Czeslaw Milosz

Gift (by Czeslaw Milosz) 

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Last night I went to an event celebrating what would have been poet Czeslaw Milosz's 100th birthday. It was in the British Library's conference center & it almost made me cry. I love Czeslaw Milosz, but I didn't cry for him. After being 'homeless' for over a month now & rushing around so many new things, last night I felt at home. Home is such a hard sensation to explain. I maintain it's a feeling you can find & doesn't exist in only one place. The quickest analogy that comes to mind is laying down after a day of moving your boyfriend's junk into a new house -- your back straightens out, you slowly adjust to being still, & that stretch is painfully pleasant & for a second it's all you can feel. I didn't know anyone in the room (in fact, most of them were much older than me, thankfully, so they didn't even try to speak to me), but being read to & hearing people speak about poetry made me want to sit still & drown in it all night long. The third speaker was Lithuanian, didn't speak very good English, & while he was speaking my mind wandered outside myself & led me to this: I can put a finger on the beginning of my love for poetry. You have to read it out loud. To someone, or hear it from someone. The only thing before my adult life I precisely remember being read was this: 

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you...
Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

I wasn't even watching my dad's face as he read it, I was looking at the tacky red & blue wallpaper from my bottom bunk & playing with the tail of my stuffed raccoon. I remember wondering about the word "cubit," how it was spelled, & attempting to trace the letters of it between my fingers. I remember it. Those lines have a lot to do with the rest of my childhood, & have been echoing in most of my adult life. Tom Lux pried it out of me when I was old-shy-me. He replaced my dad, as far as the reading-to-me version of my dad is concerned, & it was at exactly the moment I needed it. My insistence on thoughtful self growth & purpose isn't independent or all my own. I am from something & a someone that has been made to be. I come out of that moment from 30401 Via Chico Place. That philosophy of all points of time in your life acting as non-linear & defining is true. We move in circles & slowly become less blind.