“The Blue Way Out of Here”

Michael Ondaatje is returning to poetry after 25 years I learn this morning in a LitHub article. Ondaatje has been a North-Star author on my horizon, his memorable novels pinpoint lights in the darkness. This news, the publication of a poetry collection, The Year of Last Things, sends me to our local library website to put a copy on hold. I will likely purchase it; poetry remains an investment in my well-being.

Ondaatje explains the fine difference between novels and poetry. (Screenshot from LitHub article)

I remember the attention I gave to selecting the first poem welcoming my summer-sated eighth graders back to school. In retrospect perhaps I worried too much about this introduction. After all, while first impressions matter, we were going to spend the year together reading poems. Nonetheless, that first poem felt so critical, weighted with hopes and dreams of our precious time together.

Often I tendered Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” it closing lines, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” enduring with so many of them, so “sticky” it would show up in graduation speeches.

Other years, Marge Piercy’s “If I Had Been Called Sabrina or Ann She Said” captured the students’ prone-to-sarcasm side with its invitation to explore our names, both real and imagined, the possible selves we carry within—or might have. If names were to initiate our year, Sandra Cisneros’ prose poem from The House on Mango Street, “My Name” would extend and enhance the journey.

Then came the September I returned from a summer course at the University of New Hampshire with the amazing Linda Rief. We had focused on developing our visual responses in the classroom, working with drawing and sketching. I was a fish out of water, and those are the classes that, while they make me uncomfortable, push me forward.

This push complicated the September opener. Then I found Ondaatje’s poem “Inner Tube:”

Inner Tube

On the warm July river
head back

upside down river
for a roof

slowly paddling
towards an estuary between trees

there’s a dog
learning to swim near me
friends on shore

my head
dips
back to the eyebrow
I’m the prow
on an ancient vessel,
this afternoon
I’m going down to Peru
soul between my teeth

a blue heron
with its awkward
broken backed flap
upside down

one of us is wrong

he
his blue grey thud
thinking he knows
the blue way
out of here

or me

Ondaatje’s words winged me away to summer days on rivers, swimming in the reflection of green branches. I heard the cries of the bold jumping from rocks, basked in the sun-zapping languor of late afternoons, the perfume of sun block and river water mixed with pitch-warmed pine. I could draw this poem, both what it said and what it suggested. “Let’s draw today,” I’d say. “Let’s get started.”