being pearled

       On the impulse of a morning, I yesterday put five poems into an envelope and sent them off, with an appropriate letter of introduction, to meet the editors of a magazine.   Likely they’ll come back to me in a month or two, with a typed encouragement to introduce them to other people — someone might like them!  (Maybe I’m scarred from last summer’s rejection slip: a pale green half-sheet bearing a medieval woodcut of Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head onto a platter and beginning with the admonition “Don’t lose your head –”  Editors ought to learn tact.)  
       In any case, as though in acknowledgement of my sacrifice of poems, the mailbox today produced a volume of poetry for me: Luci Shaw’s Water Lines.  (In point of fact, no longer having a college library outside my back door, I ordered the book last week to encourage myself to write.)   It is a slim volume, with a simple beige cover, and the poems on its pages are familiar to me, for I used to read them from the library copy at school, and, before that, read them in the volume a friend loaned to me.  (It was the week I had my wisdom teeth out, and I don’t believe I absorbed much of the poetry then.  Mostly, I remember the clean, herbal, soapy smell that particular volume carried.)  And so this afternoon I carried my book through splotchy sunshine under trees to a chair on a porch beside a pond, and there I sat, and there I read.
       For me, to read poetry is to be still, perhaps more still than in anything else.  Other reading carries you in one direction or another; you follow an argument or a story line.  But in poetry, the best way is to sit and let the images wash over you.   Though the poem is familiar, each reading brings something new: the way the drips gather and catch light before falling off the tip of your nose; some image filling a wrinkle that, last reading, you didn’t have; the pattern of water spots on the front of your shirt.  The poem allows you to experience an instant of time in slow motion, to feel each particle of the splash, to see each glint of light, to think of all of the associations that came and went with the moment.  I slow down when I read a poem; breathe deeply; come away refreshed.
       And so, of course, I have now to share a poem with you.  It is not my favorite in the book; no, I had not noticed it really, until today.  But today I noticed, and call it good:

Conch

Its open mouth corresponds
to your own hunger to hear.
Rough as the bleat
of gulls, its edges
rasp your cheek, cold as salt;
the surge of sound floods
into your own convoluted
shell of an ear
through tympanum, stapes, cochlea.

You lean into the roar — a tide
of air and water trapped
at the shell’s pink, helical heart –
an ocean tumbled over
and over.  Breath still moves
on the face of the deep;
you ache to its
tempest at your cheekbone.
And the inside tremor — the thunder,
the wave that breaks over
more than your bare feet.

Listen deep until it owns you.
Know the whole world
a shell, and you the grit
caught in it, being pearled over.
-Luci Shaw, Water Lines, 2003