I wake to a voice saying, Winter came & left her feathers everywhere.

A light dusting of snow has fallen, the first snow of the season, and with it a beneficence has left me this one line poem. I rise, do the necessary morning ablutions, return to the bed, and write in fits and starts. The line feels like it has its own destiny and I don’t know what that is.

The next day and the next, I force myself to get up and go directly to my studio, to the desk. I’ve been away for months now and the only way back is to ruthlessly dedicate myself. The effort is awkward, but I am starting to catch the faint scent of liberation, which is to say, I will disappear and only the writing will be left.

My husband has been experiencing his own struggle. He’s stuck in a painting. He doesn’t have to tell me, I see it in his face. And I can tell he’d like me to take a look, though he won’t ask.

A second snowstorm arrives, settles, departs. The day is sparkling, sky-filled. My husband has gone on a morning ski in the nearby mountains. I go to my studio, select a small box of oil crayons, and in my bare feet cross the cold outdoor flagstone of the courtyard to his studio. On the wall hangs the problematic painting, its chalky ripple of brush strokes, the pale cobalt blue and slashes of black. I consider the oil crayons. On the long table where he lays out his materials, I see the carousel of variously tinted inks. I love magenta. I want to eat it. I pick up the bottle, unscrew the top. I look back at the painting. An area in the top right, cloudy with swaths of titanium, suggests itself. I climb the wood platform my husband has constructed beneath the painting to extend his reach. I lift the nub of magenta ink. Then, thinking the better of it, lower myself from the platform, put the ink away, and go shuffling my fingers in a blonde box the size of my palm, full of graphite. Slender graphite, like friendly dark snakes momentarily stiffened for this use. I climb back on the platform and write in large loose free letters, WINTER CAME AND LEFT HER FEATHERS EVERYWHERE.

I let the words sift down through the air of the canvas.

I go to my desk and, for several hours, write.

When I finish, my husband is in the kitchen making a fried egg sandwich with tomato and avocado. I say, “So, what do you think?” He answers in a way that is emotionally elsewhere, neither grateful nor resentful. “It made the painting better,” he says. I look at him. My question has pivoted his outer gaze from the sandwich to the inner world of the painting. For several seconds, his mind is in the painting’s landscape and he is alone in the snowfall of its forest, at the same time that he is fully awake and betting on his instincts to find the way out.

He turns back to the sandwich. I go on my walk.

It is a two-mile walk along a dirt road that ribbons the mesa. I am the small movement of a down vest the color of a river in winter beneath the magnificence of the mountain. I tuck my gloved hands in my pockets, move my legs along in their boots, breathe the cold air of early December. Half way through the walk I stop. My body makes this decision without consulting my mind. I am thinking about the recent election. I find myself looking hard at the mountain, as though for an answer. No answer, but it comes to me that the mountain, this sacred mountain, will outlast human ignorance, no matter what.

I think about the one line poem. I think about the movement of feathers that often appears in my husband’s paintings. I think about the birds that frequent our courtyard, how my husband keeps the feeders full and the birdbath shimmering with clean water, even in winter. I think about the snow that fell in the night, twice.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Shortly after the election, I reread Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Reading Rankine is entering an unflinching commitment to truth, as such it grounds and gives courage.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Write. Trust your instincts and get to know your own rhythms. Read the greats of all eras and gain a feel for your natural place in the lineages. Find someone with whom to share your work, someone who has a fundamental appreciation for your writing and whose opinion you respect. 

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I write by hand first, which is probably not unusual for a poet. Maybe five years ago, I began to notice an urge, every spring, to write using color ink. By summer, I was content with black or blue again, but late March found me writing in green, pink, purple, red, turquoise, etc. Then, following a cataclysmic event in my life, I began feeling a need to write in color inks across the seasons. Every day, a different color, never the same color twice in a row.

~

By Sawnie Morris:

O

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

January 1, 2017: Sawnie Morris

I discovered the poetry of Sawnie Morris in Poets & Writers. Her debut collection, Her, Infinite, won the New Issues Poetry Prize (after being a finalist in fifteen other contests) and was published in March of last year when Sawnie was 61.

If we are called to write–and love is the true measure of any calling–then it is joyful duty, even in struggle.

Major Jackson, who selected Her, Infinite as the winning manuscript, described the collection as “a ceremony of tantalizing music.” The experiences underlying the poems occurred during the years in which Sawnie and her husband founded and were working for an environmental-advocacy organization–with the oldest poems in the collection dating to the mid 1990s and the most recent to 2012. Given the current political situation, I’m especially proud that Sawnie will start this series off for the new year.

I adore the following description of the book, which I found on the Bookworks site:

Her, Infinite performs a metaphysical, yet-grounded-in-daily-life ceremony in which the magical properties of language meet with political action. The poems enact a healing, with the poet as note-taker and celebrant, making her way through a labyrinth that begins with community action, conceived in mythic terms, spirals though the intimacies of erotic love and friendship under environmental peril, and returns after a descent that involves self-confrontation as well as surrender to the invisible forces that guide our lives. The speaker in these poems takes the reader on a search for a worldview that can hold both beauty and terror, while singing in praise of creation.

One of the poems in the collection that I keep thinking about is “Cochiti Lake, 1989.” (Click on the link for the full version.) The lines below come after the “I” of the poem goes into the lake for a swim and then invites “you” in with her.

We didn’t know about “impairment,” (the available options). The list:
&nbsp where we could no longer swim,
&nbsp where and what we could no longer drink.
We didn’t know about “fluctuating temperature” or “vectors for pathogens.”
We didn’t know about “turbidity,” about “incident light”
and what it might mean to be
&nbsp “scattered or absorbed” in sediments. What it might mean

Hettie Jones writes about this poem:

Drawn immediately to the imagery in Sawnie Morris’s poem, upon second look I thought that what held me most was its rhythm, the sure line, how the poem used the space on the page to lead the reader in. But as I read “Cochiti Lake, 1989” over and over (aloud, too), I decided that even though all these accomplishments proved unfailingly true, what finally makes this poem work so well, and why I find it so deserving, is its own living presence, its connecting of the personal with the political, the singular to the plural, how it reaches from one breathing body to another. 

Toward the end of the poem, there’s this line that still gives me chills:

I, too was once “highly mobile in water.”

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how SAWNIE MORRIS spends her days.