fortune

The org I work for co-sponsors writing workshops at places like community centers and senior homes, and we spend a lot of time talking about how literature enables self-expression, healing, etc. When you say something enough, it becomes an abstraction. But lately, while crashing a couple of workshops in the name of evaluation purposes, I’ve been floored by the power of writing-as-therapy, to the point of getting choked up by my own tragic profundity (an embarrassing, little-discussed side effect of being a writer). Yesterday at the Burbank Senior Artists Colony—where I totally want to while away my golden years sculpting and writing plays—the teaching writer passed out fortune cookies and asked us to write poems based on our fortunes. Mine was “YOU DESIRE TO DISCOVER NEW FRONTIERS”:

You begin like all pioneers,
your ears full of stories:
streets of gold
milky rivers
open-armed natives in need
of restaurants and apothecaries.

You think it’s only a matter of packing
the right iron skillet
handfuls of healing herbs
as light as your young heart.

What they do not tell you
--because there is no they,
because this is not a journey
from which people return—
is that you will abandon
that good pan
at the first river crossing,
that the river is not milk but disease,
that the disease would only be visible
under the lens
of a machine not yet invented.

At the second river crossing
you will leave your small dog,
but her whimpers will follow you
across mountains,
for there are mountains
too, and snow, and all the things
you thought you left behind,
and new things:
war whoops in the night
new kinds of lizards
different shades of sky.
All of it fascinating,
worth recording,
if you hadn’t burned
your paper for warmth.

There is no third river crossing,
just strange spiky plants
and a longing at the back of your throat
and a feeling that you have no right
to complain: You chose this
passage. You left
your dog, and if you hadn’t,
you would have eaten her by now.

There is another side,
you suppose, a world
with the ocean on the wrong side,
but ocean nonetheless.
Another unexplored land
that is not land,
that will drown you. Some nights
when you lay beneath
the wagon watching trees
turn to monsters,
you dream
of that land,
that ocean, transformed
but still salty on your tongue
or maybe that’s just the first sign
of dehydration.