Five months after graduating from college, I’d saved enough money substitute teaching at my old junior high school to pay for my round-trip airfare to Rome. I had my backpack with the rigid aluminum external frame and was ready to join my friends in Europe. Welcome to the world of aerogrammes and American Express Travelers Cheques. I would spend the next six months abroad, traveling in Italy, France, Belgium, England, Spain, and Morocco. Every city and town was a new world to figure out, aided by a network of fellow backpacking travelers, who shared information about inexpensive food and places to stay.
I learned to figure out transit systems and how to communicate in other languages. My Spanish grammar and vocabulary miraculously surfaced from some unconscious place, I studied French, and learned survival phrases in Italian and German, enough to say please, thank you, how much does that cost, I’ve lost my glasses, I’d like to take a shower, and where is the train station.
Even now the smell of diesel exhaust reminds me of walking through Europe’s great cities and visiting museums for free with an international student ID. In France, I took a train with friends to see the cathedral in Senlis, built from 1153–91. It was a short day trip from Paris and a chance to be in the countryside. I don’t remember much about the interior of the building, except experiencing awe at the ancient building’s Gothic dimensions, a visceral reminder of the medieval place of humans in God’s world.
In the stony silence I heard the slapping of wings and looked up to see a pigeon, high above me, trapped in this holy space, unable to find a way out, moving against the glass. A spiritual metaphor and me, on my post-graduate artistic quest, with a new notebook to keep track of my journey. I wanted to write about it, but could never find a way into expressing what it evoked.
At that point in my writing life, I waited for inspiration, and sometimes that could be a long wait. I was quick to give up when the work didn’t go in the direction I thought it should. My writing apprenticeship was a circuitous one and it took ten years before I was able to write about the experience. I think there were two necessary conditions. First, there was the composting that is part of many creative ventures—a layering of memory and perception, turned and turned again, making rich nutrients for the soil. And, most important, I had begun to trust my own voice and write before judging. I was allowing myself to be more freewheeling in my approach, letting the work jump the way my mind did. The result was a poem called “St. Francis,” which began with my travels in Europe, moving from Giotto’s fresco of St. Francis preaching to the small birds, to the Senlis Cathedral, to an imagined world where my wife taught me to heal birds maimed by our cat, to me repairing the souls of broken people and watching them fly home at dusk to their owners, who might open their windows to let them in.
I had followed where the poem needed to go. It was in that moment that I began not to write poems as I thought they should be, but to follow where the words led me. I was writing about myself, but also writing about something bigger, something we can approach but never fully name. As with any creative process, I had encountered the unexpected, and was learning to meet it with an open heart.
Saint Francis (from Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press)
In my backyard garden
they are so simple in the compost
these fat sparrows
picking over the latest seeds
or robins hopping around the edges
after worms. I watch the way they hop,
sense the air around themselves
and fly off.
And I remember traveling in France
in the cathedral in Senlis
where high above the massive stones
and people humbled by Gothic dimensions,
I noticed one pigeon had flown in
through a broken pane of glass
and like a lost soul sought a way out,
throwing its body against the unreachable outside,
the white light. And a few weeks earlier
I had been in Assisi
and had seen Giotto’s fresco of Saint Francis
preaching to the small birds.
I would want to understand them in the same way
if I were not afraid I would break their wings
if I touched them, if I
were not afraid entire flocks
would think only of free food
and invade my house, flying
from piano to chairs and banister
and there I would be
in a house full of birds
not knowing how to talk with them,
my son telling me they sing
because they are happy
my cat trying to convert them
into protein. My wife would take
the small ones maimed by the cat
and nurse them back to health,
feeding them through small tubes,
their frightened hearts beating so fast
that they sound like the wind.
She would teach me her secrets
and then one day I would heal my first sparrow
and driven by my new power
I would run out to the road
and find a gull splattered on the asphalt
and touching its windblown outstretched wing
resurrect it and head down Congress Street
and begin to heal school children and my house
would fill with the souls of broken people,
as if we ran a spiritual repair shop
where we would hand out little checks that said
“not responsible for items left over 30 days”
and we’d begin to make them all over
rebuilt and winged and able to fly home
by themselves at dusk when the air is dusty and red
and we look out our windows with yearning
listening to souls murmuring
as they fly home, listening for
the sound of our own
so we will know when to open
the windows and let them in.
Image at top: Stuart Kestenbaum, Gothic Window.