Instructions for opening a door | #56

Instructions for opening a door

To open a door, you must want to leave.
A here, a there. You must want. 
Stuff pink hyacinths in the dictionary 
between “lie” and “lightning,”
the wet stem of spring curling the pages
until it is not a flower
but just a word for it. We all die, 
but the hope is to die of living. 
Slam it hard enough
to make the sidewalk hum
the way your blood hummed
the first time you walked into the sea. 
A door is just a question you have to ask
even when you are scared of the answer. 
In San Sebastián they pour the txakoli
from high up so it foams in the glass. 
Sea, grapes, the word for longing. 
Use both hands and don’t look back. 

- Adriana Cloud, from Instructions for Building a Wind Chime, 2015

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Every image in this poem is of something being reshaped – flowers are pressed, something (a door? a life?) is slammed, blood is set humming, wine is poured from great heights and foams as it lands.

The phrases have excellent mouthfeel, especially the choppy first sentences and consonants that take up space. Try saying “stuff pink hyacinths” and “wet stem of spring” and feel how they use every part of your mouth. The line “sea, grapes, the word for longing” makes me stop every time and catch my breath.

Through most of my teens and twenties, I thought I wasn’t someone who wanted things. I worked hard without considering what I worked towards, convincing myself I was “fine either way.” Fine whether I got the part or not, whether I got into this college or that one, whether I was invited or I wasn’t. I was rarely disappointed. I was hopelessly lost.

In my thirties, I’ve been reacquainting myself with desire. More out of necessity than enlightenment – at a certain point, I stopped being able to make sense of everyone else’s suggestions. For the first time, I’m trying to write my own directions.

While I’m happy to intellectually accept myself as a being with desires, I’m less jazzed about actually, well, wanting. Wanting feels like being squeezed between giant dictionary pages until I am so flat I forget my own name. Wanting stretches my patience like taffy and vibrates my brain like a tuning fork. And, infuriatingly, wanting one thing leads to wanting another, sometimes contradictory thing, until I feel at risk of being pulled entirely out of shape by everything I might reach for.

This poem brings be back to the point: desire isn’t an end state. It’s a door. I have to chose one to walk through if I want to go somewhere. And then there will be more doors to choose from. The wanting leads to choosing and the choosing leads to living. And the hope is to die of living, so here we are.

Blood humming,

Jess