Monthly Archives: July 2012

Jul18

another poetry angel

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Thanks to Emma Gorenberg (herself a brilliant poet) for this poem

Inventing a Horse

By Meghan O’Rourke

Inventing a horse is not easy.

One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
One must include a place where horses like to live;
or do when they live with humans like you.
Slowly, you must walk him in the cold;
feed him bran mash, apples;
accustom him to the harness;
holding in mind even when you are tired
harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil
to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun;
one must imagine teaching him to run
among the knuckles of tree roots,
not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves,
and not to grow thin in the city,
where at some point you will have to live;
and one must imagine the absence of money.
Most of all, though: the living weight,
the sound of his feet on the needles,
and, since he is heavy, and real,
and sometimes tired after a run
down the river with a light whip at his side,
one must imagine love
in the mind that does not know love,
an animal mind, a love that does not depend
on your image of it,
your understanding of it;
indifferent to all that it lacks:
a muzzle and two black eyes
looking the day away, a field empty
of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees,
and some piles of hay.

Meghan O’Rourke, “Inventing a Horse” from Halflife. Copyright © 2007 by Meghan O’Rourke.  Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, In

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Jul16

island love

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My friendships on Martha’s Vineyard are unlike anywhere else in my experience.  It is the shared leap across the water, the choosing to live surrounded by the sea, away from the ordinariness of the mainland that connects us like blood.  During this visit, each person that I have seen – old friends, acquaintances, close, distant – have had a quick and immediate velocity and heat, as if during my six years away, those relationships had been steeping, deepening their colors, reddening like the Aquinnah cliffs as the sea rubs away the layers, bringing out what lies beneath. I feel welcomed, held, savored, again and again.

From the moment I arrived on the island in 1992, I felt at home.  I can remember awakening the first morning that I slept in my little room at The Yard, looking out at a thrush perched at the top of a cypress tree waving in the morning ocean mist, feeling that I had landed on the planet for the first time.  I had been wandering and now I was home.

Pam, Chandrika and I are spending a week here with Jo-Ann and Derrill, the godparents of our daughters, and their son Jacob, our godson.  I feel wrapped in something holy and firm –  fine as sand and solid as stone, irresistible as the sea.  Island love.

To leave the island required me to make myself cold to it, to distance myself from it in a way that was painful and harsh.  I said we were sick of the ferry, the schedules, the mad rush to make the boat, the sameness of the roads, the incestuousness of a small community bound by the sea.  Six years later, I am finally letting the blood flow back into that amputated limb, the breath come back into my body.

I wonder where else have I done this kind of severing.  What else have I exiled, pushed away?  Am I doing that now with the home that we are selling?  Do I need to shut off feeling to make transition less painful?  I can learn something here:  a different way of moving through change – by opening my heart fully, letting the wind blow through my pores, loving what I am leaving even as I push into the next chapter.

As I write I can hear the waves beating the Aquinnah shore. This morning, the sea was high and wild, thick with seaweed and surge from the storm that blew through last night.  It is like the beating of my heart, connecting me to everything – the past the present, the unknowable future – to this single, precious moment.

Jul15

sur la plage

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On Philbin Beach in Aquinnah, Martha’s Vineyard, someone had built this excellent boat.  I like the idea of available materials, of taking what washes up in our lives, or what we stumble across and making art from sudden inspiration.  Or building upon what is already in place, like the boulder that forms the prow of this ship.

The other thing I love about this particular creation is all the different perspectives if offers.  On my way back down the beach, a man and his son were sailing this lovely stone ship, seated inside of it looking out this way, reminding me to change my perspective, to walk around a situation until it yields a fresh point of view, until I can see things differently, or more clearly.

Jul13

my angels, where now?

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On the way to Martha’s Vineyard, aboard the Sankaty freight boat, I caught these images of my angels and the sea.

Some of my favorite photographs are ones that Pam and I took twenty years ago when we began going to Martha’s Vineyard the summer that I was a choreographer-in-residence at The Yard in Chilmark.  That was the beginning of a love affair with the island and then twelve years spent year-round with our girls, who arrived from Nepal into the generous, welcoming arms of this beautiful community.

Coming back is bittersweet.  A part of me feels that this is really home, that I have been away and can breathe here in a way that I cannot on the mainland.  But six years ago, we wanted to give our girls a sense of the bigger world, and had begun to feel claustrophobic and crowded here. We left, full of certainty and optimism.

Now, on the cusp of another move, I wonder, is it time to return to my island home?  I walked from our girls’ godparent’s home this morning to Philbin beach and poured myself into the morning sea, beneath the Aquinnah cliffs.

The last verse of this poem, What’s Left,  seems to say it:

I know more or less
how to live through my life now.
But I want to know how to live what’s left
with my eyes open and my hands open;
I want to stand at the door in the rain
listening, sniffing, gaping.
Fearful and joyous,
like an idiot before God.

~ Kerrie Hardie ~