The Poetic Heart: Connecting Humanity
January 2008
Banner photo: ©Natural Selection Craig Tuttle/Design Pics/Corbis
When I Walk
It begins with a feeling of restlessness: I seem to have become obsessed with something seen out of the corner of the eye, something not quite understood--a turn of phrase, a gesture, an object on the street. The making of a poem is an attempt to see, to gather or to understand the meanings that float around these peculiar objects of attention. It might mean following a thread of language--a word, a pun, a mishearing--or a memory, a feeling. It means being led somewhere unexpected.
For me, the experiences of poetry--reading, writing, thinking about it--are deeply connected with the city and moving through it: mulling things over on the bus, reading a few lines and then looking out of the window. Daydreaming. The link with travel arises partly because poetry has its existence in between other parts of my life. It accompanies the travel to work, or the lunchtime sandwich, or the journey home after meeting friends. It is as everyday and as necessary. It is a sustaining secret.
But there is a more fundamental connection between physical movement and the movement of the poetic line, between walking and writing. "How many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat paths of Italy," the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wondered. Like Dante, Mandelstam composed on the move. He described the footstep as "linked with breathing and saturated with thought." It is a kind of walking that sometimes seems hard to rediscover in a city--just automatic enough to let the mind wander.
The shape of a familiar journey is remembered by the feet and legs. You don't have to think about where to go. The walk may seem to lack the excitement of exploration but there are constant small discoveries--a change in the color of the leaves from one day to the next, new scaffolding, posters on the wall, foxes following their own paths. A softer kind of attention takes over. And, sometimes, the wool-gathering takes on a rhythm--a rhythm imposed variously by the weather, the kind of shoes you're wearing, how tired you are--a rhythm that has words to it.
Once that first walking phrase is found, the rest might be written at a desk, at home or in a library, sitting in an armchair or in bed. It's like the note from a tuning fork, or the drummer's first beats with crossed drumsticks--it defines the key, or the rhythm, of the poem but might itself disappear from the final piece.
Sometimes I think I've forgotten how to walk. Instead, I carry bags, run for buses and look out for wildly-driven cars. But perhaps one evening, walking home, the streets are still enough that you can hear your footsteps ring out on the paving stones. You long to be home in order to write down the line; you long for the walk to continue so that the next line might come.
Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?
For hours on end we practiced dying:
an imagined blow sinking into the belly,
knees softening, the shoulder rolling into
the ground. We exaggerated gravity,
persuading muscles to believe our story.
Seven years later, our teacher told Death
he needed more time for folk tales,
mystery plays, shysters and fools.
He brought forty years of training--
all he knew about the body--
to the hospital bed, to village yoga,
to a rehabilitation he devised himself,
persuading his muscles to remember.
The last he taught called themselves angels
because they weren't like other people.
He could watch them all day, moving
around him wordlessly, like messages
that go directly to the spine.
It is January and muscles are cold.
The work is slow. I remember falling,
and falling for hours, softly.
First published in Poetry Folio 61 by the Kent & Sussex
Poetry Society
Eleanor Margolies lives in Camberwell, London, and is a poet, theater designer and editor. She has published poems in several magazines and won an Eric Gregory Prize from the Society of Authors for The Foot and Its Covering (unpublished).
