Before I started studying poetry writing, I littered my work with the word soul. What was poetry but the soul making itself known?  How else to talk when making an exploration of emotions but to use the word?  John Donne, who I had studied in college, did:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

–from “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

But in the creative writing program at the University of Washington, I quickly learned that the word soul was on the list of words poets were not to use in their poetry anymore. It was one of the overused, summarizing words we were to avoid for fear of sounding weak and imprecise. I’m not sure I’d use it in my poetry today so thorough were the lessons about “earning” the discovery in a poem rather than hoping general connotations would do the work.  However, in school and later, I surrounded myself with books like Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul and Soul Mates, Harry R. Moody’s The Five Stages of the Soul: In Search of Character and Calling, Phil Cousineau’s Soul: An Archaeology , James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, and, of course, the older work by Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Whatever the debate about using the word soul in a poem, I am positive that writing poems affirms soul experience and the way it illuminates being. I also know from my experience of writing poems and reading about soul work that while the soul expresses itself in sudden bursts of intensity, our ability to integrate our awareness of a feeling into new understanding of our situations and ourselves can take decades.  Reading in the area of soul work over the years and then comparing more recent writing to older writing, especially to older writing I never felt satisfied with, has helped me make significant jumps in understanding myself and my life.

Here’s an example of a poem I never finished from a short-lived intense relationship:

 Home Tides

It was your father’s idea,
the military regime for his first
son, you, fifteen months old
and climbing from the crib, toddling
to where your parents were.
He hit you when you got there
trying to break your will.

Tender sand crab,
lonely dinghy trailing line,
wanderer with no shoes,
how many times did you go under
before the currents became your home?

At the aquarium today your mother
told us if a mussel is carried
a distance from the sea, it continues
opening when its home tides are coming in.

Over so much distance and time
since Greensboro, 1949, your body
remembers and opens for the awful food
you got wanting what a baby wants.

You must work now to remember
the courage and desire that brought you
from the crib.  You must come up
toward all that you need.

I wrote these words twenty-four years ago about a man I was drawn to meet. I was playing one day at Greenlake Park with my six-year-old son.  We were flying an airplane or hitting a ball with a bat, or maybe we were roller skating.  I don’t have nearly as clear a picture of what we were doing that day as I do of the surprising moment when I suddenly saw a man who looked interesting to me, more than interesting.  He was blonde, about 6 or 7 inches taller than I am, and he stood looking over the lake with an expression both quixotic and enthralled. I can’t say he was exactly magnetic; it was more like there was a magnet in the air, and as if pulled by it, I moved toward this man while I held my young son’s hand and mumbled, “I’ve got to speak with that man.”  I still remember the power I didn’t have against this moment, the way I saw myself moving almost as if in a tunnel, so blotted out was the rest of the world.  Bill, as his name turned out to be, and I began talking.  He was from North Carolina and had just come to Seattle to visit his brother. He had only recently returned from a year in Morocco.  The two of us chatted and played with my son in the park until it was time to for me to pick up my daughter at her gymnastics class. When Bill invited me to come by his brother’s house later that evening. I did, of course.

Bill and I began dating immediately and this convinced him to stay in Seattle, where I owned a home and was raising my children. The relationship lasted less than six stormy months, but what does soul work know of the temporal?  In writing, we understand the lyric value of images–the way we read a poem or poetic passage inside a piece of prose and experience time standing still and something larger, more fundamental than the passage of time, something that ties us to always and to everything.

After our first few months in the glow of having found each other, Bill felt more and more that staying in a relationship with me would be difficult for him because he wasn’t ready to settle down. He didn’t feel enough self-esteem–in his eyes, he hadn’t accomplished enough to bring something of value to a committed relationship.  I began a poem for Bill and explored images that seemed appropriate for describing him: a lonely dinghy trailing line, a wanderer with no shoes, and a mussel transported far from its waters but continuing to open when its home tides were coming in. Bill was a Cancer who loved to stay home and cook, but he always talked about his travels. When I learned that he had had a military father who was very strict with him, hitting him when he was a toddler crawling into his parents’ bed, I realized that Bill knew he’d re-live pain  (to seek love and physical closeness was to experience the pain of a whipping) if he settled down. He was opening to receive the food his home tides had brought in, though he was so much older and far away.

“Work now to remember/the courage and desire that brought you/from the crib” seemed a simple wish, but overly directive. The metaphors in the poem were unsatisfying, too, as they are mixed from sand creature to object on the water’s surface and to an organism that lives below the water’s surface. I left that poem behind when I left the relationship with Bill.  Soon I entered another relationship that failed and then married the man I have spent the last 20 years with.  Over the years of my marriage, I have read more on soul work, not always understanding what I am reading at the moment I am reading, but often finding an “ah ha” after writing my own work, sometimes years after reading something that fascinated me.

I’ve also made a habit out of revisiting poems I’d never finished. One year, to gather material for my writing I did an exercise involving brainstorming and free-associating from childhood sense images and then doing a freewrite.  When I read my freewrite against the background of stored knowledge from the soul work reading and my memory of “Home Tides,” I made a surprising connection.

Thomas Moore dedicates a lot of space in Soul Mates to a discussion of the Daphne / Apollo myth. As Moore reports it, Apollo is so love stricken that he chases Daphne, who is unwilling to become a partner and runs until she can run no more, finally imploring her father, the river god, to turn her into a tree, which he does.  Moore believes this is an analogy to the archetypes in each of us that come to the fore in relationship–the Apollo that wants to ground love in the carnal and everyday world of people and community and the Daphne who wants none of that as she inhabits a world of spirit away from people.  He says we must observe these archetypes in ourselves and work through our imagination to find a way to allow both of them a life inside of ourselves.

These are the images I wrote down during the exercise:

Wet wool mittens drying on the radiator in our apartment, the way my father wrapped newspaper around the radiator pipes in spring when the superintendent had the heat still on and we were too hot in the apartment, the black and gold metal TV snack tables that folded and sat in a corner when we weren’t using them, the gluey texture of white bread balled between my thumb and forefinger, and the lights in the Kinney Shore store we’d sometimes visit on dark winter evenings when my father was out of town and my mother was bored.

And here’s the freewrite I did from these images:

In elementary school, I’d come home most afternoons and watch Gene Autry in his white-fringed black cowboy suit.  He appealed to me more than the slender Will Rogers, who most of my friends preferred to watch. I think my preference was because Gene Autry reminded me of my father–his hair was the same dark color, his body was stocky in the same way that my father’s was.  I could interchange Gene Autry around a campfire with my father around the kitchen table, the smell of tobacco on his clothes as he helped my sister and me with our homework.  I knew if my father could use a guitar to accompany his lyrics “100 bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer, if one of those bottles happened to fall, 99 bottles of beer on the wall,” he would have sounded just like Gene Autry.   Half-way into the show, I’d go to the kitchen, open the bread drawer, push back its steel lid until it sounded like the cymbals in our classroom band.  I’d pull out the loaf of Wonder Bread in its wrapper with blue, red and yellow balls.  I’d take a slice, pull of the crust, and smell the white square.  It smelled as good as clean laundry just off the line.  I’d eat the crust quickly and carry the white square into the living room.  As I watched Gene Autry, I pulled off little bits of the white bread and rolled them between my fingers.  The soft white pieces with lots of air would turn into dense gooey balls and those balls were like the days between weekends when my salesman father was on the road and my mother was so lonely for him there was no air between the words “your father” and “your father” again and again.

Suddenly, I saw that my father, the often stern authority figure in our family, was during most of my childhood, a roaming Daphne.  And my mother, who I thought of as a dreamer, was an Apollo of the everyday! She cooked and cleaned, greeted us at home when we arrived back from school and led our Brownie troops.  Being Apollo all by herself left my mother lonely, however, and I know that my sister and I tried to make up for the absence she felt. We couldn’t, of course, and I believe I carried my lack of success and my mother’s unfilled loneliness with me into my relationship with Bill.

My longing to have Bill make a life with me despite the pain I knew he suffered was connected to my own pain, the roots of which I was not aware of then. I had attracted a man whose Daphne couldn’t join my family.  Bill even wrote me a note during that time: “If I move in with you, I am afraid I will give up something necessary for my personal integrity and esteem. There is a sadness in me that I would always be presenting to you in one form or another.”  Still, my Apollo wanted him to stay and seek what I thought we both needed.

In those days, I kept a Bertoldt Brecht quote posted by my desk, “The smallest social unit is not one but two; in life we develop one another.”  I imagined this to happen the way film develops – each person being the developing solution for the other. I thought I could help Bill come clear, but I didn’t realize how my relationship with Bill was developing me. Now, after reading and more writing that allowed me to see my parents’ situation in terms of the Daphne/Apollo archetypes, I realize that for Bill and me, these archetypes lurked in our love’s negatives.

I couldn’t finish “Home Tides” because I wasn’t allowing myself to create a developing solution with my words, a matrix on the page that could reveal my soul’s news. I was too focused on what images I wanted the poem to contain. It may have taken years, but utimately, I realized this by writing on another topic and experiencing archetypes alive in me.