Now playing: Xanadu, by Olivia Newton-John

I’m writing a series of poems I’m tentatively calling Threshold. 

When Word Raccoon and I read Jane Hirshfield’s “Writing and the Threshold Life,” the final essay in Nine Doors, we looked at each other, eyes wide. 

Early on Hirshfield writes, “Every poem is a kind of threshold—between silence and speech, between the inner and outer worlds.”

That line made my fingers itch to write. I began typing as fast as I could.

I mean, how deep is that sentence of hers? Wait, that feels inadequate. It’s true and reveals the importance of poetry. It’s translating the inner to the outer, right? (That’s still a wimpy characterization of it, WR insists. Hey, I’ve been away, I’m just back, and my brain is doing laundry and wondering if I should run by the grocery.)

I was on the porch of the local coffeehouse when I began this poetry cycle, and the sound of a closing car door caught my attention. It belonged to a woman I met years ago. We met in this very café when we shared a table by chance and kept talking by choice.

She works with animals and carries that quiet, steady spirituality that makes small talk feel like a waste of oxygen, which suits my contemplative side beautifully, and this newest collection perfectly. 

Reader, Word Raccoon (my inner chaos mascot), began fretting that this unexpected encounter would knock the poem clean out of my head. I was delighted to see this dear woman and told WR to stop it. 

“You are not Coleridge and this is not Kubla Khan. Nobody’s about to steal an opium dream from you. Xanadu will be there another day,” I told WR. 

I hugged my friend and told her to grab a drink and come back.

While she was inside, I gave Raccoon a talking-to: People before words, WR! I insisted she clear the table, though she growled and insisted on keeping her phone on it. I allowed it. 

I know that’s unflattering to reveal, that the raccoon sometimes has to be reminded to be present, but it’s just true. And it does not mean that she does not welcome visitors. In fact, particular ones always help her write better, whether they mean to or not. 

And I’m so glad I was able to spend unexpected time with my friend, because she told me such a generous story of helping a family who isn’t hers at all, simply because they needed it.

When I praised her for it with tears in my eyes, she waved it away, which fits her way perfectly. She had given out of her abundance and swore she had gained so much herself from it, she said. Such a beautiful soul. 

I nosed around enough to find out that she’s surrounded by people who won’t let that kindness be exploited, and I relaxed. (We must protect those saints among us.) 

It was good catching up with her, and I could feel the poems swirling above my head as she left. I had known that she would bring them with her unawares, and she did. 

When she left, Word Raccoon blinked at me. Now? Can we write now? 

“Now,” I said.

We wrote four or five more poems immediately, all of them about thresholds, to join the poems we already had from the morning. 

Hirshfield closes her essay by describing the poet as “a dweller in the threshold life… asked to be permeable, to be shaped and changed by what is met.”

Yes, yes, yes! 

“See, WR? I told you to trust that the words will come.”

Some days the universe gives you a poem. Other days it gives you the person who makes the poem possible, or reminds you of the one who taught you to notice in the first place. 

WR says that’s where her favorite poems are. 

This feels about as inelegant as a post can be, but that’s all I can ask of it right now.