Reaching After Realness

I ask: how do I make my dented self 
         beautiful 
with this old pencil? 
     ~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies

 

Our legs look broken when light bends them in the swimming pool. Once our heads are under, immersed in the experience of wetness, the illusion disappears. Our legs are restored to us in their wholeness, where they can be repurposed as impromptu fins to propel us elsewhere. Which of these sets of legs are our “real” legs? The broken set, the restored set, or the Aquaman set?

Entering a poem is like entering that other, underwater world. We are restored to a wholeness the pain of life and its deceptions has convinced us is missing. But, we can only hold our breaths so long before our imaginations burst! And still we go down like clockwork into the dark otherwhere of metaphor, easing past the shallow end of simile, our imaginations and lungs aching. However dangerous the journey, we will not be denied our diving, our entry into depths.

The act of writing is a way for poets to break the surface tension, to transform and explore with all of their sets of legs at the same time–water-skimmer and octopus at once. The act of, not just imagining, but creating the distortion of a written record, a pool for others to enter, is part of the mystery. This writing things down, however, is not what may be called a clarification; that’s a mistake many neopyhte divers make, arriving back at the deck of their exploration vessel with the bends.

Let me propose that both imagination and reality are equally real, equally imaginary. A grown-up Velveteen Rabbit has a smoking habit, perhaps; perhaps the dourest accountant over-charging on our tax prep is a weekend balloonist– or, more daring yet– a plummeting parachuting enthusiast.

Whether this need for othering ourselves, appropriating the ocean’s indigo, pretending a purpler sky, being winged in imagination whenever we watch a bird in flight, is the result of an evolutionary symbiosis of inner and outer selves or some kind of meshuggeneh co-dependency, I cannot tell. But I know that it cannot be otherwise. Real or unreal, one hand will always be reaching after realness–a stuffed, velvety rabbit dangling from the other hand.

Gregg Glory
July 4th, 2017