Long poems unnerve me. Before I can even begin, I sense the presence of something profound, someone intellectually deep, a journey of metaphor and wisdom stretched before me that I understand, before taking my first step, I will not comprehend. Poised in the white space between title and first stanza, I know that I am insufficient.
David Wagoner’s poem Lost is short. Introduced to it this morning while listening to Padraig O Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast, I felt empowered to step into a stranger’s words and simply stand. “Stand still”, in fact, is the poem’s first line. Stand still. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It is not easy to feel found. If you are like me, you spend too much time in life hoping to be discovered, either by someone, some group, or some force external to yourself, or perhaps just by yourself. Imagine that. Imagine you discovering yourself. Or me discovering myself. What does it say about us that we can conceive of the possibility of finding our true selves? What does it imply about purpose that the very idea of finding ourselves gives us pause.
When does a flower find itself? How about a dog, cat, finch, or firefly? Is it during the bloom, or is it the bark, or perhaps it’s the purr, cheep, or hovering glow?
We ascribe wisdom to the ancient Greeks for the aphorism (perhaps it was more admonition) to “know oneself”. It seems fitting: to think is to reflect and to reflect is to open a space inside the personal for the observational, the objective. I almost picture my consciousness leaning against the eye pieces of a large telescope, squinting to achieve stereoscopic vision, and then, yes there it is, there I am, seeing my true self mirrored through the focusing lens of time, awareness, and some force of the universe that narrows the beams of our being into a single image. Ah, here I am. Oh, there you are.
But that isn’t right. Because just as you are never precisely ‘there’, neither am I exactly ‘here’. Because here becomes there just as soon as I am able to circumscribe there as here. The experience is dizzying. I feel fortunate to have pairs of extremities and appendages or surely I would topple over.
Wagoner responds as only a poet of the brief can. “Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.”
I am often confused by the urgings of life and daily existence. Find yourself too easily becomes enmeshed, even embattled, with the notion of being found. Act, one pole pushes. Leave be, the other pulls. The present is an infinitesimally small point atop the pin of the now. Occasionally, if I forget to try to be or let be, I fall into the magic and wonder of being poised, fleetingly, on that point, my essence stretched like a ballerina on tiptoe into and through the marvelous meeting of the infinite and the finite. Then I think about the flower, the dog and cat, the finch and firefly. I sense them settled together in some magical moment of thoughtless experience. There is balance there, in the dusk of the day that together they breathe. There is a pulse of here. There is no finding here because all here is, and has been, right there, all along. I cannot be lost when finding myself is fabulously unnecessary.