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.

I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be given two unrelated words and tasked with twining them into a poem.

Summers end. Worlds tilt away from each other, drift apart, resume their orbit, transformed. This is how the final binomial — “dust” and “life” — wrote itself in me, read here by the living poem that is Nick Cave.

ODE TO A GOOD PEN
by Maria Popova

Over and over
we borrow the book of love
from the lending library of the possible
and ask of it
        everything,
only to find its pages
blank and beckoning,
impelling us
to keep writing the story
as it keeps changing,
keeps reading us
back to ourselves —
an endless translation
from some other tongue,
unfinished and unfinishable,
written in dust
between endpapers
marbled with life.

Then, “Forgiveness.”

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.

It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.

I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).

KISS
by Ellen Bass

When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement
where it rested a moment
before darting off.

Couple with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poems “Any Common Desolation” and “How to Apologize.”