Salve for the Scaries
balms away
The other day I was in a place. You know the kind. One of those weird, scary headspaces. The kind where it’s best not to venture into the dark unknown alone. So I did what I usually do in these situations, especially if the cause of said headspaciness is creative fear which happened to be the case, and I texted my friend Vickie.
As a fellow writer and comrade in creativity, she knows those choppy waters well. She has decades of creative journeying under her belt. We tend to lean on each other when things (like essays, poems, short stories, scripts, monologues, auditions, and life) get rough (which they are wont to do).
On this particular day she sent me a poem that was the perfect salve for the slippery, thorny, doubt-ridden, rollercoaster that was my brain. The right words, at the right time. Sometimes friends help you find your own tools or sit with you while you look. Sometimes they just let you borrow theirs. This was the best case of borrowing.
The poem is below. May it be a salve for those in need today. If that’s you, awesome. If that’s not you, cool. Perhaps you can just enjoy the nice words laid out before you.
You can find Vickie here and here and here.
Berryman
by W.S. Merwin
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write