This is about two kinds of space – the spacing of poems on the page, and the space we live in.

I’m respectful of the spacing a writer uses, especially a poet’s use of line and space. In class I always nag my students to make real paragraphs, not like the ones I’m using in this post, blocks of writing, but paragraphs with the first line indented and the same space between. When we’re reading, space is breath. Pay attention to the white space on your pages. Let your words breathe, but be careful of having white space that gets in the way, causing your reader to pause.

Below is a poem by Mary Oliver, “On Losing a House”, and when I found it online (posted by a university) I realized the spacing was different than the poem in my copy of her book What Do We Know. So I changed it back to her original center spacing but when I copied it onto this page I noticed that the lines were double spaced while hers are single spaced. When I copied Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness”  off a website for the last post I later realized there were no stanzas, as in the original.(there are four, three beginning with the word “before” and the final stanza beginning with “Then it is only kindness…”)

Today the space I live in, and work in, has been invaded by plumbers. Every ten minutes or so a guy appears in the doorway of my office asking me to come look at something. It’s clear by his expression that it won’t be pleasant – or cheap. They took a video of the pipes and just showed it to me. It looks like a colonoscopy in progress.

Here’s Mary Oliver’s beautiful, heartbreaking poem.

 

ON LOSING A HOUSE

By

Mary Oliver

1.

The bumble bees

know where their home is.

They have memorized

every stalk and leaf

of the field.

They fall from the air at

exactly

the right place,

they crawl

under the soft grasses,

they enter

the darkness

humming.

 

2.

Where will we go

with our table and chairs,

our bed,

our nine thousand books,

our TV, PC, VCR,

our cat

who is sixteen years old?

Where will we put down

our dishes and our blue carpets,

where will we put up

our rose-colored,

rice-paper

shades?

 

3.

We never saw

such a beautiful house,

though it dipped toward the sea,

though it shook and creaked,

though it said to the rain: come in!

and had a ghost—

at night she rattled the teacups

with her narrow hands,

then left the cupboard open—

and once she slipped—or maybe it wasn’t a slip—

and called to our cat, who ran to the empty room.

We only smiled.

Unwise! Unwise!

 

4.

O, what is money?

O, never in our lives have we thought

about money.

O, we have only a little money.

O, now in our sleep

we dream of finding money.

But someone else

already has money.

Money, money, money.

Someone else

can sign the papers,

can turn the key.

O dark, O heavy, O mossy money.

 

5 .

Amazing

how the rich

don’t even

hesitate—up go the

sloping rooflines, out goes the

garden, down goes the crooked,

green tree, out goes the

old sink, and the little windows, and

there you have it—a house

like any other—and there goes

the ghost, and then another, they glide over

the water, away, waving and waving

their fog-colored hands.

 

6.

Don’t tell us

how to love, don’t tell us

how to grieve, or what

to grieve for, or how loss

shouldn’t sit down like a gray

bundle of dust in the deepest

pockets of our energy, don’t laugh at our belief

that money isn’t

everything, don’t tell us

how to behave in

anger, in longing, in loss, in home-

sickness, don’t tell us,

dear friends.

 

7.

Goodbye, house.

Goodbye, sweet and beautiful house,

we shouted, and it shouted back,

goodbye to you, and lifted itself

down from the town, and set off

like a packet of clouds across

the harbor’s sandy ring,

the tossing bell, the untowned point—and turned

lightly, wordlessly,

into the keep of the wind

where it floats still—

where it plunges and rises still

on the black and dreamy sea.