Sunlight, Moonlight
Two poems centuries apart offer timeless insights
Friends,
One of the many things I love about poetry and art and all the rest is how they can flatten time. The art critic Helen Molesworth talks about art as time travel (the object leading you into other times, other worlds), and I think that's right. In the poems below, an 11th c. Japanese poet and a 21st c. poet from Atlanta, GA look out onto landscapes and architecture and find imagery to write their way through terrible suffering. While they centuries apart from completely different social worlds, I like to think of them looking through the same windows, writing under the same light.
“Although the wind ...” by Izumi Shikibu
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.“A Walk to Sope Creek” by David Bottoms
Sometimes when I've made the mistake of anger, which sometimes
breeds the mistake of cruelty, I walk
down the rocky slope above the ruined mill on Sope Creek
where sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight
into gauzy screens. And sometimes when I've made the mistake
of cruelty, which always breeds grief,
I remember how, years ago, my uncle led me, a boy,
into a thicket of pines and taught me to pray
beside a white stone, the way a man had taught him, a boy,
to pray behind a clapboard church.
Sometimes when I'm as mean as a stone, I weave
between trees above that crumbling mill
and stumble through those threaded screens of light,
the way anger must fall
through many stages of remorse.
Any rock, he allowed, can be an altar.In Izumi’s short five lines, the poet describes a simple scene: a rainstorm passes over a dilapidated home. There's wind and rain, and what used to be shelter no longer keeps the weather at bay. The roof leaks, and you can imagine the water pooling at the ceiling dripping through onto the floor. Where else can our imagination take us? Maybe the windows are busted too, not quite fitting in their frames. I can see a fire in a fireplace, sputtering and dying out. Maybe all the bedding is damp too, wet from inescapable rain. It's not a pleasant scene—the opposite of comfort, the opposite of building a safe, calming home to protect us from elements. And when everything's falling apart, what does the poet see? What had blocked her view of the night sky is now broken open—and moonlight reflects in the leaking water.
From an objective reading, moonlight dripping into the house is already an evocative image. You can imagine a dark house lit from within, the silver light of the moon so far away now brought close, dripping through the roof and filling the ruined house. And then there's the psychological reading, too. The house-as-self. What insights does that have for us? We often try so hard to build our lives, plank by plank. To make things orderly and to shape and trim and edit construct the perfect life. Of course, that never works.
But there's even more here for us. The poem hangs on a metaphorical turn of phrase: moonlight leaks. Moonlight doesn't leak—water does. But bringing together moon and water turns both things into something illuminating, literally. A common image for enlightenment, the moonlight here evokes the poet's own insights that have come hard-won from suffering. There are lessons in her suffering: she didn't want them, didn't ask for them, and yet here they are. We don't get the biographical details of what she's going through (or even the insights she gains for that matter), but as the life she's built falls apart, she catches a glimpse of life-as-it-is, not as she wants to construct it to be. Ruined, the moonlight leaks through.
In a similar way to Izumi's poem, we don't get much information from David Bottoms on his “mistakes” of anger and cruelty and grief. Maybe he means yelling at a loved one, or the way grudges can slowly corrode the heart. Maybe he means something more stark–turning to drink or violence. But whatever it is, the poet knows he's off course. He lost his way in a fog of anger, and he's trying to find his way back to his own life. Where does he go in his searching? He hikes through local mill ruins and lets a haunted Southern landscape reweave him back to life.
As he hikes through the sunlit woods, his own mind drifts back into the past and toward a lineage of men who've taught him what it means to be a good man. As he looks at the mill, he walks through his own memories—the mentoring and lessons learned and praying and church services—and it gives him a way forward out of his anger. And though he's wandering through the woods instead of a church, that space becomes its own sanctuary too, a place for him to seek forgiveness, to reconvert his stone heart back into something soft, light-filled.
And like Izumi's poems, the poet uses architecture and light and natural images to orient himself. There's stone (rocky slopes, ruined mill, white stone, mean as a stone, crumbing mills, and a rock altar), there's light (sunlight through tree branches), and then there's the lovely woven imagery tying it together: weaving, gauzy screens, hiking as weaving, threaded screens. Where Izumi's insights came from things falling apart, Bottoms' insights come from sunlight and memories and the natural world and prayer weaving together. It's more about what happens when you start the slow patient work of bandaging life back together, one gauzy thread at a time.
These poets use moonight and sunlight to express profound change. So what exactly happened to them? And what exactly are they learning? We don’t really know the details. But what we can know is what happens in our own lives. The phone call that changes everything, the relationship that cools and hardens into distance, the ruptured friendship, our own self-destructive behavior, and, through it all, our own longing for things to be different.
For me, the real gift of these poems is that they start with this assumption that things don't go according to plan. We will never be able to construct or perform or strive or build our way to the exact life we want. Because, despite all the stars we might wish on, life is much more mysterious and wild and tragic and joyous than anything we might hope to build from it. These poets separated by centuries are blindsided by pain, and as they write their way toward a more mature and grounded (and even prayerful) experience of life, they leave behind some words for us, too. Words we can weave into our own lives, any time we need them.
Take care,
Michael