Revisiting the Pantoum and the Phone Booth

Talking (and listening) to death.

Iowa forest and prairie in full summer.

*I’ll be taking next week off newsletter composition to go on a writing retreat. I’ll meet you back here on June 28th.

Poetry

First of all, here’s Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris.”

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Second of all, here's my pantoum.

The Phone Booth

I am tired and bleary
shed their bark like skin
heavy with the weight of my selves
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
the phone has no dial tone
I was so happy I wanted to cry.

I am tired and bleary
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
shed their bark like skin
the phone has no dial tone.

Shed their bark like skin
heavy with the weight of my selves
the phone booth has no dial tone
I was so happy I wanted to cry.

Heavy with the weight of my selves
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
I was so happy I wanted to cry
I am tired and bleary.

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Journeying

Earlier this year, I wrote the piece A Pantoum and a Phone Booth, where I discussed the revelatory practice of writing a particular style of poem called a pantoum at a retreat. My pantoum offered me a lot to ponder, and I shared some of what I discovered in that newsletter. But to quote myself, two lines in the poem “gave me a little more trouble,” and even seemed a bit “ominous”: “a phone booth at the bottom of the trail” and “the phone booth has no dial tone.”¹ That last line in particular appeared, like the phone booth itself, to be a stopping point. It sat at the end of my trail of thought and waited. When I wrote the poem, I knew that “no dial tone” pointed toward death, but I didn’t know how to accept its invitation.

Then two weeks ago, I found myself in a heart surgeon’s office, waiting to hear the results of an echocardiogram. The test had, hopefully, ruled out heart disfunction as an underlying cause for my low blood pressure. Despite the dampening effect years of meditation and trauma healing have had on my catastrophic tendencies, in situations like this one, I continue to consider my own imminent death as a very real possibility. Ultimately, the doctor delivered good news. I felt deep relief, and catastrophic death slid to the back of my mind until about 6pm that evening when it appeared again on my way to a weekly hiphop class. I’d heard a story earlier that day about two people who went to see the doctor with gallbladder complaints and received news that they had cancer instead. One of these individuals died within two weeks of their diagnosis. In the car, I recalled my occasionally complaining gallbladder and thought, “what if I have cancer?” I had operated without this particular paralyzing fear for just under four hours, and evidently, that was long enough.

I spent the rest of my drive surprised and perplexed at my need for a steady diet of fatal scenarios. When I shared the experience with my Spiritual Companion,² she replied, “well, it’s really fear of fear, isn’t it?” For a moment, I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I realized that all of my catastrophic hypothsizing kept me distracted from feeling the real, underlying fear, the fear of death. After decades of imagined fatality, I had never really interacted with death, only the terrifying scenarios my mind created to keep me safe. “Well, no wonder some part of me needs to keep manufacturing all of this,” I thought. “I’m frightened of dying, and this is how I’m dealing with it.” The revelation was a relief. At least, now I know what is happening when I find myself in the middle of imagined demise. I also have the opportunity to open, “just a little, little bit” as my Spiritual Companion advised, to death, to grow, very slowly, more comfortable with it.

I would like to consider death a companion rather than an entity I must continue to push away or ignore at tremendous cost to myself. Oddly enough, this version of death doesn’t seem nearly as frightening. The “real” death, at least right now, in this moment, seems like someone I could pick up the phone and talk to. So I’ve returned to the phone booth, cautiously picked up the silent receiver, and begun to listen.

---

Gardening and Making/Mending

Native purple coneflower and sunny prairie paths

This week my garden has expanded to include the prairies of central Iowa. I spent the last few days in the small Iowa town where my partner teaches during the school year. Last time I visited here, I biked. This time I spent one late morning hiking through a local nature preserve. Summer has arrived, and I missed the window of cool air available earlier in the day. Nevertheless, I spent a couple hours walking and sweating through restored tall grass prairie and oak forests. The preserve contains multiple ponds, and I heard frogs flop into the water, while batting away perspiration hungry insects. At one point, I sat down to rest on a stone at a shady overlook. I wondered about the stone. It was so much older than I. I’m not a geologist and couldn’t imagine its history beyond a vague sense of glacial activity, but did notice its obvious solidity and stilling presence. I sat in silence and watched the trees and prairie move with the wind. I listened to the sounds they made and felt the wind, cool on damp skin. My mind slowed and stilled. Eventually, I returned to my hot car and the dusty drive home on backroads. My quiet mind went with me.

Neglected knitting basket and box

As the gardening section of this newsletter swells during warmer months, so the making and mending section shrinks. I spend so much of my creative (and physical) energy outside during the summer, that not much remains for textiles, particularly wool, which is hot. When we lived in Atlanta, Georgia. I always picked up my knitting again in August. This puzzled me because August is the absolute worst month to be in the southern U.S. Humidity and heat peak with no perceived end in sight (we used to delude ourselves by telling each other that September was much better because it was drier). On one paricular day, I sat in my darkened, air-conditioned home knitting and reading Barry Lopez’s book Arctic Dreams. In that moment, I realized that my handwork and reading habits were actually unconscious attempts to manifest cooler weather.

1. The editor in me cringes at this line for entirely different reasons than the self discerning its meaning. Of course, a phone booth does not have a dial tone. It’s a phone booth after all. Ah well. The pantoum exercise did not include editing.

2. Here’s my take on the practice of Spiritual Companioning.