to survive the northwest gray

In the chapter titled “Winter” from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she writes, “Obviously the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than the illuminator.” She goes on to describe an experiment of a mirror on snow reflecting the sky in its surface. “The dark is overhead and the light at my feet; I’m walking upside-down in the sky.” I believe that, through reading and writing poetry, one can process trauma, a secret shadow self, those dark nights of the soul, and thereby touch upon illuminating insights that lighten our being and lead toward healing and wholeness. The nature of poetry, its rhythm, rhyme, repetition, figurative language, order, and white spaces of silence offers an ideal structure for sorting through fears, pains, confusion, and other negative emotions. A falling leaf is lighter than my hand that catches the leaf, the hand that holds a pen and scribes a description of that leaf on the page. But the leaf is not lighter than the metaphor it engenders or even, simply, the poem on the page or on the breath of the reader.
How does that work, the power of poetry to transform a dark, laden poet into an illuminator of herself? Tess Gallagher’s poem Sing it Rough suggest that the poet must first name and acknowledge, voice the darkness…disclose our trauma, our dis-ease.

You can sing sweet

and get the song sung

but to get to the third dimension

you have to sing it rough,

hurt the tune a little.

Put enough strength to it

that the notes slip.

Then something else happens.

The song gets large.

Then with the tools of vowels and consonants, line and stanza breaks (brakes), metaphor, simile, rhythm, and poetic form the poet can re-frame the earlier dark scenario, put some space between her and the trauma to let some light shine in.

In my 30s I moved from the sunny high desert of Utah to a darker, rainy (but lush green) northwest. Within a year, my serotonin levels plummeted and I was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder. This triggered the sun-less blossoming of a depressive disorder and I struggled for years. I realized early on that the only way to deal was to “take my depression/darkness to tea” and ask what it needed me to hear. I did this through poetry. Two winters ago, I realized that my depression had drifted away; so despite being recently unemployed, this poem came out:

Gradations of Gray

To become a true north-westerner

I must learn to gaze into the fog

rather than battleship through

the granite gray-green day

with sights only on another leaden tomorrow.

I must learn to let go of fog horns

that pierce and startle

through a pewter dusk

attempting to awaken the unknown

cinereous mystery

dappled light in day or night

smoky ashen ashes to ashes to

drab, dusty iron-clad will

livid purple-gray bruises

of yesterday, let go.

I must learn to adore

a muddled moon

somber silver

as well as the powdery pearl

of a Portland sun

oyster gray

shaded gray pine

astringent slate

stone cold winter

wet heather gray

or withered seared fields

from musty to neutral to peppery

dingy to dove gray

I must learn to distinguish

and esteem them all.