i thank you god for this most amazing ache which is natural which is infinite which is yes

i have read how Lord Byron on his death bed turned to a friend and said he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence.

dear little voice,

i have read how Lord Byron on his death bed turned to a friend and said he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence.

[i thank you god for this most amazing], e.e. cummings

i am having one of my hours on the steam train to emerald station.

i want to keep on going through the high grass and over the edge of the world, which cannot be very far away— the light suggests it, tells me that the world ends here: that only ground and sun and sky are left, the shaky pebbles and slow shadows on the tracks— the falling light catching the lazy halos of butterflies and the thrum hazy machinery beneath me.

“The Train” - Ben McLaughlin

i want to go on straight through the turning grass and over the edge of the world— past the disappearing tracks, into the distant light, onto the platform pebbles where there is as of this moment only some unspecific and equally untouchable future where i can float off into it like the tawny hawks sailing over my head, making slow shadows on the walls.

i’ve got a real case of whatever all this ache is, you see.

so i cry on the steam train on the way to emerald station with my head thrown out the window, in the mercy of that perfect falling light, of the singing of brilliant, bursting blossoms in blur, of distant tulips and chimneys, the sway of the high grass in the stumble of this little thrumming machine, above us the sky a silver stable where January’s fingers are resolved to toss clusters of stars. only quiet in the night. only quiet and slow-moving smoke in the night.

what i am experiencing here is a unique kind of ecstasy: the rude shadow of bliss that precedes grief like a final dare.it feels almost inappropriate and certainly awkward, but in it one experiences a certain floating euphoria: on the steam train to emerald station, suddenly everything is liquid, buoyed, drinkable (i drink the air, the smoke, the gardens, the distant people) and i say a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it, a yes to this: a yes to being on the steam train to emerald station, and a yes to the ache, to agony, to its bliss even, and certainly to a broken heart—

it’s one of my three hours, you see.

A Bangladeshi girl hangs on to the side of a train, taken by Tab Tuhin in 2008

i close my eyes on the steam train to emerald station and i listen to the sound of yes— of stars in wells, of oranges being torn, of coins being dropped— the sounds of promises.

yes, it is one of my hours and i am on the steam train to emerald station and my heart is breaking but i choose to still believe in everything for exactly this reason: in a hundred— no, in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.

i make a list to myself. i believe in theatres and i believe in the smell before rain, i believe in people and i believe they cannot waste their lives, i believe in spring and i believe in the miracle of a useless hobby, in spontaneous tango and passion and i believe in red boots and the snow on beaches, the melodrama of airports and the impulse to care for strangers.

i can give you another, if you’d like. i’ve listed all of them: roses, change, the wind and how we never see it, the leaping greenly spirits of trees. the blue true dream of sky. in kisses and in tears. in the sun’s birthday. i believe in the unlimitable earth.

but i also decide to believe in what hurts me. to believe in misery and to believe in hot nights and in my own tears. i believe in being let down, i believe in angels and i believe in aching. i believe in being brave, i believe in the inevitability of mistakes and i believe in anxiety. i believe in neurosis; the terror of care. i believe in toothaches and i believe in sin.

i believe in my hot and heavy heart because i know that nothing can be wasted in feeling. not a life. not a heart. and certainly not hours.

it’s all simply a part of a world far too beautiful to lose.

René Burri, ‘Tokyo Train’

the world is so enormous and we are so brief: as Louise Ledrich writes: we are a one-day dandelion. a seedpod skittering across the ice. we are a feather falling from the wing of a bird.

i still don’t yet have the word for what all of this is but I know that it’s beautiful. and i still don’t know why it was given to us to be so brief and yet feel so much. it is, i think, a cruel and lovely trick.

but it’s why my Heart is always open to the little things that know the secrets of living, like the flowers that nosy their way from seeds and are moved in the wind— whatever moves them is better than anything i can know, and i know that the day i do not listen for it is the day that i remain closed.

so i’m on the steam train to emerald station and my heart is breaking and i personally cannot quite shake the astonishment: i can’t quite believe what my life keeps teaching me and that it keeps goes on with the endless game, chases new plays both in spite and to surprise me: that i am still here, even though there have been days where i didn’t want to be— knowing that there will again be days where i don’t want to be— that despite the invariable blunders and bliss — that even these amused lessons are only a passing fragment in this material existence, which itself is a thin veil tossed over a series of miracles so myriad and so important that we inevitably overlook them every day.

so i’m smiling because right now i only need to believe in the wild machinery of a steam train, taking me to trees, to breakfasts and to sunsets, to bad dreams, to tears, to new friends and to stranger lives, all of which i believe in because i have chosen to believe in everything— in all of the totally ephemeral bliss and sustainable agony of my youth.

despite my protests and my excitements a thousand unpredictable aches will wait for me when i step off this steam train at emerald station— bigger and bolder and more brilliant and more boring than even this one. love, too. ecstasy. disillusion. shame. questions. hope. maybe laughter, if i am lucky.

Waiting for the train, southeast London. 1983, unknown photographer.

and i’m not being a complete fool- i know the incandescent endless happiness is the best kind— more than divinity or apricots or chocolate or jewels— its fitzcarraldo, its ease, the brilliant bursting delight of it; laughter or hours in the soft grass or our hand in another perched on a stone wall. we want these moments like a seed wants its way out of itself. we want it like raspberries want whatever they’re climbing towards..

but, little voice, i have said this before, and now i say it again but this time to myself— life is not a safe investment. to live at all is to be wrung out and broken in the heart.

on the steam train to emerald station i think of George Batailles: a being that isn’t cracked isn’t possible. 

a being that isn’t cracked isn’t possible.

if you want to make sure of keeping it intact— that hot and heavy heart— you must first give that heart to no one, not even to animals or notions or art or tears, and instead wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of selfishness. but in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. it will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. it will become cold.

the only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Hands touching the faces of riders drawn on the moving New York City subway trains. by Gregory Muenzen

i keep as still as i can when we finally turn over that quiet mountain into the end of the world.

and nothing happens. even though we do move into the mouth of the leaving sun.

but i didn’t expect anything to happen. i am now simply something new underneath the sky, like flowers or birds or discarded candy wrappers, and i am where i was once looking, in some future now-specific and yet entirely unknown. i do not want to be anything more. i am entirely happy and my heart is broken but i am going somewhere.

so i’m hanging my head out the train on the way to emerald station when i realise: i’m not happy. this is not an incandescent, effortless ecstasy; it’s not marzipan and it’s not birds. it doesn’t shimmer and it doesn’t sing.

but i realise also in this moment that for all its melodrama there must also be a simple joy to dying; of shattering into the same dust that creates symphonies and snail trails, of becoming apart of something entire instead of existing as something other— whether it is sun or air or goodness or knowledge, or anything else worth believing in.

at any rate: i realise that instead this is happiness— this final dissolution into something complete and great; a dissolution that comes as naturally as sleep and as confidently as rain.

and being on the steam train to emerald station isn’t a kind of dying, but it is a kind of departure.

that is to say, in both scenarios i am going somewhere i do not know: into some unspecific and equally untouchable future where i can float off into it like the tawny hawks sailing over my head, making slow shadows on the walls:

Night Train, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1959

how lucky we are that we can’t sell these moments; sell our terrors, our apprehensions, our lulls: that they’ll insist on returning to us with their little hands again and again.

ultimately, the bliss cummings is talking about in his poem isn’t your three hours. these hours are superb and worthy of the teeth that cling to their perfect marrow, but they are not, little voice, what cummings is interested in.

instead, this poem is for the hours in which you need to cry so hard that there’s nothing left to say for it. the hours afterwards in which you laugh at the absurdity of your own private melodrama, pick up the plates and the grief; this exhausting performance for which there is no audience, no applause. and still, the quiet of the hours following. still: every part of you run through with wind.

how lucky we are that we can’t sell these moments. that we can’t give them away, negotiate, bargain or trade. that instead they create the only circumstances possible to create a gesture towards hope.

they are the only circumstances in which it is necessary to create a list.

Winter Morning and Train, Steve Coffey, 2010

“As the plump squirrel scampers
across the roof of the corncrib,
the moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
and I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying,
This is what I wanted.”
- today i was happy, so i made this poem, by James Wright

so: i believe in the unsustainable agony of my youth. i believe in my broken heart. i believe in bravery and i also believe in sin. i believe in being careful, and i very much believe in being kind. i believe in my own uselessness, my misgivings, my confusions—

most of all, i believe there are a few poems i carry with me for these reasons.

e.e. cummings’ [i thank. you god for this most amazing] is one of them. it’s the poem that is a prayer i whispered to myself with my head out the window on the steam train to emerald station. it’s the one i have howled alone in empty rooms. i have traced it on my palm with one finger at the demands of silence. i have taken my friends by the shoulders and spoken it into their eyes. it’s the poem i thought of when, on one unseasonably cold january afternoon in a friend's home, alone in a bathroom, i did rescue a trapped monarch butterfly from a shower curtain feeling its hot life like the striking of a match between my two palms until at last i reached the back door, unclasped them and released it.

it disappeared into the sky.

never before have i felt more worthy of my own life.

Francisco Segovia, It Isn’t Gentleness

“There’s no accounting for happiness,” Jane Kenyon wrote, “or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.”

i don’t think i believe in happiness. if i do it’s only because i believe in everything. i believe in happiness like i believe in loneliness, in wheat and insects and ecstasy and love and shame and miracles also.

and i mostly believe there is always something more beautiful for the one who lets more in.

today i woke up and it was like every other day except for the fact that it was wasn’t. i didn’t open up the book and begin writing. i didn’t marvel at the growing light. instead i kept my shoes by the door, i let what i do be what i do, realising that there are a hundred ways to be on a steam train to emerald station.

it’s the whole life that’s necessary— not the one part of it. it’s our feet at the door as much as what remains behind and in front of them. it’s why we read, it’s why we rescue butterflies, it’s why we love and why we ache, why we write poems and why we suffer. it’s why there’s no hierarchy to these things.

it’s why nothing’s lost when it’s done in feeling.

yes: here’s my happy ending for this happy, happy fool: even steps of leaving can sound like closing wings, falling wings. even the sound of a heart breaking can be like rain.

you know i’ll leave this platform singing.

love,

ars poetica

little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you eery week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:

Jack Spicer, from “A Second Train Song for Gary”