Quiet Day

Today was a quiet day. I mailed off gifts to my parents in Maine, my father is probably the only person on the east coast who does not have the movie The Titanic. Well, he does now. One of my claims to fame as a child was my great grandfather’s brother was the helmsman on the real Titanic. I grew up playing hurricane and icebergs. Sometimes I feel very sorry that my children will not grow up by the sea or jump across rocks with their arms outstretched to get home. The ocean is my place.

Tonight Olivia and I watched the National Geographic channel with their special on sharks. It made me very homesick which is odd because we have no men in wet suits crazy enough to dive under water and throw red meat at animals. In Yankee terms those men deserve to be in eaten.

I have a very distinct memory of being four years old with my father in boat and watching these two people try to go UP the rapids in a canoe. I remember my father telling me, see honey those people are tourists and now they are going to fall into the river.

It was bred into me at an early age to never be a tourist. No matter where I have gone in this world I’ve tried my best to blend in, which by the way isn’t very easy when you are living in Haiti up in the mountains in a place where most people have never, ever seen a white woman. They always rubbed my hands to see if the color would fade.

One of the lines in my new book is I am a tourist in my own land which is something I use to write in my journal when I was 15 and going through what my mother deemed the dark year. Sometimes I think the journey of poetry is to bring up all that we know. It is a discovery into the deepest self.

Joseph Millar at our writing conference this summer said that a thousand years ago we (poets) would have been the holy ones. The people who sat in the night and told the sun to rise, that we would have believed our very existence had power to do that. Well that thought made it a bit easier to send submissions off today….