my smallness conversely important

February, sunny kitchen. There is a bunch of forsythia branches sitting on our new turquoise table, looking awfully spring-like and pretty. I am going to volunteer in my first classroom today, a grade 1-2-3 split that meg has been working with as well. I have to say I am quite looking forward to it; it is about time I start figuring out whether this is what i want to do with my life. Despite the career angst, though, I'm happy. Things are coming together, sometimes, sometimes.

Also, my friend Tara posted this Al Purdy poem, it's definitely worth sharing.

The Darkness

- particularly in Renfrew County
when I chased that porcupine
from cellar to woodshed
from lawn to road with flashlight
and felt affection for it
that I couldn't explain to myself
but do explain
as if it embodied
all the lost
doomed animals crushed to death
on highways or swallowed and eaten
by fiercer animals - by man
Why should some comic beast
like a briar patch on four legs
be anything but that?
Anyway I'd stand there
beside the porch when bugs were gone
with everyone else asleep
looking up at that great ocean
that place where you're able to think
father than you're able to see
billions of miles - or think you do
for surely observing light from that distance
is having your mind touch its source
having it brush against stars?
my smallness therefore conversely important
my heart beating across that void
a tiny pump supremely unimportant?
Then I laugh
how ridiculous to invent methods
of receiving yourself or pretending
you touched the far edge of the cosmos
Only settle yourself on the shore
of this bright sea this glittering enormity
and close your hand on a scrap of it
the darkness the massed nothingness
say I have grabbed some and held on
Surely if that frightened porcupine
could represent all dead animals
then I may I allow myself this conceit:
to feel with hands and heart
the black reaches of light-absence
and the whip of comets
pulsing like swift little fish
when lights leap like car headlights
gleaming on wet pavements in the sky
What this comes to is religion
not the conventional stuff
but some sort of lost kind of coherence
I've never found in people
or in myself for that matter
only in the unhurried natural world
where things are uncrowded by things
with distance between animals
star distance between neighbours
when the grouch irritable universe
fumbles with understanding
and a god's coherence
Look down on me
spirit of everyplace
guardian beyond the edge of chaos
I may be a slight reminder
of a small tribe that occurred to you
when you were thinking of something else
even tho I am of little importance
and conversely of great importance
I am waiting here
until the dark velvet curtains
are drawn and the scrap of darkness
I clutched in my hand
has changed to light.


- Al Purdy