Three Things: A Sharks’ Game, Indian Springs in Calistoga, and the Poetry of Jean Valentine

“That's my goal: to take out everything that doesn't feel alive.” These are Jean Valentine’s words on editing her poetry. I’d rather keep reading her book, River at Wolf, than get up to pee. Her crystalline lines, offer murky dream fragments barely remembered but that return –intermittent radio signals— when you fall asleep again. Likewise it reminds me of a that quick shudder in the middle of the night, the knowledge that something important is all wrong, still beautiful, and within my power to change. The alive is dynamic, and her poetry, these condensed-less-than-a-page bits and pieces of living dynamite, cut into the mind with recognition, and then sometimes mend it.

“And the under voice said, Stars you are mine,
you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table
when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silver-blue stirrups,
I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me?
Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive.”

http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/river_wolf.html.

How to take out everything that doesn’t feel alive? Is that only possible on the page…? Sarah, Leslie and I went to Indian Springs in Calistoga. www.indianspringscalistoga.com/ Like postulants (Sarah’s word) we walked in our white terry cloth robes to the Olympic-sized mineral pool. It was an alive night, moon-basked, cool and clear. We floated on foam mats, on large “noodles” talking and laughing, holding the corners of the mats so we wouldn’t drift away from each other. We must have made a funny triangle from the moon’s perspective.

Tourists have been ‘taking the waters’ here since the 1860’s and the Wapoo tribes, for generations before that. All that wasn’t alive melted away in the steam – and after some time there – we were too soothed to let anything unnecessary erode that calm. I could only feel love and gratitude. War, debt, loss, anger would reside in other moments.

Humans love rituals – collecting words to recite, soaking in so-called sacred waters, and the national anthem before a hockey game. Despite myself, I got chills when I heard the song before my first-ever hockey game. Not because the National Anthem means anything specific to me– but because its formal repetition binds a community: melts the furtive, restless, and chaotic individual selves into a crowd poised to enjoy something beautiful together. How appropriate to then to share the drama of a match. A ceremony with its own rules, rites, and liturgy. Its exciting to feel 17,453 people all clap in unison, to make the cave-man-like - shark jaw motion, – to yell “Charge!”

It might be a stretch, but I find hockey of all other sports to be well- edited. There’s no endless stop and start – it MOVES. It’s all you can do to keep watch on the puck. It almost hurts the eyes. And I don’t think it’s right but I LIKE the fights. I’m human and as one, I get mad. While I’d hopefully never act out violently – I do imagine it – and I did get some satisfaction when I saw the guys let it out on the ice. It’s safe. Contained. The penalties are clear, and at least in the game I saw, no one is seriously injured. Its just steam eking out of the earth, but cooled so we can take it, or the violence constrained in a poem that calls out human nature and underlines both its light and dark aspects. I’m grateful for all these expressions of the alive.