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Picture This
You live in a foreign country,
except to you
it isn't foreign
because it's where
you were born
in this, a different life--
imagine--
pears grow there
on your very
own tree,
or maybe--get wild--
they're figs,
and you can use
the word pluck
for the first time
in your whole life,
at least this life,
but in that one
you pluck practically
every day:
harp strings, heart
strings, whole mornings,
and the figs, of course--
but only what you need.
You never horde.
Imagine--
each fig is the first,
the last--
pollinated by the tiny moth
that has climbed inside
the fruit's tiny mouth,
laid her eggs
and waited
for her prince to pluck
her out.
Imagine--
inside your mouth
for one moment
you hold seed
and flower
and egg,
all that you
could ever want,
the world--
its birth,
its death
inside
your mouth.
Copyright 2009 Gigi Thibodeau
Copyright 2009 Gigi Thibodeau
Today I have reposted a poem I wrote back in 2009. My life was headed in a very different direction then. I was the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; I'd just had a collection of poetry published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and had just won a couple national writing awards; I was preparing for a more permanent position teaching poetry writing and children's literature at UML after having taught these and other classes there for nearly a decade as an adjunct professor. I knew who I was, where I was going, what I would do when I arrived there.
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain / For promised joy" (Robert Burns, "To a Mouse").
And then, everything that was supposed to happen did not. Namely, I lost the newly created position at UML--in the most spectacular and ugly way--due to hideous campus politics. I lost many friends and colleagues. I lost all belief in myself. Every last bit of it. And I lost all sense of who I was. I had been a teacher for a very long time, not just at UML, but before that, too, in many other places. Suddenly, I felt like that life had been a lie.
This lie brings me full circle back to the poem. I'd crafted it while I was writing my Kerouac lecture and poetry reading. It was full of hope and excitement about the future. When I read it now, I feel empathy for the woman who wrote this, for what she was about to experience. I also feel a small sense of relief that nothing I hoped for came true.
Instead, with the support of my husband, I picked up the shards and shattered bits, and I began again. We moved back to Maine, the place we both loved. I started working one-on-one with writers, helping them shape their work and their words into stronger and stronger finished drafts. I began selling more and more photographs. My own writing grew richer. The whole world split open. Isn't that always the way when we keep our commitment to the muse, even in the midst of despair?
We rented an apartment for two years while we saved our pennies. Then we found a little cottage with enough land for gardens, and we scooped it up as quickly as we could. We'd learned after many trials and disappointments in life to act quickly when it feels right in our hearts. Here over the last year we've dug and planted several gardens . . . and have plans for more.
And we bought our first fig tree. A Brown Turkey, it's called, and it's not cold hardy all the way up here in Maine, so we will have to coddle it, bring it in each winter to go dormant, coax it back to life each spring. Already it's been fruiting like mad, though, and, yes, that photo above is of our very first ripe fig.
And, yes, I plucked it myself.
Instead, with the support of my husband, I picked up the shards and shattered bits, and I began again. We moved back to Maine, the place we both loved. I started working one-on-one with writers, helping them shape their work and their words into stronger and stronger finished drafts. I began selling more and more photographs. My own writing grew richer. The whole world split open. Isn't that always the way when we keep our commitment to the muse, even in the midst of despair?
We rented an apartment for two years while we saved our pennies. Then we found a little cottage with enough land for gardens, and we scooped it up as quickly as we could. We'd learned after many trials and disappointments in life to act quickly when it feels right in our hearts. Here over the last year we've dug and planted several gardens . . . and have plans for more.
And we bought our first fig tree. A Brown Turkey, it's called, and it's not cold hardy all the way up here in Maine, so we will have to coddle it, bring it in each winter to go dormant, coax it back to life each spring. Already it's been fruiting like mad, though, and, yes, that photo above is of our very first ripe fig.
And, yes, I plucked it myself.
