Learners Permit

Yesterday, at Wednesday afternoon zazen, which I barely made after an afternoon spent out at the administration learning "how to be The Man" (listen, they really have classes on this! Management training they call it. I feel like a spy for the peons). Making it involved Silva Mind Control acrobatics, frantically visualizing convenient parking spaces, as well as illegal u-turns performed right under the nose of campus security. Very exciting. The temperature dropping, the wind cutting through my beautiful wool Talbot's plaid skirt. Saw Seido, coming across the brick plaza with his bags of zafus, wind blown crow skirts swirling around him, like something from a dream. Met him half-way to help carry them. His new book of poetry just came out. Here, let's plug it, to the two people who ever read this--Seido Ray Ronci--This Rented Body. I haven't read it yet. But I read Skeleton of the Crow--I forgot that was the title! That's funny, because I always think of him as this big wind-blown tattered crow--like the ones who used to hang out in the pine trees in front of Sanborn Library at Dartmouth.

The day had been full of poetry. Literally. It really began the day before. Lilly had the day off from school and wanted to get her learner's permit, so we drove out to the drivers license building, which is this terrible low brick building built in the 70's when people had the bright idea to get rid of windows. So it feels like a prison--fluorescent lit rabbit warren corridors, dirty gray carpet. I used to go there for food stamps. It feels poor and dirty--institutionally poor and dirty. The worst it gets. I hadn't brought a book, I realized, sitting in the windowless waiting room while Lilly was in taking her test, so I went outside and got the only book in the car, the anthology for the Poetry Out Loud competition. Outside in the parking lot, I looked around--beautiful gray winter views of the power plant, belching smoke and the trailer park. Acres of asphalt. How do you redeem this place? I wonder, shaking my head. I go back inside.
Suddenly, a girl appears in the hall, running barefoot on the filthy carpet as fast as she can. She's about 16. Her hair is dark red and wet, and she's wearing a white silk chiffon dress with silver spangles that floats behind her as she runs like a spray of foam. She turns a corner and disappears. I stand still, wondering if I've really seen her. No one else is in the hall. The feeling rises, that strange bubble I call the tummy smile, and which is probably a little free delight. I go back to the waiting room, sit down, open the book. The first poem is Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold. I read:
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

As I read this, it seems that I can really hear the ocean. I finish, the sound of the sea still in my ears, and I realize that it's the ventilation system, ebbing and flowing, creaking its stale air out. The dusty vent is right above me. I had noticed it when I first came in, and it seemed just to be one more horrible thing about the building, but now it was a stage effect provided by the good fairies (or the ghost of Matthew Arnold) to bring the poem home to my soul. It's funny how the most unlikely things can suddenly turn magical. It's funny how everything is in everything else. I was going to write more, but that's my 1/2 hour! You know the rules...