrowing into my sorrow, I found the capacity to love. In training thousands of miles with puppies who became yearlings who became full-fledged athletes over the years, I readied myself for the Quest & all that it represented. Those voyages that we find transportative are so rarely executed extemporaneously. They follow the stories of the grief or love or abandonment or joy that compel them, through every winding chapter, & honor the process of slow discovery along the way. I think of Williams:

THE WHOLE PROCESS is a lie 

unless,

                                           crowned by excess,

it breaks forcefully,

                 one way or another,

                                           from its confinement –

or find a deeper well.

                 Antony and Cleopatra

                                           were right;

they have shown

                the way. I love you

                                       or I do not live

at all.

The excess here is the willingness to abandon the script, the choice to immerse oneself in whatever it is that comes next, over the cusp, beyond the last known form skylighted against the horizon. It is an opening out, an embrace of alterity. An investigation into meaning that does not settle for perfunctory definition. 

There is much to be said for the necessity of an ethical underpinning to such an enterprise. Levinas liked the phrase “amphibology of otherness,” & I like it for the way its precision lies in its vagaries, its meaning a compass pointing toward its futurity, its application. That first step down the path of the successful poem, that pulling of the hook under the start line, that tentative embrace of the person who will become the love of your life, they are all queries made in faith, coiled propositions that will attain to life & grow until they demand that life attain to them. But we never know, not at first, our breath held & our fingers crossed. Every poem begins with one word in a sea of blank space. What a proposition that is. 

& so the same way a poem makes room for its revelations (themselves shifting infinitely from reader to reader) (including the writer upon being rendered reader), our efforts toward our dreaming establish a space wherein we are forged irreducibly with what is meaningful to us, or what will be. Life without access to such spaces is a stasis I do not enjoy, a cave with no flame where even the bright spark of memory pales & dulls. Nothing easy is worth doing, we always say. It’s those moments shining fulgent & brilliant in the middle of a thousand miles, in the middle of the thousandth poem, that keep you attenuated, there in the snow, under the firmament at sixty below.