Limping Along, Figuratively

A lame dog, an old friend in the hospital, oh-so-marginally employed, and staring down the barrel of four months of student teaching (that’s an UNPAID full-time internship), but on the rosy side, I’m in love. My writing has dried up the past month or so. Writing has devolved into that purely utilitarian act of putting down on paper what is necessary to complete this particular phase: emails, resumes, applications, a four-inch-thick portfolio to prove I’m ready for student teaching. (No matter that no amount of reading or writing prepares one for even a day in a classroom.) There is no poetry in any of this. I’m leaning on poems from six months ago like a crutch, my words these days are so stilted and stocky, so ho-hum and hokey. So lame. Worry about everything perpetually and experience ends up muffled. I live through a scarf wrapped around my senses, a thick dull blanket. I can’t breathe as deep as I’d like to. I’m crippling myself with worry—not walking nearly as much as I’d like. The mountains feel far away. The days are only getting shorter. It’s one thing to do absolutely nothing in the summer; the sun and swelter are justification enough. But September is long gone and everyone is buckling down, battening down, or just down. If I could, I would hibernate through the next six months.

So why am I writing? Why now? Why not a month ago, two months ago? The obvious answer would be release, relief: things have gotten too heavy, and I’m here to lighten my load. But I’m too much of a Brechtian to believe wholeheartedly in catharsis. In fact, I sincerely hope I don’t spend every subsequent post unburdening myself to the virtual public. What I want to do here is write about anything I don’t have room for in my school papers. Blame it, ironically, on writer’s block: I’ve been sitting in front of my computer on and off all weekend, struggling to write about curriculum design for high school English classes, and I keep getting stuck. I get up, I make tea, I bake, I walk, I chip away at what needs to be done in the garden before winter sets in for real, and all the while wisps and scraps of poems push themselves up through the rubble. I want to give those scraps a space. My paper journal has been given over to notes on books, important phone numbers, and infinite to-do lists. I’ve stopped bothering to write about the first frost, new music, the comings and goings of people, of migratory birds, how the lake is getting lower, what I had for breakfast. These things go unrecorded and my life fades out of my own consciousness. The details of the past weeks are more or less lost. I’d like to correct this tendency before the weeks become years. So I’m going to write. Whatever it takes. That’s why I’m back. This is an attempt to exercise some discipline, some authority. I have to remind myself that I matter. I have to bring myself back from the margins of my own writing, push myself back to the center. I’m not letting any more words go to waste.