HarveySarles.com

Sitting here, casting far and wide, searching my innermost mind’s word-generation centers, translated into scratches upon paper – it seems difficult to believe that I often lack words.

Not usually in mornings, but often after a long day’s interactions in intensity, trying to relate the day to spouse or friends or even to myself…I seem to have no words.

Now trying to recall the sense of being word-bereft, I sit here fairly confident, a large orange pen in hand, dictionaries and thesauruses in the next room waiting just in case I need a word.

I am full to brimming with the ordinary, the range of words searching not for words, but for just the right word, the perfect word, that word which says it all.

At other times, though, too intense, too many scenes and persons and interpretations, understandings – feelings flash in and out of mind’s eyes and ears, not stopping to say more than a brief, “Hello,” I cannot seem to find hardly any words at all.

Lacking words, I could not write…and do not try at those times when, lacking words, I have not much to say, nor any way to try.

A set of other characters emerge in hard times, in down times. Some adjust, and do, and wait. Some fight: old battles in new wars. Others over-see; and some reform.

Reform! Re-form? To truly re-form: my mind’s pre-occupation, requires a sense and knowledge and good will and strength and timing… and… and…What is to re-form: to take some image of what there is and how it worked – once – and alter the structure in order to preserve the image? And, to hope that it will work, once more. Will it work – to re-form?  Is that image of the structure which once worked, does that image really depict the form which is to be altered, or was it some story which was good enough to account… as long as it was working?

To re-form is to avoid re-thinking, to place faith in that past when things went right. To re-form is to take the same knights and centurions – now grown old – to grant them some discipleship, some belief still in their own powers, and to send them out on new day’s dawning to assert that it is a new day. Are they convinced? And, we?

Now, years later, she confessed that she had thought, for a long time, that John Berryman was some sort of fake. The great thinker-poet, who used to orate and make pronouncements beyond the reality she felt to be possible, who was actual, turned her off.

He was, she thought, all talk, mostly pretension. He, trying to grapple with life and death and death within life, was trying with all his might to state what he felt he must, pronouncing what he saw. He didn’t like life always or even all that often. Now, years later, she confessed that she only became convinced that he was serious, to be weightily considered, when he actually took his life.

What testimony to a poet’s life that he must commit suicide to convince her that he was real, after all?

(And if he was not real…?)

Winter sunset’s light’s low angles illuminate the land and buildings from the top down. Light, gone from the ground where darkness has settled, staying low, held down by the coldness of the snow always wanting to turn to ice; light directs us upwards towards the tops of things as if heaven were a search[-ing] light.