Instructions for Being More Alive – The Marginalian

We spend our lives trying to see our own light, to catch its surprising refractions on the face of the world, to play in its waterfalling golden blue radiance until we are ready to lie down in the bright black of time as the stars go on spinning, their fractured hieroglyphics encoding the memory and mystery of being alive.

Sarah Williams — one of the five wonderful women in my intergenerational poetry group — offers a shimmering set of instructions for how to do that in her splendid poem “How to See the Milky Way,” read here by Rose Hanzlik — the youngest member of our constellation — to the sound of Mozart’s “Moonlight Sonata” against a painting of the Milky Way by Étienne Trouvelot.

HOW TO SEE THE MILKY WAY
by Sarah Williams

Travel far
from crowds. Leave
lit places that yellow the sky.

Bodies of water help.
Pick a cloudless night,
a new moon.

Find a place to rest your head,
perhaps on someone’s chest,
their heart keeping time.

Or float in still water
flecked with stars
rippling around you.

However you arrive
parallel to earth and sky,
settle your eyes in their soft sockets and wait.

Look up.
Disregard the march of satellites,
their plotted lines.

Linger here.
Drink speckled light
from billions of neighboring stars.

Some nights your life is like this.

Couple with “The Whole of It” by Hannah Fries — another of the five women in our poetry group — then revisit Ellen Bass’s lifeline of a poem “Any Common Desolation,” which has been an ongoing inspiration to all of us.