A second life

This place has been silent lately, untouched for more than three years. I liked knowing it was here. I hoped somebody might still look in from time to time. But my hands and days were full. I had neither inspiration nor leisure to sit down to it; barely time to reflect on how little time I had for reflection. Michael Longley says that poets have a second life. ‘No experience is complete until I’ve written about it… It’s a way of having more than one life.’ When I heard this, it resonated because this second life — this layer of reflection and recording and refining and creating — is exactly what has been wanting. Time to look back over one’s experience, even from a distance of hours; to muse on meanings; to find connections between the everyday and the immortal, and to make something out of them — all this is what I have been lacking these last three years and more. Another poet, Philip Metres, gave me a different image. His poem ‘One Tree’ treats a standoff between neighbours over a tree in one yard so large it shades the other.

“Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love. Like the baby brought to Solomon, someone must give.”

I borrow this image to think about the shadow family casts over creativity. I love my tree. It’s beautiful and bountiful and alive with lovely creatures. But it shades the little plots where I might cultivate creativity. It takes up all the room and nourishment — blights my tomatoes. Plenty of love. Not enough land or light. But it’s a tree, not a monument. It moves and changes. The light changes. As this year begins, something is beginning to give. My tree is tall enough to let some light in. A friend who writes and has small children told me, if you have a child under five, you’re in survival mode. If this is true (it feels true), this year will be our last in that mode. Light dapples the grass. The sky expands. We look up. I come back to my tomatoes, my little plot. I give it, and begin to live, a second life.