How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  Publisher’s Note

  Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.

  Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. A little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.

  There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.

  We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.

  This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

  —Daniel Halpern, Publisher

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note

  1: How to Fly

  How to Drink Water When There Is Wine

  How to Have a Child

  How to Cure Sweet Potatoes

  How to Shear a Sheep

  How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

  How to Give Thanks for a Broken Leg

  How to Survive This

  How to Do Absolutely Nothing

  How to Lose That Stubborn Weight

  How to Get a Divorce

  How to Be Married

  How to Knit a Sweater (a Realist’s Prayer)

  How to Love Your Neighbor

  How to Be Hopeful

  2: Pellegrinaggio

  I. Pellegrinaggio

  II. The Roman Circus

  III. On the Piazza

  IV. Into the Abruzzo

  V. In Torricella, Finding Her Mother’s House

  VI. Circumnavigating Torricella Peligna

  VII. Pompeii

  VIII. At the Top of Mount Vesuvius

  IX. Swimming in the Bay of Naples

  X. On the Train to Sicily

  XI. Monreale

  XII. Lemon-Orchard Blue

  XIII. The Road to Erice Is Paved with Intentions

  XIV. Palermo

  3: This Is How They Come Back to Us

  Burying Ground

  This Is How They Come Back to Us

  Passing Death

  The Visitation

  Long Division

  My Great-Grandmother’s Plate

  Thank-You Note for a Quilt

  My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes

  4: Walking Each Other Home

  By the Roots

  My First Derby Party

  Snow Day

  Six Women Swimming Naked in the Ocean

  Courtship Dance on Playa Luria

  Will

  Creation Stories

  Meadowview Elementary Spelling Bee

  Blow Me—

  After

  Walking Each Other Home

  5: Dancing with the Devil

  Thief

  Dancing with the Devil: Advice for the Female Poet

  Cage of Heaven

  Insomniac Villanelle

  My Afternoon with The Postman

  6: Where It Begins

  Where It Begins

  7: The Nature of Objects

  Ghost Pipes

  The Nature of Objects

  Come August, a Seven-Day Rain

  Ephemera

  Love Poem, with Birds

  Swimming in the Wamba

  Cradle

  Down Under

  The Hands of Trees

  Mussel, Minnow

  Matabele

  Great Barrier

  Forests of Antarctica

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Barbara Kingsolver

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  How to Fly

  How to Drink Water When There Is Wine

  How to stay at this desk when the sun

  is barefooting cartwheels over the grass—

  How to step carefully on the path that pulls

  for the fleet unfettered gait of a deer—

  How to go home when the wood thrush

  is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk—

  How to resist the kiss, the body forbidden

  that plucks the long vibrating string of want—

  How to drink water when there is wine—

  Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, took them

  for the currency of survival.

  Now I have lived long and I know better.

  How to Have a Child

  Begin on the day you decide

  you are fit

  to carry on.

  Begin with a quailing heart

  for here you stand

  on the fault line.

  Begin if you can at the beginning.

  Begin with your mother,

  with her grandfather,

  the ones before him.

  Think of their hands, all of them:

  firm on the plow, the cradle,

  the rifle butt, the razor strop;

  trembling on the telegram,

  the cheek of a lover,

  the fact of a door.

  Everything that can wreck a life

  has been done before,

  done to you, even. That’s all

  inside you now.

  Half of it you won’t think of.

  The rest you wouldn’t dream of.

  Go on.

  How to Cure Sweet Potatoes

  Dig them after the first light frost. Lay them

  down in a shallow tray like cordwood,

  like orphans in a dresser drawer. Cover them

  with damp towels. Bring up the heat. In a

  closet or spare room, you’ll want it hotter

  than the worst summer day you remember

  and that humid. A week of this will thicken

  their skins, make them last for months

  in your cellar, and turn all their starch to sugar.

  Bear in mind this
is not a cure for anything

  that was wrong with the sweet potato

  that meant to be starchy, thanks, the better

  to weather a winter in cold clay, then lean on its toes

  and throw out reckless tendrils into one more spring.

  Bear in mind also the ways that you were once

  induced to last through the sermon, the meal,

  the insufferable adult conversation, all the times

  you wanted to be starchy but were made to be sweet.

  Recall this surrender when you sit down to eat them.

  Consider the direction of your grace.

  How to Shear a Sheep

  Walk to the barn

  before dawn.

  Take off your clothes.

  Cast everything

  on the ground:

  your nylon jacket,

  wool socks, and all.

  Throw away

  the cutting tools,

  the shears that bite

  like teeth at the skin

  when hooves flail

  and your elbow

  comes up hard

  under a panting throat:

  no more of that.

  Sing to them instead.

  Stand naked

  in the morning

  with your entreaty.

  Ask them to come,

  lay down their wool

  for love.

  That should work.

  It doesn’t.

  How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

  Behold your body as water

  and mineral worth, the selfsame

  water that soon (from a tree’s

  way of thinking, soon) will be

  lifted through the elevator hearts

  of a forest, returned to the sun

  in a leaf-eyed gaze. And the rest!

  All wordless leavings, the perfect

  bonewhite ash of you: light

  as snowflakes, falling on updrafts

  toward the unbodied breath of a bird.

  Behold your elements reassembled

  as pieces of sky, ascending

  without regret, for you’ve been lucky

  enough. Fallen for the last time into

  a slump, the wrong crowd, love.

  You’ve made the best deal.

  You summitted the mountain

  or you didn’t. Anything left undone

  you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles

  into the hands of a child

  who will be none the wiser.

  Imagine your joy on rising.

  Repeat as necessary.

  How to Give Thanks for a Broken Leg

  Thank your stars that at least your bones

  know how to knit, two sticks at work:

  tibia, fibula, ribbed scarf as long as a winter.

  The mindless tasks a body learns when it must.

  Praise your claw-foot tub. Tie a sheet around its belly

  like a saddle on a pig, to hammock your dry-docked

  limb while the rest of you steeps. Sunk deep

  in hot water up to your chin, dream of the troubles

  you had, when trouble was still yours to make.

  The doctor says eight weeks. Spend seven here.

  Be glad for your cast that draws children with

  permanent markers, like vandals and their graffiti

  to the blighted parts of town. They mark out

  their loves and territories, and you, the benevolent

  mayor, will wear these concerns in public,

  then throw them away when your term is up.

  Concede your debt to life’s grammar, even as

  it nailed you in one fell stroke from subject to object.

  Praise the helping verbs, family hands that feed;

  the surgical modifiers that pin you from shattered

  to fixed to mended. Praise the careless syntax

  of a life where, through steady misuse, a noun

  grows feet: it turtles and outfoxes and one day,

  with no one watching, steps out as a brand-new verb.

  How to Survive This

  O misery. Imperfect

  universe of days stretched out

  ahead, the string of pearls

  and drops of venom on the web,

  losses of heart, of life

  and limb, news of the worst:

  Remind me again

  the day will come

  when I look back amazed

  at the waste of sorry salt

  when I had no more than this

  to cry about.

  Now I lay me down.

  I’m not there yet.

  How to Do Absolutely Nothing

  Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin

  but: Do not take your walking shoes.

  Don’t take any clothes you’d wear

  anyplace anyone would see you.

  Don’t take your rechargeables.

  Take Scrabble if you have to,

  but not a dictionary and no

  pencils for keeping score.

  Don’t take a cookbook

  or anything to cook.

  A fishing pole, ok

  but not the line,

  hook, sinker,

  leave it all.

  Find out

  what’s

  left.

  How to Lose That Stubborn Weight

  Follow this simple program:

  Examine your elbow, the small bones

  in your wrist. Kiss what you can.

  Gather up all the magazines

  and catalogues in your house—those

  hungry girls in expensive clothes.

  Put them all inside your refrigerator.

  Next, your streaming videos and

  discreetly altered friends: balance these

  in a pile on your bathroom scale.

  Leave them there for sixteen weeks.

  See how the weight melts away

  from the craven core. Listen,

  all God’s children got this yearn

  and half of them wish they could look

  just about like you do now. And so

  will you, if you ever get to be ninety.

  That photo that set you off today?

  How you’ll wish you’d taken more,

  back when your skin still held

  the shape of a lusty animal you forgot

  to love, wish you’d hung mirrors

  on all your walls and halls and

  oh hell, the fat blue indifferent sky

  in praise of this body you had one time

  when everything still worked.

  How to Get a Divorce

  Fight for these things:

  One phone call to your mother-in-law.

  The credit you deserve, because

  sacrifice for love is a cozy hearth, or a spark

  that burns down the house. It’s all in the timing.

  The flimsy relics of childhood, yours.

  The car you could talk to.

  The tools you learned to live by.

  Your children intact, blessed by your diplomacy,

  a language of words you will chisel out of ice.

  No work you’ve ever done will cost you more,

  or purchase more.

  Don’t fight for these:

  The car that’s not paid for.

  Every gift you pretended to like.

  Take one object treasured by your spouse,

  something small that won’t be missed:

  Smash it with a rock.

  Bury the remains in the backyard.

  Bear the pall however. It’s your party.

  By the powers vested in hearsay,

  your marriage is now oil and water.

  Some of your friends will choose to drink the oil.

  These you have to give up:

  Collected shells and pressed flowers.

  The eyes that knew your body

  when it was still perfect. Everything must go
.

  Don’t throw it in the Grand Canyon. Seal it all

  in a box with packing tape, shoved to the back of a closet.

  Years from now, when some passion brings new order

  to your household, you will open this box. Find inside:

  Music you’ve since gone looking for.

  Wedding photos, two sweet kids with comical hair.

  A ring for your daughter, prop for the story

  she’s had to rewrite alone.

  Your one-time self in a rummage of lost and found.

  Quietly set it all out on a shelf in plain sight

  because, like rain and gravity, these things

  are right, and flattening, and dearly necessary,

  and inasmuch as they’re anyone’s,

  they’re yours.

  How to Be Married

  Think of rain: the gathering sheer fall

  on a quaking plain. Like a kiss,

  the long slake. Here we stand

  in blissful drench. It only falls;

  no calling it back from here.

  River infinite, grinding belly on bedrock,

  paring the plain to a canyon,

  changing the shape of the world.

  Love is no granite boulder, praised

  for its size. It’s the water that parts

  around it, moving mountains.

  Nothing new, a marriage. This union

  is as old as it gets: ocean floor,

  the wave and shore that can’t be still

  and can’t come apart. Think of

  blue-gray horizons, heavy-lidded.

  Don’t rule out surprising possibilities.

  An ocean can rise up whole

  into the firmament, given eternity.

  No going back from today.

  Water flows downhill and still

  we are here, new as naked children

  standing in the cool precipitous fall: think of rain.

  How to Knit a Sweater (a Realist’s Prayer)

  O Lord

  (whether male, female,

  animate, all-knowing,

  unreasonable or just

  whether or not),

  we are practical people

  who hedge our bets.

  As I hold my loved ones

  this day in my thoughts,

  meditating on our hopes

  and wild adversities,

  I also hold a skein

  of good wool,

  needles that click like

  rosary beads working

  through Hail Marys

  of knit and purl.