Poem to Share

Billy Collins has become one of my favorites. Here’s one that I like in particular, on writing.

Purity by Billy Collins

“There’s nothing more interesting than the truth.”

- William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Waiting For Miracles: Newtonmore, Scotland (a work in progress)

If Scotland is a postcard, Newtonmore is just a corner of the postage stamp. I understand the appeal of a place like this. I feel it wherever I look: rolling countryside, sublimely green meadows, patches of long-grown weeds and wildflowers that lay open before me and dance in the wind like a Jackson Pollock painting. The thought can’t help but creep into your head that if only you moved here, you would suddenly be struck with vast expanses of clear thought out of which to write great, deep things. I would be successful if I moved here. I would be rich. Yet there is no frontier here. Just as westward expansion destroyed so much glory in the United States, there is a knowledge or at least a nebulous finger pressing something in my mind pointing to the fact that there is nothing new to be discovered here. As green as it may be, this place is just as dead as my home country.

Tonight after dinner a few of us went into town to explore, which means we went down the road and through the alleyway. All that was open was a grocery, and so we found places that weren’t closed, like hills and meadows and parks filled with war memorials, as Jillian had so eloquently put it. . We went down a road marked, “Humps 400 yards,” and the most action we found (besides the speed bumps) was an old man in the upstairs window of his house looking down on us. I calculated how long it would take for the police to arrive after he called them and wondered if seven American young people would be able to outrun an old Scottish Paddie.

All was a Thomas Kincaid but with the sensibility of a Seamus Heaney poem. The others got ahead of me as I took a photograph of a tree house that spanned between two twin trees and even had a shingled roof. It reminded me of the shanty my Dad, my brother, and I (but mostly my Dad) attempted to erect in our back yard this summer. Life can happen here in Newtonmore. Tree houses can be built.

We made our way around the rock path on the outskirts of the golf course, me following at a distance. I am aware of life for the first time it would seem, like the man walking through Eden. I am aware of the cute girl in our group and her glimmering singleness. Despite all other signs, I notice for the first time that the leaves are changi8ng and beginning to fall, that autumn is at the threshold in the United Kingdom.

And here is when it happens:

As we climb a small hill at the top of which is another tee-off area [explain how we were walking past a golf course], I suddenly feel a familiar urge, one that all of God’s creatures feel from day to day. I am suddenly filled with desire for a white porcelain bowl where I can spend a few moments in peace and privacy.

Allow me to explain.

Part of my charm is that I have a condition that is called “lactose intolerance,” the effect of which often is, what I have called elsewhere, an “unruly stomach.” As uncomfortable as this sometimes makes me after such delicacies as cheesecake or an ice cream cone or even a ham and cheese sandwich, the few moments of masticating dairy-full bliss are well worth it. As I’ve said, this is part of my charm.

So at this moment I am standing at the top of a lovely knoll overlooking some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ve yet to see with some wonderful people discussing who knows what and all I can think about is squeezing my cheeks together and if anyone will notice any sweat stains or worse dripping down my ass. How long will I last? Where is the nearest toilet? I smile and fake-laugh with the people around me as I plan my escape. I plan to leave quietly while I make a self-deprecating joke about having to use the bathroom yet again. I walk off and just know that everyone is staring at my butt. The worst is that I’m not wearing underwear as I didn’t have a clean pair after my last got soaked whitewater rafting earlier. I’m at the point where I’m feeling sweat drip and I’m praying to God to let me make it or to save me, when I suddenly think the prospect of throwing myself down a prickly-looking ravine thing and dying and then allowing my sphincter muscles to release would be much more acceptable than simply soiling myself in public here on this side of eternity, because no one would ever blame a dead person for crapping their pants, and on the contrary they would probably feel sorry for the person and wouldn’t even wonder to themselves, “I wonder if this person died of an over-stressed sphincter?” So while this prospect is continuing to grow in attractiveness I continue waddling along carefully, ever-conscious of the beautiful, successful, and happy people behind me who, as it is, have decided to follow me home.

Where is grace? I wonder. Where is salvation? They can’t be in the flickering lampposts or telephone cables that bastardize the purity of the darkening landscape. I think of the drowning man who prays to God to save him and then refuses help when the boat passes by because he is waiting for God to rescue him. How is grace and the holy and the miraculous incarnated into my life today, here in Newtonmore, Scotland? When I pray to God for help with my bowels I’m not exactly expecting Him to turn that tree over there into a water closet, but then again I’m not expecting a ship to sail past either.

What is reasonable to expect from God except that which is completely unreasonable? In Biblical times God most often met needs by sending help in a physical means, one that was usually fairly easy to name as miraculous, such as making a dry path to walk on in the middle of a huge sea or multiplying the size of a loaf of bread and a few fish so many could eat. Accounts of modern manifestations are rarely as epic. Providing the money for a building fund or softening the heart of the staunchy workaholic seem to be the most miraculous things to have happened recently in my home church back in the states. It would seem that, at least in America, as our appetite for grandeur and the gaudy has increased, the “showiness” of the miraculous has decreased—particularly, I think, because we distrust theatrical religion and businessman ministers. And yet we hunger for meaning and purpose, and just like the folks in Jesus’ day we wouldn’t mind “a miraculous sign” from time to time.

Maybe my request for God to help me was a little too much for Him, given His limitations by the impossibilities of my cultural and ideological conditioning. Just then, though, my friends pass me up and I snag aside one of my roommates and tell him that I think my shit is going to leak down my leg soon and we laugh together at the ludicrous nature of human biology. At least if my sphincter does explode and I do die, someone will be able to relay my last tale of woe to my loved ones, my tragedy will be shared.

And as trite as it may sound, this is where I have found grace the strongest in these past few years—not in a lofty chapel ceiling or a well-crafted Evangelical poetry reading group, but in sharing stories about my shit with other people who have shit too. Jesus showed up for me in the form of human empathy that night in a small Scottish town, just as He has on countless other nights and as He will continue to do in the years to come.

And my sphincter did hold out until I reached the toilet.

“Waiting For Miracles,” Copyright 2008, Joseph Van Dorf

Jesus, Bozo, & Captain Hook

When I was little I wanted to be Captain Hook. Forget Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and never growing up, I wanted a life of piracy. My favorite toy at four or five was a grey and black plastic hook from Wal-Mart that would fit over your hand and your dog would chew on. I would borrow a red frilly blouse that my mom never wore and drape it over my body, pretending that it was Captain Hook’s red coat from the Disney movie. The plastic hook just fit within the sleeve to look as if my hand had really been severed and fed to a crocodile.

Even at five years old I wanted to be a badass.

At one point I told my mom, “I want long hair like Captain Hook,” and my mom, ever aware of the fact that a new hair style is less permanent than a tattoo or a piercing, agreed to let me grow my hair out. The problem was that I was a rotund child, a chubby kid, and that the young pre-adolescent anatomy of a fat child—especially one growing his hair out—can be nearly indistinguishable in gender. I remember being at a friend’s house, wearing a particularly neutral sweatshirt and jeans, and having his mom come up to me, pinch my cheek, and tell me oh what a “sweet little girl” I was.

I got a haircut the next day. Short. Boyish.

And for the next eight years of life or so my hair remained a respectably and distinctively short and boyish length. Businessman’s haircut. That’s the way my mom would explain it to the hairdresser. Longer on the top, shorter in the back and on the sides. Parted on the left, combed to the right. Businessman’s haircut. As if I was trying to sell you something.

As if I was trying to sell myself.

Looking back and remembering those years, trying to figure out what the Captain Hook hair was all about, I’m unsure if I was really into those long flowing locks or if I simply wanted a say in my grooming processes. All that I have to go on are some memories, a few stories, and my current set of biases and beliefs. I want to believe it was a genuine interest in the hair style, a raw appeal discovered in the innocence of youth for the “edginess” of a particular self-image. I know what it has come to symbolize for me now, though: a kind of “grown-upness,” an assertiveness that dares question traditional stereotypes and is able to make self-determinant choices.

Whatever Captain Hook once meant to me is now lost to the ages.

Sixth grade is when I became aware that there were people other than me in the world and that I cared about how they thought I looked. I don’t know what inspired me, but this is the year I started slicking my hair back with heavy-duty hair gel for the “wet look.” I cringe looking at pictures of myself from this year. I look like Fonzie but with a peach fuzz mustache growing thickly on my upper lip. At the time I didn’t notice the mustache. Puberty just happened, like a chrysalis on my face.

I have a picture of myself in seventh grade—pretty much the same except that I started shaving and I began parting my hair down the middle. Still overrun with too much hair gel, leaving my hair cement-like in place, but generally I think I looked okay. Maybe because this is a variation on my current look.

In eighth and ninth grade I got what my mom called the “Emperor Nero” haircut. This was another classically short hairdo, still gelled, but spikier than I had worn it in the past, and, as I recall, the cool style for guys to have in the late 90s. Similar to the “ski-slope,” the “Emperor Nero” involves getting your bangs (what are called on guys the “tips”) to stick out like an appendage from the front of your face.

By the spring of freshman year, however, I got lazy. The past four years of waking up early to gel my hair had gotten me tired, and so I decided to go for the “bedhead” look. This was fun, I remember thinking. Just throw on a t-shirt and some jeans in the morning, eat your Wheaties and you’re ready to go. That summer I slowly let my hair grow out and it has since evolved into what it is now—shaggy, above the shoulders, feathered-looking hair. I had a teacher tell me in high school that the way my hair grew out at the sides reminded her of Bozo the clown.

That summer six years ago I also decided to grow a beard to cover any of my androgynous bases—just in case someone felt like calling me a “sweet little girl” again. It was a small beard, a goatee that came down from under my lower lip and hugged my chin. No mustache above the lips. I looked younger without it. Younger and more hip. Friends in high school started making jokes and calling me Jesus. Two or three dubbed me “Holy Joe.”

Jesus. Bozo. Not Captain Hook.

Yet this has stuck—the Captain Hook-Bozo-Jesus self—the one that is easy to slip on in the morning and feels so comfortable. I like to imagine that with this self I have finally found the me that I will be wearing for the next fifty or sixty years. Genetically, though, I can say with some certainty that I will one day be bald. I wonder who this bald self will be, how I will cope with it, how I will compensate. It’s not that I believe hair loss will completely change my social and private identities. I do understand, however, that the ways I present myself to the world are rooted in the certain set of images I collect for myself, images that explain and point and prophecy to who I am becoming. And if I go bald, I’ll be strapped to find a new set.

My someday-bald self looms on the horizon of my future, like an island waiting to be named. Maybe Ben Kingsley. Or Brittney Spears.

Today, though, these are my self-images, the ways I explain my given selves and behaviors and how I understand who I am becoming:

Jesus, Bozo, and Captain Hook.

A martyr, a clown, and a pirate.

“Jesus, Bozo, & Captain Hook,” Copyright 2008, Joseph Van Dorf

Reflections On Wandering In The Wilderness

“And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning…

…Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment.”

-Little Gidding, T. S. Eliot

“The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.”

-Exodus 16:35

I am not an Israelite, thank God. I have not wandered forty years in wild, uninhabited deserts. I have never eaten quail or manna, nor am I Jewish. I have, however, spent three months wandering European wastelands, and I have some idea of what it is to be uprooted, to live as a nomad with a stunted sense of home.

It was in the Lake District of northern England, not yet a month into my semester out of the United States that I first had this realization. As I half-slept in the common room at two in the morning, waiting for my next load of laundry to finish, as I lugged my finished load of still-sopping clothes out of the drier and hung them on the chair backs to air dry, and as I folded my damp, musty wardrobe to repack it into my tiny suitcase, ever wary of our nine o’clock departure time the next morning, I felt a distinct sense of Israelite-hood. Maybe it was out of a half-delirious imagination, packing into the wee-hours of the night and realizing I would get less than three hours of sleep, but I experienced a sort of camaraderie that night with my four-thousand-year-old fellow wanderers. How often did the Israelites hear on short notice that they would be leaving early the next morning, following the Sprit of God from their campsite back into the wilderness? How often were Israelite women in the middle of the wash and forced to pack their dank clothes in sand-battered trunks and suitcases that they would carry out to load on their camels early the next morning? What were the less-than-ideal conditions the Israelites were forced to exist in? And if I found three months of travel difficult, can I really blame the Israelites for forty years of grumbling?

Why do we allow ourselves to travel like this? More importantly, why does God call us to wilderness wandering? For the Israelites, God’s purpose in calling them into the desert was, to put it bluntly, to kill them. God waited forty years for the sinful generation to die off so he could prepare the Israelites for the Promised Land. Personally, I don’t believe that God called me to England Term to kill me or let me die (even though there were moments I wished I would die). I don’t think God desired for anyone on our trip to die, and thankfully no one did. On the contrary, I believe God wanted to use this trip to make us live better.

Yet in living better there is a necessary death. Purification requires a renunciation of the old mode of living. It requires a throwing off of the old self with its selfish desires and a submission to God’s will. This is what makes travel such a miracle. Travel forces you to resign yourself to the unknown, to abandon your purposes and preconceptions to the wind, to have faith that God’s will is being accomplished in you even as he raises the ax to your neck.

I was walking the streets of Sligo near the northwest coast of Ireland in mid-October with Dr. Taylor and his wife Jayne, and I happened to ask, jokingly, what would happen if someone on our trip died. “Well,” Dr. Taylor said, “it depends on who it was. Either it would be a really sad moment or it would be a really great one.”

The truth is that I died somewhere in Europe though I can’t quite say where. For me, though, it was a great moment. My body isn’t buried in an English graveyard, but I am in the streets of London and in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and on the coast of St. Ives and beside the Derwentwater in Keswick. There is a pain that comes with resigning yourself to God’s will, and only in retrospect have I realized that it was death. Purification is not a warm, happy, tickling sensation. It hurts like hell, but it is necessary to living better. It is a death that blesses you when you walk into a graveyard, teaching you your affinity with those underground. It is a death that makes every moment of existence precious, turning life into a rhythm and a balance and a pattern. It is a death that makes you live better, that prepares you for the Promised Land.

What is the Promised Land? For the Israelites it was Canaan. For me, in some ways, it is home, the United States—but that almost makes it too easy. It sums up England Term as an elaborate, transcontinental connect-the-dots, a maze with a nicely sliced cut of cheese at the end. A true pilgrimage, though, is a spiritual journey, a physical movement towards a spiritual end—from slavery to freedom, from sinfulness to holiness, from the common to the transcendent.

Have I reached the Promised Land? Have I come to a place where I am more deeply connected with the holy? My fear is that I haven’t. I fear that I am Moses, standing on Mount Ararat, looking over to the land flowing with milk and honey, the land my people will be entering, and I, despite my own feelings of holiness, will be forbidden to enter because I have not traveled well. I fear I will die here on this mountain of stagnancy.

I am not alone. There are many on this mountainside staring over to what might have been, waiting for their lives to end. I know I cannot wait here, though. I have learned too much on this journey—about myself and those around me. Holiness is not incumbent on my feelings at the moment. Life is too worthwhile to wallow in regret. I cannot say what my Promised Land is or whether or not I am there, but I know I must come down from the mountain and travel on. This journey, this leg of my pilgrimage might be over, but my traveling is not. I return from the mountaintop whether or not my face is glowing with God’s presence. I return because I must go on. I return because the experiences I have had and the ways my heart has been expanded are deserving of new journeys, new ways to travel hopefully—a permanent pilgrimage of which there will never be an end.

Life is travel. Maybe we are not flying projectiles in airplanes every day or maybe we don’t spend our evenings in hotel after hotel, but we will leave our homes to go to work, to school, to church, and come home again. All the while we wander on in our pilgrimage of life, hopefully learning something of ourselves, our world, and our God as we creep ever forward toward our final end.

“Reflections,” Copyright 2007, Joseph Van Dorf

Fishtails

It’s been snowing the past few nights. Supposed to get up to twelve more inches by Sunday.

Every good Midwestern driver knows the hidden danger that a freshly-snowed road can pose. It lays there indiscriminately covering the cement and blacktop streets of the northern states, making once-familiar roads suspect, like a drunken, leery-eyed sailor who’s forgotten the words to his melody. Some people enjoy driving in the snow, putting their SUVs into four-wheel drive and speeding past the people puttering around at under twenty-five in a forty-five or fifty. And even some of those drivers, the ones in the minivans and Toyota Camerys, enjoy the fishtailing and the doughnuts (my mom calls them cookies) that fresh snow affords.

Me—I’m not one of these drivers.

I’m a putterer, puttering around in my thirteen-year-old Ford Escort at speeds up to a dazzling thirty miles an hour. Maybe thirty-five if I’m feeling reckless. I do this because in fresh snow like this, I tend to spin out, to fishtail when I don’t expect to or even want to. Some drivers get a thrill out of this and even induce fishtailing sessions, sprawling around on empty roads, sneering in the face of danger, like a self-important halibut, flopping proudly on the fisherman’s deck. They actually find joy and fulfillment from driving this way in the winter.

I can assure you, this brings me neither joy nor fulfillment.

As I have said, I tend to spin out when I don’t expect to, and although I love surprises, this is not a surprise I enjoy. Visions of broken glass and crunched up metal mixed with screams and blaring car horns are unleashed in my mind with disproportionate amounts of adrenaline as I seek to gain control of what seems to be a demon-possessed car. I turn right, it moves left. I turn left, it goes right.

This is what it’s like for me when I fishtail.

* * *

I blame my innate fear of crashing on my mother—as I do with most other things. Actually, I don’t blame her, but I associate a specific situation with her that brought about this fear:

It was the second day of school in fourth grade. I was wearing a burgundy button-up collared shirt with a flapped breast pocket that I had bought with my mom a few weeks before at Kohl’s. I had one just like it, but it was forest green and I had worn it to school the day before.

We got off of the freeway that morning and approached a familiar intersection, one that we had approached many times before. It was shaped like a T and we were going toward the cross-beam. The local porn store was in front of us and across the street on the corner was a small Christian book store. You can’t beat that. I think it must be symbolism, but for the life of me I can’t tell you what it means.

Today, as we approached the intersection, the light was red. I think we must have been running early because rarely was this light red when we approached. Just as we were about to come to a complete stop, our light turned green and we rolled through.

At the same time, an eighteen-year-old gentleman, who I’m sure never exceeded the speed limit and whom I had never met before, was driving a moving truck for a very well-known and distinguished nation-wide company, approaching the same intersection from our left-hand side.

According to reports, the light had been green when he looked down to change the radio station or to talk to his passenger or to pick up his breakfast sandwich from the floor of the truck’s cabin. Whatever it was he was doing, before he crossed the white line of the intersection his light turned red and he never saw it.

I remember hearing my mom scream and then looking from the front window to her in the driver’s seat. She had beautifully curly brown hair and was wearing a woman’s polo shirt, a sea-foam green with thin white stripes running horizontally. She had one just like it in Christmas red back home folded up in her dresser. The green one was later cut off of her poor broken body for some unknown purpose at the nearby hospital and she would never wear it again. In that beautiful instant I have her photographed against my memory. I think she had her left arm up as if she were going to push away the two tons of force driving toward us. So light and transitory.

In the next second our small car was transplanted somewhere else. Reports say that we had been pushed onto the median although I don’t remember the scene out the window. Glass was everywhere and the image of my mother had been transformed.

I removed my seatbelt and stared at the woman who gave me birth, sitting there next to me, unconscious and with a string of blood hanging from her forehead to somewhere on her arm. I think I tried to remove her seatbelt, but our car had been totaled and she was crunched in, trapped by the car door and the dashboard. Though she was unconscious, when someone would talk to her or touch her she would slap the air in their direction and say to them in a childlike voice, “No, no,” like in a bad dream—something I think she was forced to do to protect herself in her less than ideal childhood.

All that I could say was “Mama.”

* * *

I think that it’s funny (and I think myself terribly profound for thinking so) that the way we are taught to drive is often very similar to the way we live out our interpersonal lives—safely.

I was reminiscing recently about my days in driver’s ed classes and having to memorize how many seconds of driving distance you should keep between yourself and the vehicle in front of you in different situations like on the freeway or in the city. They slapped a stupid acronym on it like ten-second H.A.L.T. or something equally ridiculous and tried to convince you that it’s imperative to your future as a driver that you know this at all times. I remember being discouraged from driving in packs on the freeway because this is dangerous and will most likely cause you to die and instead you should drive safely and alone, checking your mirrors and blind spots every five seconds to make sure no one’s there. Kind of like being an American male. The Lone Ranger minus Tonto. Or Tito? Sure, we have our friendships, but so often they turn into shells of relationships; to quote the Apostle Paul, “having a form of godliness but denying its power.” Deep relating is saved for our therapists and is turned out one-dimensionally while our “real” friendships rarely plunge into the sublime and dirt-ridden depths of the human psyche exposing the vibrant colors infused with hope and penny-pencil dreams as well as the papered walls crusted over with flung and steaming shit. (This is often the way that I think when I’m driving in those dangerous packs.) We don’t live this way because it takes time and guts to get that close, because if you do, you run the risk of colliding and getting hurt. And that costs both time and emotions.

* * *

Once upon a time there was a girl that I went to school with. She went to Europe to study for a semester and during that time I thought that she could be someone that I could drive in one of those packs with, traveling for miles side by side down rural highways with small wooden farms spotting the fields and the horizon, watching the sun set in grapefruit pinks and warm oranges. I spent time with her every few weeks once she got back to the states and on Valentine’s Day I bought her a rose. It was a small gesture, really. I also wrote her a wretched little poem that I sent with it—awkwardly straining, but a poem nonetheless.

The other day we had coffee and she told me that she thinks that she is driving in a different direction than I am.

This was something that I expected once we were sitting down, although I didn’t see it until we were sitting. It was a look in her brown eyes, much like the image of my mother set against the truck that smashed into her fragile body. In that moment we made contact in the most real way we had yet. In a moment of fear and awkward understanding we foresaw the inevitable crash and subsequent costs, and there was nothing we could do to undo it.

It was not the contact that I had longed for, yet it was an intimate moment. Likely the two of us may never share each other as openly and painfully as we did in that moment of knowingful unknowing, and though the memory still throbs, it’s healing.

It doesn’t stop us from driving and dreaming for the hope of another more intimate crash.

* * *

On the way home tonight I turned on the radio and searched for a station that played jazz that would fill up my lungs with smoke and dance around sideways like the street lights bouncing on and off of my dashboard. Instead, all I got was some wannabe jazz, straight out of a seventies version of a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon. I drove home in a way I usually don’t go and for a few minutes pretended that I was lost, like a halibut on a boat, except the effect wasn’t what I had hoped for. I reached down inside myself with the orange dirty-rag jazz and wiped something palpable and heavy from my worn chest.

I thought about the snow and how any self-respecting Midwesterner would know the tricks of maneuvering through it without crashing. I drove very slowly.

Right as I was about to make my final turn, I slowed and felt the fish jump, the steering wheel taking control of where the car moved, turning right and moving left, turning left and moving right, trying to regain control so I wouldn’t crash.

I’m a creature that needs control.

Eventually I regained it.

And tonight the snow keeps falling.

“Fishtails,” Copyright 2007, Joseph Van Dorf