It is spring of 2017 CE, and, when I am not devastated by the national and international news, I am snared by questions.

I used to be a poet. I still am, but it’s different than it used to be. In the book of shadows and recipes I keep, I find this brief entry: “Poetry is no longer the thing. It is one important thing in this wild, good life.” Those words are dated January 2016. A recipe for Banana Pancakes on the facing page and on the next page after that I penned a note to myself that David Bowie died.

This quote from him stays close to me:

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

In other words, go to the place where you are snared by questions. I used to be a poet. I still am, but it’s different. The passion I feel for poems has not changed. I teach poetry classes here and there. I edit and shape manuscripts for people. In my work as the owner of Odonata, I run classes and retreats, and work one on one, helping people identify and live into their passion (whether for poems or for something else). As I am living mine. Currently I’m passionate about questions. Did I say that?

I know we each have our own best answers, locked away inside, and it only needs a little prodding (and a lot of courage) to unloose them into the world and effect change. The further I go, the more I feel my job is to create spaces for a person to discover her own knowledge and best instincts. We have largely lost the art of listening to our intuition. Who takes the time? Who silences the noise long enough? Maybe this is one of poetry’s gifts to us, in the 21st century.

Because poetry, my first love, my oldest home, is a wild thing, refusing to be tamed or framed. As much as any of the arts, poetry resists the marketplace, insisting on the primacy and unpredictability of gift. Through the experience of a poem, our sense of time is altered, our sense of breath and movement of the body temporarily shifts as we read the words of another. Poetry tunes us to metaphor, which is as close as most of us get these days to being attuned to messages from the non-human world. Poetry cracks us open. In a way that I don’t yet understand a poem is very like a question. More than the teacher, it is the poem that teaches us.

Say Yes

Tiresias swipes right, left, right, there on the bench,
under fairy lights cold in their promises.
His blindness is ours, his thresholds
and transports his own.

No scholars of Greek, my friends
compare Narnia, Middle Earth, Hogwarts.
I say none of those. These doors, right here.
My own adventure.

I will paint in the palette of dreams you forgot,
not some land far far but as close as your eyelid.

Keep awake, keep aware for the gift freely given:
the key, or the goatskin, or sometimes
the body itself (swipe right). Imagine the friend
you haven’t yet met

playing guitar on the couch. Everything thawing,
out of the cold, and people of laughter and patchwork
entering in and out doors that are squarely real.
You can hear them from here.