Sometimes the Work Comes to You
A herd of horses gathered outside my cabin, their hoofbeats steady as a bonfire crackling green logs. At the same time I could hear them bent to the earth, nipping the young grass. It was the wrong season. I wore two sweaters. In my dream, from across the lake, a wolf howled to remind me of a wound left open in the soul. My blood flew with his howl. Then it turned in the air like a flock of pigeons and came back. The wolf sat beside me and watched. I asked to borrow his nose. Caught the scent of decay and followed it to my heart. A ruin of promises I never kept. Lifted a lie and a pup with my eyes looked back. I knew which poem he was, and lowered my hand to feed him. He said it was time to stop writing poems and start living them. A crow cawed in agreement. A squirrel dug up a nut and brought it for courage. I ate it and my eyes became light. When I woke I could still hear the horses grazing. I went out to look and an angry wind blew leaves that bit the ground. The mountain dropped rocks, click-clack, into the valley. No birds at the feeders, ice on the day's tongue. I put on another sweater, thick gloves. My last piece of oak in the woodstove. It was time for work. I sat in the lap of the earth and closed my eyes. The wolf howled and I could feel it in my throat. from Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019)
I read with Ricky Ray — a poet, as you can probably tell, of wonderful tenderness and awareness — at Harvard Divinity School many months ago now, and maybe it is because of the early autumn light, the welcome-warmth of the dawn sun on a cool morning, or the sharpness of the sky’s blue in the late afternoon when I leave work, that I am thinking of his work now.
And maybe, too, it is because I am reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony with my AP Literature class, a novel where Silko tells the story of Tayo, a mixed-race veteran moving through the world in search of healing. In one moment, Silko writes of Tayo meeting with Ku’oosh, a healer who tells Tayo that the world is fragile. Silko then writes:
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spiderwebs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.
And, too, in that same gorgeous novel, Silko writes:
Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind…So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences.
I think of Ricky Ray’s poetry when I think of both of these moments in Silko’s novel. Even today’s poem’s title — “Sometimes the Work Comes to You” — is a kind of recognition of what Silko’s Josiah states in Ceremony, that “only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves.” I don’t think Ricky Ray’s poetry resists what it sees outside of itself. I think it welcomes it. The work comes to it.
In one of his poems, “Read Slowly,” from The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, Ray writes:
Because every day we turn a page, and a little less of our story awaits us.
I think one response to this kind of recognition — a recognition of our limited time — in our current moment is a kind of urgency to make the most of time, as if time is a thing, like almost anything we encounter these days, that we think could be made the most of. But I think Ricky Ray responds to this notion as a recognition of temporality and frailty, and then offers life, as a result of such temporality and frailty, a real sense of presence and care. Read slowly, he urges us. In the middle of today’s poem, Ricky Ray illustrates that sentiment with the line He said it was time to stop writing poems and start living them. It’s a line that reaches out toward what is different than the world of humans, a line that makes the case that a poem should be of this world, a line that allows the page to be a thing that can be turned, expanded, and lived upon. It allows the page to be the world. The lines that follow, playful and mystical and lovely, echo that idea:
A crow cawed in agreement. A squirrel dug up a nut and brought it for courage. I ate it and my eyes became light.
What I notice most of all in this poem today is an expansiveness that opens and continues to open as we live inside the poem. As the poem moves, it becomes more of itself, which is to say it becomes the world. Think of these moments:
In my dream, from across the lake, a wolf howled to remind me of a wound left open in the soul. My blood flew with his howl.
The wolf sat beside me and watched. I asked to borrow his nose.
Lifted a lie and a pup with my eyes looked back. I knew which poem he was, and lowered my hand to feed him.
A squirrel dug up a nut and brought it for courage. I ate it and my eyes became light.
In each of these moments, the speaker of Ray’s poem is becoming part of the world. He is playing with it, asking things of it, wearing it, sitting in it, and, perhaps as a result, becoming light. And, in each of these moments, the poem itself is treating the natural world as something sacred, a living poem (I knew which poem he was). By the time the poem ends, the speaker is so intertwined with the world that he has refused to resist it. When it is time to work — whatever work means — he sits “in the lap of the earth.” There is a sense here, an argument, that we can only do our most worthwhile labor in recognition not of the humanity that might exist in all that surrounds us, but rather of the beauty and worth. Our humanity is our own; I think we often make it the world’s, too, rather than recognizing the value in the world that does not have to be centered around humans. Once we recognize that value, we extend our humanity toward it, rather than co-opting it, and we learn from it, and become better for it.
That same work is at play throughout so much of Ricky Ray’s work. In one of his poems, “Family,” he writes:
I think the stars out there are in here, under my ribs, which are no longer mine but the body of some great heaving that holds us together
It’s that move of gentleness, that little addendum — which are no longer mine — that I learn from in Ray’s work. It’s a move that subverts that common trope: we are made of stars. In that trope is a kind of individualism, a way of specializing our bodies rather than seeing them, as Ricky Ray does, as part of the body / of some great heaving. Ray’s desire to place us collectively in the world reminds me of Leslie Marmon Silko’s passage above, where she writes: It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone. No word exists alone. No human. No oak tree. No rooted thing, growing between the cracks. No sky, no bird flying through it. I am reminded, too, of a favorite Denis Johnson poem that I’ve talked about often in these little essays, where Johnson writes:
If I am alive now, it is only to be in all this making all possible. I am glad to be finally a part of such machinery.
That gladness at being a part of something rather than separate from something — it’s a beautiful gladness. It is the gladness of looking out windows, of wildly blue skies, of murmuring birds. It is a gladness that I recognize this time of year, as the air begins to cool and enlivens me. I want to be in the world, among it, glad to be a part of it.
I am so struck by the title of today’s poem. I found myself saying it to myself the other day, riding my bike in Central Park, swooping downhill before the steady incline of Harlem Hill. I shook my head at the feel of rise, and clicked through the gears. My body was a little rusty in the early dawn. My breath caught a bit, and I took in more air. Sometimes the work comes to you, I thought. And it does. The hill doesn’t move, I know, but the feeling of ascending it arrives in the body like warmth or even light. You learn about it as you move with it. The work comes to you the way a word does, the way Leslie Marmon Silko says, with great patience and even love.
In a culture, especially, that manufactures work out of nothing, the title of this poem today is a welcome reminder. I think of how David Graeber writes:
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.
So much of our lives use the language of work, and, especially, the new language of work. Data and metrics and deliverables. We fit things in. We compete. We make, even out of our leisure, the stress of doing something with our time. Self-betterment is the same as self-optimization, and this process, too, has become a kind of work. We strive toward this work. We make work out of blue sky days. We do this so often. I know I do. And so it is welcome to be reminded that the work can come to me, and that this work is often more generous than the work I make out of the blue sky world, the work I manufacture out of thin air.
There must be a real consequence to this kind of life, in how it makes us unsettled, judgmental of our own selves, unable to heal or cherish peace when we’ve found peace. And so I think, too, that I have found myself thinking a lot about what it means to heal, and about how healing might come to us as well. I have been thinking about what it means to sit with something and to allow it to grow inside of you rather than resist it. About seeing what happens in that allowance. I am living now in these months of waiting, seeing how my body responds to injury, seeing if it grows worse or better or stays the same. Waiting is healing work. Living, too, is healing work. Just breathing some days is a kind of healing. I think that so much of our talk of healing these days has to do with eliminating, with fighting. Something invades or changes the body, and it must be fought and destroyed. Self-optimization sometimes seems like a war we wage against ourselves, and, as such, so much of our lives — even the long days of healing — are spent in violence. This is heavy work, I think. It takes a toll to live in this language of violence, to have it embedded in our talk not just of war but also of healing. It is everywhere. When does peace come? That gentle work that wanders to us?
I think it comes in the everyday. In the mornings in Central Park, sometimes — so often, actually — the trees smell like nutmeg. I’ll be biking through a stretch of the park, and it will stun and surprise me, this nose-full of spice, as if buckets of it were being poured out for display along the side of the road. I smile always, and I think of a kitchen, or bread baking somewhere. I think of cookies, or the glaze on top of a just baked pie. I’m surprised by my joy. I try to hang on to it. I think this is a kind of healing that happens everyday. Sometimes so much comes to us. Work; peace; love; joy; healing. It does so with the calm grace of a horse standing in the middle of a field. The kind of thing you feel lucky about when you see. You reach your hand out, upturned, and hope it comes even closer.
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Thank you for this post. An amazing soulful journey.
"There must be a real consequence to this kind of life, in how it makes us unsettled, judgmental of our own selves, unable to heal or cherish peace when we’ve found peace. And so I think, too, that I have found myself thinking a lot about what it means to heal, and about how healing might come to us as well. I have been thinking about what it means to sit with something and to allow it to grow inside of you rather than resist it.' What a poem, dreamlike but infused with the hard knowing of how we resist our dreams and pummel our reality with resistance. Thank you.