Breathe in oxygen./ Breathe out poetry. -Muriel Rukeyser Breathe out peace, breathe out fullness, breathe out impressions, breathe out truth. . . . But what happens when you have exhaled and exhaled and emptied yourself and there are just. no. words. left?? What happens when the Muse holds her tongue? When you are left waiting like a waif in the rainy cold, with nary a matchstick, much less poetry? Do you fall to your knees and pray to Minerva to fill your white pages, your blank screen, with her wisdom and her verbiage? Do you look to the bottom of the bottle? Do you scrape your knuckles against the rocky cliffs of hackneyed projects that didn’t work the first time around; do you recycle snippets out of old journals, liner notes of obscure Cocteau Twins lyrics, shaky translations from high school Spanish class? What are your fallback tricks when you are too tired to be inspired? What do you breathe out? After a month-long whirlwind that started with a drop-tower of emotion and ended in an indoor cat fight (Remember – I write poetry, not fiction. I did not make that up. That’s the real-life sandwich that’s been my reality for the last five weeks. In between was a messy stack of German cop-on-the-take, Czech foreign police department, a birthday away from home, a 19th wedding anniversary, several bottles of wine, only one complete meltdown, and two trans-atlantic flights for the funeral of my dear mother-in-law.), I still was not writing. You’d think what with all that material I wouldn’t be able to stop putting pen to paper. But the Muse was reticent to express her take on any of that. Really, Muse? You got nothing? Not a metaphor about death to go along with my visit to the Jewish cemetery in Old Town Prague? Not even one measly line about love and loss across the ocean? Come out, come out, wherever you are! I had been tired. And grief-stricken. And storm-tossed. I had played tour guide to my father and his very pretty wife and shown them the city I call home. I had mothered and wived and edited and sewed 26 Viking costumes for my daughter’s school show. But I still couldn’t write a word. I was exhaling and all that was coming out was . . . air.
Maya Angelou
was
my
muse.
I lost a saint in 1998. The year before my mother’s death, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa had died within months of each other. I believe that one soul can be shared among many bodies. The souls of these three women must have been so intrinsically woven, that one could not survive without the other. Maya Angelou was the first rockstar poet I ever went to see in person. And though my daughter Maya’s namesake is actually a Picasso painting, my love for Maya A. definitely influenced my husband’s and my decision to choose the name for our first-born girl.
I don’t know the circumstances surrounding Angelou’s death. What I do know is that I heard she died on Thursday. And that my muse had returned sometime Monday or Tuesday. On those two days I had filled page upon page with outpourings of my heart – stories, events, poetic musings, titles and ideas and elegies and epics. One poem, dedicated to my father, came out solid on the page seemingly without my even being there, except as usher. Don’t you freaking love it when that happens?! Everything that had been lying dormant during my busiest time , the height of emotion, the depth of exhaustion, erupted and emerged.
One muse died, and to mark her passing, another one rose again within my well.
Maya Angelou taught us that “we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” She taught us also not to write our pieces into the ground, to know when to leave them alone. Sometimes, when the Muse is holding her tongue, it is well-advised to let her rest for a while. In the meantime, all you have to do is breathe. In and out. She, your Muse, has not gone away; she has merely taken on another form. She will speak to you again. She will rise.
