What I Am Right Now

Lately I, like Robert Frost, have been one acquainted with the night. Its chill is sturdy, my invisibility comforting. I love the feeling of falling asleep only when there is nothing more for me to see. No calculators or credit card machines, no vultures or deer, no bales of freshly cropped hay strewn across pastures like scattered dice. I need to be done with my day before I'm done with my day.

I am nearing the end of my allotted island patience, and have become so disenchanted with all this enchantment that I no longer bestow upon my days off the same adoration that I did only a week ago. I have biked until it seemed I had burned through all my muscle. I have taken over thirty photographs of a single sunset. I have hiked Turtleback Mountain twice. I have consumed my customary chai latte and lemon coconut scone at Teezer's more times than I care to admit. I have read and written at the waterfront. I have watched countless seasons of countless shows. Even my guitar--my one true everymoment companion--doesn't make the same music anymore. The Here and Now has never been a vocabulary that I have easily memorized, and this is frustrating.

That being said, I can recognize that I am living a beautiful existence. I am working hard, exercising, sleeping well, and devouring the books that I never had time to read during the school year. Currently I am in bed listening to "Arms of a Woman" by Amos Lee and drinking peppermint tea. My clothes rack is open and draped with shirts that perfume my room with detergent in a way that makes me feel as though one deep breath would cleanse me down to the soul.

I have fallen in love with a magazine named Orion who is tall and gorgeous and full of poetry. If only I could find a man who fits the same description. I am thoroughly bored by every item of clothing I own, but I think in this case I'd rather be bored than shocked. Yesterday I started the first poem I've written since my last day of classes, and it didn't end well. Actually, it didn't end at all. I put down a single stanza, had to help a customer, and never went back to it. Sometimes I wonder if that's the shape my life will take--the excitement of beginning, the breathless intention to follow through, the piercing halt that comes so quickly that I don't even realize it until I look back through my journal and find four lonely lines floating on a blank page like a ripple that never breaks.

A week ago I took a day trip to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island with a friend from UPS who is also on Orcas for the summer. In the afternoon we happened upon a treasure of a used bookstore, so packed with old titles and splitting bindings that it was a wonder the building wasn't bulging on its foundation. The poetry section was located in a small room at the back of the shop, and as is the case every time I discover such books, I ran my hand along the familiar titles, occasionally sliding one forward over the edge of the shelf just enough to see that the pages had begun to yellow at the spine, a graceful acceptance of their long life.

Among the poets I have come to consider dear friends--Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Ted Kooser, Robert Frost--I found a slender green spine stamped with gold letters, The Rain in the Trees: Poems by W.S. Merwin. I slid it into my hand and fanned the pages beneath my nose before flipping the book open at random to a poem called "Before Us." By the end of the first stanza I knew I had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Merwin:
"You were there all the time and I saw only
the days in the air
the nights the moon changing
cars passing and faces at windows
the windows
the rain the leaves the years
words on pages telling of something else
wind in a mirror."
I don't need to tell you that this book is now among my most cherished of possessions. I do that--create for myself an existence in which so often words on a page are the only permanence I can kiss goodnight.

Between hunting for soul-suspending poetry and spending seven-hour shifts in the pottery shop answering the same questions and writing the same words on different receipts, I have developed a fascination with hands. It's not an obsession--not yet, at least--and rather than bordering on the absurd, it merely caresses it. I think hands are extremely telling of a life. Maybe it's because I treat mine so poorly, having practically emerged from the womb gnawing at my nails and cuticles, but I have found a new appreciation for the ways in which life transforms us, especially in the places we hardly think to notice.

Home in only a few weeks. I'm ready to say goodbye.