POEM #10: The Way

Of stones and dewdrops, and a glimpse of things to come

Some old Orthodox monk of old Valaam; some beautiful god-bearing human person of the forests of long ago.

I don't know if you've noticed or not, because their tone is pretty understated, but my essays are kind of more ambitious than they should be—and getting more so! The one I'm working on now—the last of the Gods of the Future Will Be Machines series—has been hanging out my brain to dry on a daily basis for a couple weeks now—but if it comes out in the wash alright, it'll seem like there's almost nothing there (and that's a big if; you be the judge next Friday).

Well, so, Paul Kingsnorth at

The Abbey of Misrule

began his most recent essay, The West Must Die, with the sentence: “The problem with writing essays is what it does to your head”—to which I'll say now amen to that, good brother—and he went on to say that he can never write poems when he's writing essays, since they come from totally different places: “Essays are made,” he said, “they are constructed over time, like drystone walls. Poetry arrives: it drops from the sky like dew, and is shaped as it flows onto the page.”

And I'm feeling it, man—I'm feeling very, very, very far down the well of this next essay, wondering if I can come up out of it long enough to catch the rain of a new poem—seems like probably not, since this is about as far as I got this week:

In this poem, as if rising

In my mind's sky:

A dream-tower of white rock,

Made lilac by the twilight

And also bellflower and marigold,

The colors of the clouds above,

And of people blossoming and dying in its shadows,

Everyone I've ever known or loved...

Which is weird, because I almost never write rhyming poems! But maybe I'd like to finish this one, one day—I kind of like it, it's alright.

But I can't!—I’m digging the current essay too much! (Or, I’m stacking it too much, apropos of Paul’s metaphor). I love thinking about it, love getting hopefully simple, hopefully expansive, thoughts in order. Consequently, though, I’m feeling no headspace for new poetry (not even starting with a Hebrew psalm, which is dew already long since fallen, and still waiting there for the thirsty)—except insofar as the essay itself will be poetic in moments, as I hope it will.

And so what I'll give you today instead of a new poem is an old one—which indeed fell from the sky like dew, as Paul said—a poem that, I think, foreshadows all I wish to really say in the forthcoming essay anyway, maybe all I really wish to say, ever—and so here it is, the tiny seed of a poem which became my book of a year ago, The Sunlilies :