A thousand stanzas ago, I was a poet. Think about it, a verse as a unit of time. That makes sense to me, someone who once had crazy literary ambitions. I blame my brilliant poetry professor in college, who sat me down once in her office and told me that I was living a life of “self-exile.” The idea intrigued me—what did she mean? Let me live it.
I, too, wanted black kohl beneath my eyes, to accentuate the green. I, too, wished to wield magic in the middle of Michigan corn fields. Take me to the ecstatic place where surrealism is the song.
But I never made it as a poet. I sat with them in restaurants called Prairie, I took classes with them in grand art deco buildings downtown, got critiqued by the big ones as they peered into my poetry behind their desks of pomp and influence. But I never got the library or the swivel chair, the delirious devotees or the tour of prairie state bookstores. That’s fine, I traveled instead. And so it’s said, a poet can learn from other poets or she can travel.
(It didn’t have to be an either/or, but life’s questionnaires are tricky and make you think you have to pick.)
I smoked my first cigarette at an archaeology camp in southwestern Colorado. You’d think I was being naughty but no, we made our own cigarettes from bamboo and stitched a leather pouch to carry our tobacco, as part of a lesson on Indigenous habits and customs. I even beaded a little red heart on the front.
Smoking is a spiritual act, they taught us. At 15, that was the kind of message that landed straight like an arrow in my soul. I would connect smoking with consciousness expansion for the rest of my days, ignoring all obvious threats to my sweet, innocent lungs.
Marlboro reds in Jerusalem. Nyala in Addis. Sportsman in Dar es Salaam. I never mastered the fine art of rolling one’s own cigarettes, but I loved watching my friends and lovers roll me one as a gesture of good will, a manifesto of slow living.
Organizing a smoke at an outdoor table in the morning with the sun licking your face, a hot cup of coffee of some kind, a book opened to lush language, the ultimate ritual, and I welcomed theses scripted moments of reprieve from an otherwise chaotic day. If I heard the call to prayer, I knew I was far from home, and that made the ritual even more critical to my mental health.
I have a smoking cessation mantra now. It works and it goes like this: “I love smoking, but it’s not for me.” You won’t believe me unless you’re trying to quit and then you try it and you’ll tell me that you entered your dream and disrupted the ritual and the world didn’t fall apart.
The world never falls apart, at least not how you imagined it. There are always a few loose strands holding you to it. I used to be the leaver, who then felt for the rest of her trip that she was left. How silly is that? Christian Wiman writes in “On Being Nowhere,” that even if you never return to a place, that place returns to you. It's true. I left Zanzibar, but Zanzibar returns to me.
Philosopher Simone Weil describes it as being “rooted in the absence of a place,” feeling at home again—in exile.
There’s that word again. Shouldn’t use it lightly. Some who leave may never return. I left and keep on trying to come home. Perhaps, Wiman posits, we can only inhabit wholly those places we already left. “No scene so gorgeous as the one that’s gone.” That’s so far been true enough for me, home a thousand stanzas so far, at least. But if I write about the land, I stand to sink a little deeper into the now.
Let those dream places return to me if they need me. Otherwise, I’ll be here.
Transit Slips, #22
I, too, wanted black kohl beneath my eyes, to accentuate the green. I, too, wished to wield magic in the middle of Michigan corn fields. Take me to the ecstatic place where surrealism is the song.
But I never made it as a poet. I sat with them in restaurants called Prairie, I took classes with them in grand art deco buildings downtown, got critiqued by the big ones as they peered into my poetry behind their desks of pomp and influence. But I never got the library or the swivel chair, the delirious devotees or the tour of prairie state bookstores. That’s fine, I traveled instead. And so it’s said, a poet can learn from other poets or she can travel.
(It didn’t have to be an either/or, but life’s questionnaires are tricky and make you think you have to pick.)
I smoked my first cigarette at an archaeology camp in southwestern Colorado. You’d think I was being naughty but no, we made our own cigarettes from bamboo and stitched a leather pouch to carry our tobacco, as part of a lesson on Indigenous habits and customs. I even beaded a little red heart on the front.
Smoking is a spiritual act, they taught us. At 15, that was the kind of message that landed straight like an arrow in my soul. I would connect smoking with consciousness expansion for the rest of my days, ignoring all obvious threats to my sweet, innocent lungs.
Marlboro reds in Jerusalem. Nyala in Addis. Sportsman in Dar es Salaam. I never mastered the fine art of rolling one’s own cigarettes, but I loved watching my friends and lovers roll me one as a gesture of good will, a manifesto of slow living.
Organizing a smoke at an outdoor table in the morning with the sun licking your face, a hot cup of coffee of some kind, a book opened to lush language, the ultimate ritual, and I welcomed theses scripted moments of reprieve from an otherwise chaotic day. If I heard the call to prayer, I knew I was far from home, and that made the ritual even more critical to my mental health.
I have a smoking cessation mantra now. It works and it goes like this: “I love smoking, but it’s not for me.” You won’t believe me unless you’re trying to quit and then you try it and you’ll tell me that you entered your dream and disrupted the ritual and the world didn’t fall apart.
The world never falls apart, at least not how you imagined it. There are always a few loose strands holding you to it. I used to be the leaver, who then felt for the rest of her trip that she was left. How silly is that? Christian Wiman writes in “On Being Nowhere,” that even if you never return to a place, that place returns to you. It's true. I left Zanzibar, but Zanzibar returns to me.
Philosopher Simone Weil describes it as being “rooted in the absence of a place,” feeling at home again—in exile.
There’s that word again. Shouldn’t use it lightly. Some who leave may never return. I left and keep on trying to come home. Perhaps, Wiman posits, we can only inhabit wholly those places we already left. “No scene so gorgeous as the one that’s gone.” That’s so far been true enough for me, home a thousand stanzas so far, at least. But if I write about the land, I stand to sink a little deeper into the now.
Let those dream places return to me if they need me. Otherwise, I’ll be here.
Transit Slips, #22
