Here’s a recording of today’s featured poem from Poetry Daily.

It’s like you look back
and there’s the first half of forever
which was nothing to you since you were nothing
yourself but there it is stretching way
beyond the beginning
of the beginning of anything
because it is the first half of everything
which is what the absence of you had been zipping through,
and so imagine your exits: Stone Age, Age of Reason,
Renaissance, etc., or, say, 8902 BC, or 1396, or 1464,
or 1982, or maybe when the landscape finally
looks familiar or attractive or instructive enough,
someone—who but you, but there is no you—somebody
says, Well, this looks pretty good,
and so all these tiny bits of carbon and hydrogen,
nitrogen, and calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and sulfur
copper, zinc, iron, and bromide
clump up in somebody’s belly, clump and grow,
clump and grow until you spring forth
in a bathroom south of Akron or a cab in New Delhi,
a bedroom in Ames or a pool hall in Brixton or an ER in Boston
which is what it’s like exactly, except, except
pretty soon you’re wondering why
you couldn’t remember to remember
that route a little bit, goddamn it,
your roots because now here you are
and it’s the middle of the night and you’re in the kitchen
scanning the classifieds or thumbing a catalog
or slicing a pie and you look up
and there’s the stove clock saying
2:10 and you’re all
wound up about nothing again.

—Mark Kraushaar

The Gettysburg Review
Autumn 2009

We arrived home a week ago from our little midwest adventure and I must say I was eager for the mail. I’m always eager for the mail. As a writer I regularly submit myself to the daily longing for good news, which often results in receiving nearly weightless self-addressed letters from literary magazines all over the country.  To think, my work in the hands of a whole bunch of young slush pile readers who, if they felt compelled, could pass it on to their editors. I can often read the form rejections without opening the envelopes by holding the letters to the light. Oh well.

But sometimes the best mail comes after that correspondence, when contributor copies are out. This time I had the delight of looking through my copy of Arctic Inspired, essentially an anthology of stories, essays, songs, poems, and stunning visual art by people who have traveled through the tundra of Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Tim Irvin, who envisioned and edited the book, calls it a not-for-profit community project. Irvin says:

If this project brings people together to share their collective interest in the tundra, then it will have been a success. If it also stands as a testament to how the rugged beauty and vastness of the tundra inspires the people who visit it; if it helps in some way to ensure that we treasure it, that we don’t plunder it, that we respect it and its people, then I will be thrilled.

I wish him and this project that success and hope some of you will feel drawn to this sort of collection. Inside you’ll find three poems of mine, a slew of great writing and stunning photography. Never been to the tundra, but want to know what it’s like? Order a copy of this beautifully designed book. Spread the word. You won’t regret it.

What is so heartbreaking about the Time Traveler’s Wife? It is a striking, well written book with a complex structure. The literal world of the story is a stunning idea—that a man could evaporate in and out of the present to other times in his life. But if, for a moment, we leave our fundamentalist reading behind, isn’t this exactly how life actually is?

In the middle of any given day we drift from the simplest and most profound moments of the present into the blinding past. A smell can send us to another world and we actually feel we have lived it again. Language and imagination give us those few glimpses of our future lives.

The ghosts of those who have left us never really leave. I still feel like I see my great-grandfather and my old friend Gabe.

I write this not to put Audrey Niffenegger down or to do anything but praise her book.  I merely wish to point out that the reason her book hits home is not for its rare quality, but for its exact and true way of giving us our current lives in a striking new form.

Jim Harrison, the prolific author of such books as Legends of the Fall, is doing the same thing for me these days. I recently read Returning to Earth and am currently toward the end of Dalva. These books are heartbreaking for the truth they capture. They make and remake the world with a kind of writing that doesn’t announce its elegance.

Read these books. Find out something about your own life that you always suspected might be true. In these talented hands your life will vanish—and reappear—before your eyes.

One of the things that has filled—and I mean really filled—my life is paddling canoes. Junking around on ponds, following the shore of bigger lakes, getting lost in the rhythm of stroke after lovely stroke. In the past year I have begun paddling most frequently in a style some call “Canadian.” This means the paddle never leaves the water, but is spun silently underwater and feathered back to the original position in one seamless move. The boat glides after the short pull and leaves the remainder of each stroke for subtle maneuvering. It is an utterly quiet way to travel and I’ve noticed how my thoughts are instantly quieted under its spell.

All this is really to say that we’ve just returned from a very brief trip in the Boundary Waters with River. We had a great time, though it wasn’t entirely romantic (trying to get the boy to sleep in the tent is much harder than walking him around a dimly lit room), but when it came down to it I really wanted to start River’s life in a boat. To give him a chance at being that paddle that never leaves the water. Or at least knowing those rhythms early on.

We are finding new and better ways to parent nearly every day, and to do this means stumbling through many things that don’t work all that well. It means that we laugh a lot and sometimes nearly lose it over silly things. We have kept it together, largely I believe, by helping each other find time for our most important daily traditions.

I go canoeing for the same reason that Elie practices yoga: to be immersed in a ritual teaches you about life and about living (which I consider two very different things). We’ve added the ritual of scrambling at the simple, but often mysterious, needs of a little boy. We are immersed, and, as humble students, we are learning that though we may be more worn down, being attentive to his rhythms teaches us many of the same things.

There is a place in northern Wisconsin that has been in my family for well over a hundred years. It first belonged to my great-great-grandparents, D.L. and Lady Taylor and now, six generations later, a little bit belongs to River.

It has been a place of many milestones. A place where generations gathered and celebrated and really grew up. Among other events, my parents were married there, and 26 years later, so were Elie and I.

We spent the last week wandering through the woods, savoring the hemlock shade.  We saw a coyote right out the door of the log cabin, picked raspberries and made jam.  We paddled and swam and savored these still-early days with the boy.

In that spirit we baptized River along the shore below the original cabin. There were no ministers present. Just Elie, River and myself—singing as we walked slowly down the hill. At the shore we spoke to the boy and welcomed him to the woods and to the family. I have belonged to that place all my life, and as we cupped our hands in the water and let it wet River’s hair, I knew he also belonged.

It was important to both of us that River earn his dual Mid-west/West Coast citizenship early, which has also brought us back to the humid arms of Minnesota to spend some time with Elie’s family. We know it will pass too quickly. But we’re getting it all in now, while the getting is still good.