The moon, the sun and other things.

Ahh yes, a couple of weeks ago - well, considering how long it's been since my last blog post, obviously more than that but...I'm splitting hairs - I posed the rhetorical question that perhaps I write, about writing too much. But then shoved aside the question with a resounding 'no', because after all, it is the central part of me, defining so much of who I am that to deny it it's unique voice upon the white screen of this box would be like denying more than ninety-percent of myself. The writer within me, just like my obsession and fascination with old houses, always find a way to leak into whatever I'm writing about every Wednesday. Such, I concluded then in that one-way argument with myself that I needn't worry about writing too much about...writing! For there is always something new and refreshing to say, like waking up every morning and seeing a different bird perched on the branch directly outside your window, greeting you with a new trilling song that makes the pale morning fingers of light even more bouyant, until it seems you could blow them away like the deepening rays of afternoon brush away nighttime's fog and dew.

Someday perhaps I should delve into exactly why it is I fall again and again onto the brittle and breathless morning atmosphere by way of metaphor's and similies. God knows I've never woken up early enough to see a sunrise - at least not any that I can remember as clearly as those my imagination paints gleefully in my head - and I consider myself a part-time morning and night person, so it's not like I wake up embracing the morning like a lawyer facing snarled traffic in a few hours hugs their first cup of coffee to their chest, willing it to give them patience, and every thing else they couldn't possibly acquire until much cups of coffee later. But yet in many of my novellas, 'story-thoughts' and poems alike, my voice wanders to that broad room slumbering behind one of the myriad closed, six-panel wooden doors along the corridor of my imagination, flings it open and delights at the images and words abounding, picking and choosing or sometimes reaching up with a fistful into those haphazardly dancing blizzards within the delicate forks of light.

Sunlight is also a fascination of mine, I've noticed. Like the metaphor's above are testimate, so is the fact that during my frigid walk back to my apartment on campus after my last class I admired the very tops of the barren trees where the sun was hitting them, bleaching them in that particular golden hue of late evening, while the rest of the tree was shrouded in the indifferent, snickering shadow of winter. I've also figured out that the earliest reachings of morning's light, as well as its dying rays of late evening are what captivate me most. All of these rays are from the same sun, yet some barley carry enough heat to wittle away at the laden fog like deft fingers weaving a new and beautiful color over a pitfully faded shade, while others burn in that intensity that can only come as death creeps closer. The sun casts its fingers outward, perhaps gripping the barren tree tops or the elegant slope of hills for a final grasp on the land it has bathed again and again, even as the one-eyed moon regards it from its steadily rising perch, those golden hues hang on, deepening, deeping, flooding color into the same dark shade, extracting color from the earth to fuel itself, until that hollow stare tumbles down, ebbing away the heat of the evening.

I also, as you've probably noticed, have a magnetic literary pull towards the moon, and nighttime in general. I actually wrote a poem a few years back about the peculiarity I have of coming up with some of my most vivid and captivating poetry at night, when the world is in slumber, but my mind is running, racing, skipping and skating across the sloping, wide-plank floorboards of my imagination, keeping me awake and restless with the ever-increasing creaks and groans it emits. And one again, old house metaphors have snuck their way in through the back door, twining themselves so seamlessly with my words and every day writing and thoughts that I don't notice they are there until I step back and examine such metaphors.

Perhaps though, old houses and writing have always gone together. Or is it just my mind that melds them so indelibly? I can't help but think back to Robert Frost, who lived his life high in the New England countryside, buried within sparkling blankets of snow, writing his poetry so treasured today, treasured by me as well. Why I cling to Frost as my favorite poet, I do not know. Although I could give you guesses: because he writes so unfailingly about the countryside, because his poems aren't so ambiguous that I feel I can at least find a somewhat sturdy foothold along their sheer and smooth rock facades and also perhaps because I was too lazy or uninterested to delve into the many other American poets offered to me throughout my school days and chose to stick with Frost, because he was so widespread and appreciated.

I'll admit, I've never been one for reading poetry. There's something irksome to me about the ambiguous, seemingly lofty language poets speak in that offsets me. Granted, Frost himself isn't omitted from such a group, some of his poems fall into the category of a raised-eyebrow and titled head struggling to inch the ball of reason or meager understanding even a breadth closer along the sloping, constantly weighted floorboards of our knowledge both our own and others. But for me, perhaps the fact that he writes about the countryside and its many flapping and fluttering layers of lives and tales overrides that ambiguity. Or, as I've realized in the back of my mind somewhere, the fact that he is so associated with New England - a place that has captivated me since I have loved old houses - has earned him a sturdy string woven deep into the fabric of my heart.

I can guess, that for however much I balk at the mysterious language of both yesterday's and today's poets, that some of my own poetry falls directly in step with the poems I shake my head at. For instance, I think of the first poem I wrote about my hometown, Sheboygan, WI. I had intended it to be free-verse, like most of my other poems, but instead it morphed itself almost by will into a form I had made up, which is three lines of three words and three lines of one word, which would be six lines in each stanza. The super-condensed form forced me to condense what I wanted to say, and thus the end result was something completely shrouded by fragmented memories that rose to the surface about my hometown. I know what they all mean of course, but after having my parents and brother read my poem, I was met with the same expression I have doubtlessly given many poems I've had to read for school.

Which leads me to thinking, do the authors of such poems know how truly complex they are? Do they choose such privileged language for the same purpose I did? Because they knew that sometimes - in rare cases in my opinion! - forms actually say more efficiently what you couldn't say within the boundless confines of free-verse? Sometimes we need fences, I am beginning to understand, when it comes to our writing. For sometimes the Mustang captured amidst the sprawling, reddened facade of the Nevada plains is in more free struggling against the foreign sensation of a saddle and bridle because he has escaped the danger of the predator, both in the animal and in the government. Also, are such poets, when met with all these equally ambitious interpretations of their poems, find humor in them? Or endless inspiration to create more work than can, somewhat ironically, produce so many views in all of us as we as a society view each poem through a kaleidoscope, inevitably influenced by those around us, as well as what society has gingerly sprouted and nurtured within us.

Reflecting on all of this, it's all beginning to seem eerily similar to the lectures my English professor gives at my college, UW Green-Bay. After all, am I not talking about the many ways we can study literature, and interpret it? Only unlike sitting in my English classes, my mind isn't running away without looking back to the refuge of my imagination where it can frolic amidst words that don't make me stumble and knit my brow, amidst ideas and characters that aren't totally unrelatible or coax sleep to my side like luring a stray kitten out of the woods, slowly but with a barely contained eagerness. No, I haven't fallen asleep in class, but I do admit to some head bobbing and momentary closing of the eyes. But in my defense, when I don't find something interesting in the least, I supplement my time in English class by writing songs and poems, and have been satisfied with them all. Sure it's not a creative writing class, but it's better than sleeping right?

You may not believe me, after reading this, but I had indeed intended to talk about music when I sat down to write this blog an hour ago. Perhaps I will leave that for next week. Or, like all those times before my mind has dared to step over the threshold of the sun-faded, familiar room and crossed that narrow hallway into another, that dominant side of myself will jerk it back, or perhaps just lightly tap it on the shoulder as its fingers fly over the clicking typewriter keys, daring itself all along not to find those inevitable connections, don't find them, don't look...just write.

But that's what leads me to talking about writing and old houses, isn't it? The act of 'just writing'. But if these are the places that such an act takes me, then may I always have a pencil in my hand, or at least a droning English class to use as a convenient backdrop to filter out the tumult of the world and step over that threshold into places I myself have never been, but my imagination knows well, and beckons to me eagerly, sometimes pulling me inward, sometimes patiently waiting. But always waiting nonetheless, greeting me with a new faded mural upon the walls every time.