It’s late and I’ve had some leftover champagne, so surely I can be forgiven for waxing romantic about notions of life and creativity and love on all levels.
I was reading a fairly depressing comment thread over at Salon the other day (depressing in that so many people want to dispense advice to an author who isn’t even asking for it) and this poem cropped up in it, like some little pearl ascending out of all the grit and grime of other people’s keyboard diarrhea.
I put it here not only to share it, but so that I can keep it and remember it occasionally when I revisit my archives.
The Writer (by Richard Wilbur)
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
Wow. Sold.