During these in-between days when the uproar of Christmas has subsided and the obligations of the new year have not yet begun, I sit in my reading chair enjoying the embrace of a rainy day.  Thoughts send me to my books—the quite organized collection I created when Bill lent his carpentry skills to a pair of beautiful built-in bookcases.  

I pull down The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers Build Faith by my friend Bill Tammeus.  I want to read that again, so it goes in the stack beside my chair.  I also hunt in my newly alphabetized poetry collections for the first book of poetry I ever bought for myself.  There it is:  a small blue paperback of the Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I bought it when I was in high school for sixty cents. Although Millay was out of fashion among poetry critics at that time, she is possibly the “mother” of my poetry soul. I love these poems still, and I think she is now having a posthumous comeback among the literati. Is that important?  

Well, it’s important to know that as a poet I can’t pay much attention to “critics.”  Granted, getting published in print over the past few decades has been a challenge, because the almighty Editor is always the first hurdle.  When your poetical work isn’t on trend, your voice can scarcely find a way out.  As it happens, my forever friend, the poet Gail White, and I found our own way. It was thirty years ago this year—1988—when we collaborated on and self-published what is known as a “chapbook” (a small paperback collection) of her poems together with mine, side-by-side on comparable subjects, eg. cat poems, poems on Biblical subjects, poems on hope vs. cynicism.  We titled it Sibyl and Sphinx.  Who is the Sibyl, who the Sphinx?  Still not decided.  The book is a rare treasure, with only a few copies afloat in the universe.   

At that time, my poetry publications were few and far between.  In the deepest and truest spirit of friendship, Gail wrote a poem encouraging me to keep at it.  You’ll find it below.  In the forty years and more we’ve been corresponding, we’ve both written and published a great many poems in so-called little magazines you’ve never heard of.  Since the internet became a thing, online magazines provide an excellent new forum for all kinds of voices.  Because my name is somewhat unusual, you can find my work via your browser or amazon. Gail White?  Not so easily.  But do try. Along with Millay, Gail White has always been an inspiration to me.  

Thirty years?  The twinkling of an eye!  The point of life is being you, the only one of you there is. It doesn’t last long.  And you probably won’t know what you do that makes the best difference.  

For Barbara
(on the publication of her poems)
 
A paradox:  paper, quick
to crumple, easy to burn
perishable as grass,
makes the best wings for a journey.
 
Adrift in your floating ark,
with all your beasts around you, 
send out a paper dove: 
it will rescue someone from drowning
 
perhaps, and return to you
with a branch when the tide falls lower.
And your paper coach will come
to the princess alone in her tower.
 
Poets can laugh like gods
at the rich, the wise, and the proper.
The wealth of the world weighs light
against our sheaves of paper.
 
For we turn from weapons to laws
when the useless wars are over,
and the print on a single page
gives the bride to her lover.
 
 
Gail White
Sibyl and Sphinx(Rockhill Press 1988)