Writing poems is a fire, blue and hotter than anything else. Writing poems is a kind of violence, a taking over, a spinning and dropping and flying thing that possesses. And consumes. 

And refines.

Words are the flame under the kettle. I am the kettle. I am the little tea pot. I steam up and the water comes pouring out, scalding, poem after poem after poem, hot off the presses. 

I will be famous, I will be remembered, I am genius poet, I am the brightest thing there is in all the vast history of the known world.

Writing words, making poems, has saved my life. Has brightened it. And flung it heavenward. And broken it. And lifted it back up.

Learning words, learning to read, leaning hard into stories, finding the rhythm, the pulse, the lifeblood, these things woke me up, switched on my brain. Yesterday I met a young man who has never read a book. This is beyond my ken. What sort of empty, echoing thing would my brain be without the words that poured into it from books? 

When I was growing up my mother read bible stories to me every night. Genesis I loved most, not just its stories but the rhythm of the words, the long lists of begats. I listened to God separating the light from the darkness, to Esau stealing Jacob’s birthright, to Jacob loving Rachel long and hard enough to win her from her conniving father, to Moses conversing with the burning bush. What a strange energy, what a fierce thing to do before sleeping. How vengeful God was, how angry and somehow appealing. God bless my mother for giving me these stories. 

And the picture books, too. Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? The dibble-dopp-dopp of the rain, the words dancing on the pages. The mystery of Bartholomew Cubbins' hat after hat and what was waiting underneath. I reached my fingers into the page and lifted up one hat, then another, until the final jeweled-and-feathered extravaganza was revealed.

I remember a girl with long dark hair who had a yellow rain slicker and a cat she dressed up in doll's clothes and her bath time was a wonderful thing with bubbles and fluffy towels and she walked into the yard when the rain was over and that page was green and yellow and blue. I cannot remember the name of that book. It burned in the fire. I still long for it sometimes, for that soggy afternoon, for that pink soap, for that yellow slicker. 

I read Little House in The Big Woods and The Animal Family with its marvelous Maurice Sendack illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. My heart, filled-up-and-cresting-with-words, with magic, traveled into and out of these books as I read them over and over and over again. So I could keep going back, keep returning to the little house with the peppers and onions hanging in the attic, the little house buried deep in the snow in the Big Woods, back to the house at the edge of the sea where the man brought home the mermaid and he and the mermaid started their family with a bear, a lynx, and a boy.

A yellow book of fairy tales, The Faun and the Woodcutter’s Daughter, pulled me into magic forests, into the hazy chest-whirling of the possible, the might-be, the forbidden, straight into the day when, on her wedding day, the woodcutter’s daughter chose the wild faun over the sealed-with-approval bridegroom and, as she and the faun ran pell mell from the church, she tore off her clothes and was naked and unashamed. 

Oh the wild, oh the abandon of ladies going into the woods and dancing with fairies in a ring under the summer moon.  Oh the frenzy. Oh the naked. I walked the length and width of our woods, looking for fairies. I peeked at them lounging in the rain-greeny pools, I saw them flicker and disappear in the morning mist. I spoke with them as I danced down the pastures. I took them with me into my dreams. 

The words had seeped into me, but poetry had not yet located me. I was alive and floating, swimming through the days, skimming the surface of my life. My ears were pricked up, but I was still tethered to the earth. I was not quite awake, not quite listening, not quite ready to fly. 

And then, a miracle. And a disaster. 

I started writing poems. My house burned down.

In the seventh grade my English teacher was Mrs. Gearheart. Her classroom was painted blue and orange and she wanted us to write. To put whatever we wanted down on paper. To write poems. One day she showed us the poem:  "In Just–" by e.e.cummings and my brain exploded with the possibility of words, the possibility of 
periods and lines curling down a page–

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring 
when the world is puddle-wonderful
 
eddieandbill. I asked Mrs. Gearheart what that was, what that line said that was so strange and foreign to me. And she showed me how mr. cummings had run the words together and how to separate them from each other. And then I saw it. Understood that eddieandbill were coming together from playing together. 

Oh the magic way the words clung to each other, the way the small caps aligned themselves in playful strings unfolding on the page. I felt a new excitement surge down my arm and into my pencil. I had to write like that, to make those small letters dance across the page and create that magic. I didn't capitalize the letter "i" for years after that day.

That was the beginning of writing. Feeling my hand move across the page writing those very first poems, as though I was in the control of some unknown force. The poems poured out in streams. My hand knew when the end of the line came and repositioned itself on the other side to start again, over and over in an automatic dance of words, poems writing themselves while I watched. 

Poems about the seasons changing, leaves falling and flowers opening. Poems God and Jesus inspired. Poems about the inevitability of death.  Oh the wonder of poems. The power of words. The universe opened up and was a pen in my hand, moving madly across the page.

I wrote and wrote and my thoughts turned inward, a bright focus inside my chest, my head. I was still in the fog of smoke that was still smothering me, my room in ash, the past in ashes, ashes. The cleft in time, what pervades the heart wrenched free of its moorings. Would I have written without the fire, without the wall of flames when I sat up in bed? Would the gongs and bells and wild whistlings, the current of the churning creek pulling me on and on, have happened at all? Did I need despair to wash through me before I could capture the blue hot cord of the words?

Would I have been that thirteen year old girl with her spiral-bound notebooks and her fountain pen writing of forlorn love lost, if the fire had not consumed me? So many pages of Why can't someone love me, will anyone ever love me? Where is the kiss? The kiss, kiss, kissing? 

I’m in love with him. I’m in love with him. I’m in love with him and god it hurts so good to be alive and love so much and even to be rejected when I pour it on the page it hurts so good I want nothing else but to feel this thing I feel.

I am riding down the pastures, I am the deep morning oranges, the darkening twilight. I am the lay of the lowlands, the sweep of the winds across the hill. 

I was so large, so blue, so burning burning hot. I found Coleridge. I rode down the banks of my own Xanadu on a sweating beast and sex pushed its fingers into my words, parted the page with its skillful hands and thank god high school was filled with eager listeners. Girlfriends willing to read my sappy love poems and say "ooh" and "ah" and I kept writing. Found my way to Plath, Wordsworth, Frost, and Hardy. Found poetry in Tess milking those cows in early morning, poetry winding its way through a long, complex story and I realized poetry had always been there. In all the books I loved best. Poetry flowed through them all, a stream of music and electricity.

And then, another miracle. Mrs. Eberly, who had been my eighth grade teacher, moved to my high school to teach English. She was all the wonderful things a teacher could be for a budding writer. She listened and encouraged, read all those early poems and wrote comments with her little red pencil– "Good. I really liked this one" or "What do you really want to say here?" One day she sent me to the office on an errand and on my way back, while floating up the stairs on some daydream or other, I found that my head was light as a balloon, my body a small puff of air, and I heard–“I am about castle walls and ivy growing wild.” I floated on, back to the classroom and told Mrs. Eberly what I had heard and she said, “You are a real poet.” A real poet.  Write, she said. 
Write. 

Write!

And I did and I did and I did. Poem after poem, whole notebooks of poems, each one a treasured thing, magical and somehow secret, tiny evidence of something larger than myself, so large it was hard to breath with the weight and swell of it inside me. Then the letting loose, then the gushing out.

Poems followed me from high school into marriage and childbirth. Poetry grew around my son, his snuggly butt in the crook of my arm, his mouth at my breast. So many poems in tribute to a child, a life sprung up out of nowhere and growing beside me. Words followed me through breaking up and starting over. The end of love and the beginning of hope. So very lucky, words led me to a man with a mouth full of words. I thrilled to the sound of him speaking on the phone. His words filled my ears and the moment I first knew I loved him I was dizzy with the poetry of it.

Dizzy in love.

Dizzy drunk in the forward motion of my happy, laugh-out-loud life.

And then I was more than dizzy and the words were so large in my head, my brain cavernous but as tight as a little nut. I burned. The inside was too big for the outside. I snapped. Straight down the middle. I would not know for years that it was bipolar and now I wonder if it was the madness all along, punching and pulling me, drowning and reviving me so I could write. And write. And write.

I used to I hear the first lines of poems in the middle of the night and I would wake up with the poem calling to me, demanding to be heard. Then I would drag myself up and follow it wherever it wanted to go. I was caught up in the swirl and dance, running with the words as they pounded across the pastures and up the ridgesides. And the wild and the yowl. And the yes, yes, yes, yes.

It was fiery. It was unkempt. It was a reason to stay alive, a reason to think myself a genius, to think myself too special to turn to ash, too amazing to slip under the surface of the dark lake I swam in.

But after a time, the giving in, the uncling under, was too much. I reached a point in my life when it was time to remake myself, pull my insides out and sift them, sort them, reorder them, find a different way to be. This I did do, but the cost was the frenzy, the Ferris wheel spin and drop, the I’m-on-fire magic of writing poems. 
So I held the poems at bay, I ushered them to their seats and left them in the theatre. I turned to drawing and its blissfully calm interior room where it almost never storms, where the only clouds are those fluffy ones that look like rabbits or herons, only the occasional monster. 

And slowly, over so many, these all-too-many years, the sunshine came. The soft meadow of the morning head. The gentle breeze touching. The tiny whisperings. The finches. The bluebells.

The healing. The opening of the cages, setting all the birds free.

Now I don’t wake up with words. They don’t wrestle me up from sleep. There is not the same holding-on-for-dear-life, the always-on-tenterhooks fever of those early years. This is a blessing, a calmness, an understanding that the poems will always be there and if I miss one, another one will appear in its place. 

The words are almost gentle with me now, and I with them. There is no bearing down, no great birthing with its agonizing crown of my too-big-poetry-head, no more please-oh-please-read-this-and-tell-me-how-genius-I-am desperation. The flame is soft yellow now, the sun has aged and mellowed, as have I.

But sometimes, when the moon is cocking its head just right and the room around me shimmers in gold, it feels just the same now as it did then, and I allow myself to settle down into the brain of that twelve year old girl. And I hurl myself headlong from the cliff and fly, the blue flame burning my insides, the very act of writing turning me inside out so that I am flame, but not flame, so that I am ash but also a green thing popping up from the soil.

Maybe I needed a real fire to ignite the one laid in my brain. 

Maybe I needed to choke on the smoke, walk through the flames, watch the external scaffolding of my life burn down to ash. 

Maybe I am a mushroom that had to bloom on the forest floor, overnight, like magic. Like the fire that ends the world.