Michael Daley was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1947, and attended public schools there until entering a junior seminary at 14 to study for the Catholic priesthood and become a member of the Salesian Order, an experience which has informed much of his writing. Seven years later, he left the religious order, worked as a copy-boy for the Boston Herald-Traveler, as a taxi driver, and later as an assistant in the first Special Education program in the country. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts in downtown Boston while on his tenth hitchiking trip across the United States. In 1972 he settled in Port Townsend, Washington, where he worked for Olypmic Reforestation, a tree-planting collective. In 1976, he co-founded Empty Bowl press and published several issues of Dalmo'ma and the Dalmo'ma series, as well as numerous collections of poetry from Pacific Northwest writers. Empty Bowl published his book, The Straits, in 1983. From 1983 to 1988 he worked for both the Washington State Arts Commission's Poets-In-the-Schools program and Massachusetts' Artist Collaborative. From 1984 to 2005, he published six chapbooks of poetry, as well as numerous poems and essays in national and local periodicals, anthologies, and on various web- & blog sites. In 1990 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. In 2007 Pleasure boat Studio published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays. He has been an English teacher at Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, Washington, since 1990. He lives at Lake McMurray with his wife, Kathy and sixteen year old son, Theo.
Nailed to the sloped ceiling of my so-called garret outside Porter Square was a banner on which I'd scrawled in my own best script the Russian proverb, "Eat Bread & Salt and Speak the Truth." The walls were turquoise mottled by shadows, a bare bulb at the peak of the Spartan white peak of ceiling; a desk lamp, reading lamp, a wax mound of candle beside the bed. Until three or four in the morning, the silver percolator pumped espresso, snow four inches up the window. A typewriter, a notebook, or some desperate lined paper may have been on the desk, bearing my imitations of Ezra Pound's imitations of Greek poems. Between 1968 and 1970, although the Vietnam War was raging, I had no television and didn't read newspapers. I kept up by attending protest marches, benefit concerts, or once a picnic with the SDS, but only to meet women. The world of current events was less interesting than the Pound biography my friend Mark had given me. He worked in the only bookstore open late nights in Harvard Square; he'd begun recommending poets on my second purchase of cheap novels. He may have seen me browse the poetry section, and suggested Pound, later providing me with a course of contemporary poets. Stacked next to my blue overstuffed chair were Cantos, Selected Poems, and ABC of Reading. That winter all I did was read Pound, skip class, walk around Harvard Square at dawn, and smoke butts from the gutter.
That was two years after they kicked me out of the seminary. Or I left. Whichever interpretation surfaced from time to time, what's apparent now is I agreed with the priests: I should return to "the world." During my last months, entrusted with keys to the sacristy, I unlocked the communion wine and sipped from a small glass, my back to the tabernacle, staring into darkness at one or two in the warm summer mornings of Tampa Bay, where I thought God was now an enlarged challenge to forgive.
Although responsible for the "Church Latin" of Liber Usualis, I knew the Classics nonetheless. Had Pound demanded the Aeneid in Latin, I'd have been ready, but his ABC of Reading said a poet should at least have read Homer in Greek and Dante in Italian. This impressed me more than G.K. Chesterton's quip: a gentleman should have forgotten his Greek. I'd failed to be admitted to Homer in the seminary, defaulting to New Testament Greek, disappointed not to study with my sharpest classmates the Iliad and Odyssey. Yet familiarity with dead languages, and an additional year of Italian, led me to "Dante, The Duecento," a course which the University of Massachusetts conducted in Italian (a detail I'd overlooked in the catalog, to the chagrin of my classmates, and sometimes to the professor's when in bad Italian, then English, scoring points as I saw it, for erudition, I recounted snippets of Church history and half-baked poetics). I hired a tutor to practice Italian, and translated a selection of cantos from throughout Commedia on lined paper I never respected enough to keep.
These versions never struck me as poetry, nor did my syllable-by-syllable Pound imitations. Translating Dante was more familiar than any aspect of what I supposed was my apprenticeship. At times the text gave up splinters of Dante's vision of divine light in the Paradiso, but I worked up no more than a sincere enthusiasm for the drudgery; from Dante's vulgate I made no new poem. Maybe motive separates one's early work from poetry. Practice poems are translations of a kind. As a student for whom school was primarily the act of looking up words in dictionaries, acquiring familiarity with convoluted structures, parsing obscure verbs in his mother tongue, I thought "being a poet" natural. I dressed for it, parading in black cape, high boots, white fur hat, and hitchhiked Mass Ave. I smoked Galois like a good existentialist, carried poems in an army surplus knapsack, ready to throw down at the first raised eyebrow. I was obsessed, but with form, the "mantle of the poet," as someone phrased it years later-the poet prince handing his famous cape to a successor. I had the barest inkling of that untamed spirit which imbues words we think to call poetry.
When poets visit classrooms, they are often asked: "When did you write your first poem?" It's a more explicit question than, "How old were you when you started to write?" That one always seems more the asker setting notorious expectations: Did I start too young? Am I working at the right pace? Is it already too late? My answer has usually been unsatisfying, perhaps I hurry through. Some poets, I understand, began as children, and received encouragement from parents, friends, and teachers. I always stop after saying that when I was fifteen I wrote a religious poem for a feast day in high school, the junior seminary. A spring evening, all the boys attending the artistic celebrations in black suits on folding chairs near the statue of the Virgin Mary, I read in a high voice in the middle of 150 acres of birdsong and Massachusetts crickets, a mimicry of marching Victorian meters in aabba rhyme; an historical poem in which the Pope prays to the Virgin because Turks were about to invade Rome, but then camped in Hungary for 150 years. It was a horrible thing, and although first attempts must not always be failures, mine deserved the clammy applause that followed, just as I deserved a ribbing from Joe Beyes, an upperclassman- "Aha! The young Robert Frost." He flattered me by even speaking to me, a miserable sophomore. I deserved ridicule because I wrote a poem, and had the nerve to read it. I deserved it because where I came from, a neighborhood not known for its contributions to the Arts, poetry was for sissies. I tried again at twenty, also religious, bad Eliot, and lifted that forbidden wine to my lips in Florida, and didn't write again for three years.
Abbreviating the story to give a functional answer, dates and trite biographical information which doesn't amount to much, I notice the questioner become shy, if a little horrified. But it's a lie, because that was not my first poem. Nor did I write it in those two years in Cambridge. But something came about then, something woke up, shook off the snow, and opened its eyes. A year before, I was staying at the "Y" in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working at a toy factory, and I'd written a simple description that employed words I never used before. Not the whole piece, but a few of the lines startled me, so I tried more. Under the desk lamp in Cambridge, my notebook open to lines about a rose on my shelf turning black, I wrote, "A swag of velvet on a spindling shaft" without knowing what "swag" meant. Not the first poem, but the first insight, which I can even date. The rest was in waiting, but I didn't know that as I worked fiercely at syllables of Cantos or the Purgatorio, pausing to notice how my mouth felt to read Dante aloud. The mystery of real poetry lay in imitation and translation.
A new fervor took the place of religion, fed by books Mark suggested, and poetry journals, among them an issue he'd edited. After glossy Pound books, I wondered where the Moderns were in the college library of the seminary, which let me read only Frost and Thomas. Frost's depth of feeling held me even in high school when I studied the Complete Poems; Thomas's life opened my eyes, and his recorded readings, the turns of language, compact meanings and range of music, offered me an early model. Eliot's Collected Poems, roughly as slim as Thomas's, did not elicit discussion in our seminary about the effects of the first half of the 20th century on poetry. Books to fill in the gaps by these poets and others were out of reach behind the "amber curtain," restricted to seminarians with research projects and required permissions.
So Mark's journals became my introduction to small-press editions of selections that barely broke even: thin volumes on rag paper, or bark, handset in limited editions, mimeographed, stapled, handed out in the Square in the morning. Or low-budget offset in black-and-white and department money. It was how those Moderns saw things; eke out enough to find readers, have friends review, promote you wildly. In Mark's apartment were stacks of books, magazines, manuscripts, and framed signed portraits of poets I didn't know. At Black Mountain School, Olson replaced Director Buckminster Fuller, whose reputation even I was aware of, and Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, and many others were instructors. He showed me poems by Robert Kelly in letterpress books, an issue of Swallow with Creeley, and an inscribed copy of one of Duncan's poems. I read The Maximus Poems, Projective Verse, and Maximus again.
Mark was from Alabama and the sound of an Olson line or Kelly poem, made even more exotic by his dialect, helped me grasp those heady abstractions; I was raised with broad Boston Irish, and the thick Italian accents of priests. Even in the wild suburbs of Florida I'd never come across a genuine Southern twang. The crackle of those syllables in Kelly or Creeley made me recognize how poetry sounds when it's not just in my head. He read theatrically, and had a slant on things that left me suspect. "Did you know 'gabardine' comes from 'Garbo'?" He was going through a divorce, picking up taxi work as well as hours in the bookstore, and drinking pretty hard. He may have been drunk when I took him apartment hunting, and he told me from the bathroom, "Never rent an apartment 'tll you try the toilet, and bring a good book of poems." I thought of all the books I would have to carry, as I traipsed empty hardwood floors, assuming I'd be tapped for the move. I went on having beers with him in downtown bars beside bookstores and universities. I never met his wife, nor did he talk about her. I'm not sure if he had children. It seems he mentioned the custody struggle forced him to take the second job; he stopped and honked from his cab once on Boylston Street, and above the busy traffic, recited a poem.
Across from my attic room in the house I shared with four graduate students lived Ivory who, when asked where he was from, always answered "Brooklyn" with a British accent, and who rarely gave information about himself. He was married and had a child; they lived in Paris, but he would stay here until he had a doctorate from Harvard and could work for the Kenyan government. Ivory never appeared to study-he had no desk in his room. Two years earlier I'd been a student in an environment where study was a certain posture at a desk with drawers containing your own pens, paper, and written work-one of three hundred in a hall the size of two football fields (the last hurrah of giant seminaries in America), so I had a distinct advantage in judging what was intellectual activity and what was not. He had only the bed and one or two overstuffed chairs, where I would sit occasionally and tell him about Dante or complain about my struggle with the language. He disapproved of poetry; it was less significant than history or philosophy. He had a lot to say about Vietnam and activities of Congress. Not opinions on Congressional prudence, his comments fit our government into a trend he called the Revolution. Yet he didn't attend rallies or marches in Cambridge and Boston, didn't project interest in changing society.
The Revolution was a new concept for me. None of my seminary classes prepared me to look at the universe as social history. I had perhaps a different education than priests and nuns who became politically outspoken. It was not my inclination to think of poetry, hence the universe, as anything but a metaphysical entity. Thomas Aquinas taught me that. I was not prepared for a world not antagonistic, yet Ivory, when I ran into him and his girlfriend at a Laundromat, gave me a glimpse of the utopia he envisioned. "Won't it be better," he asked, "when we leave our clothes washing because we know a neighbor will put them in the dryer?" I don't know if he or I was in a hurry to be somewhere else at the time. "And when we come back, the clothes will be folded?" He was smiling, being mischievous. I wasn't sure if he was mocking Revolution, expressing an ideal, or trying to get me to do his laundry. It was also new for me to be around someone who was not white. My Boston Irish childhood, and seven years in the seminary (ages fourteen to twenty-one in priest's cassock, a blackout of puberty) had offered few encounters with cultures unlike mine, and the notorious racism of the times had a stranglehold on Dorchester and South Boston where I grew up. To live close to a black man, especially one more European than American, who asked many questions, provoked me to tether my answers on the strange identity of cultural tour guide. I explained human behavior as acceptable to rationalize motives of politicians or elucidate meanings of sentences he quoted from Marx or Engels. Ivory's answers were equally determinist, offering inevitable social change. I failed to recognize that he was planting by Socratic questioning a course in dialectical materialism, an ideology for which I was fertile ground.
He gave me a copy of John Stuart Mills' On Liberty, but I couldn't get past page five, deterred by dense language, or maybe Paradiso was more to my liking. We went to a lecture given by Herbert Marcuse, whose books Ivory was steadily working through. Marcuse was a provocative speaker, instructive, funny and rational, and yet for me the details of the Revolution were less important than the way he trilled the letter 'r' in "radical." We attended Ayn Rand's lecture as well. Rand, who was belligerent, a philosopher for whom will and self determined success, asked the room at large if "hippies" wanted us to smash our washing machines and dishwashers, after we struggled so hard to get them, and move back onto the land to scrub old cloth on river stones. Many young women in the audience were dressed for such a life, though we were in the middle of a harsh metropolitan winter; the image of them kneeling on the banks was so appealing, I resolved to leave Boston soon.
As Ivory led me to the contradictory views of Marcuse and Rand, he opened a window onto philosophies of social justice. My attempts at poetry began to include people more than the gulls and dunes and cigarettes I'd been shoveling into disjointed stanzas. Yet I couldn't abandon my metaphysical search; it was the oxygen I breathed; the universe had meaning at a level I insisted was mysterious. The mystery I dwelt within, to use Biblical phrasing, was a version of the theories of Teilhard de Chardin, the mystic French anthropologist-priest. Proposing them without imprimatur, he contended that matter defines events and history more than do struggles for power; existence itself, not interpretation, was the basis for the spiritual life I assumed as the medium of all poets. Contemplative lives led to poetry. The existential experience had been depicted in the seminary when one of the brothers stood up in philosophy class, speechless, clutching the back of a chair. He ran his hands along the smooth grain of oak, eyes wide, unable to speak, until almost choking, he managed to say "This . . ." and then a long pause, the class stunned he could say no more, "This . . . is!" We reached a consensus that the brother had experienced what our professor termed the "Intuition of Being." Such an event in the childhood of Elizabeth Bishop is recorded in her poem, "In the Waiting Room." I hoped to portray Being in poetry, though I couldn't have been conscious of metaphor as distinct from understanding, and now I let social justice sit comfortably with my metaphysical intuitions.
Perhaps the little I understood of Chardin influenced my reading of Olson. To think of Maximus as an epic, I had to recognize Olson's metaphors of change in geologic and civilized time. Mark introduced me to Pound and Olson primarily, just as Ivory introduced me to Marcuse and Rand. Marcuse had become something of a mentor for him, as Olson had for Mark. Both Ivory and Mark, a study in opposites, were my own mentors: a black radical philosopher, cool and unassuming, funny and irreverent (on a sailing trip in Maine he told me that if our host, the aging heart surgeon, captain of an eighty-foot schooner, spoke that way to his self-effacing wife again, he'd "knock him upside the haid"-British accent) and a big, white, Southern Baptist with a twang and lisp, a poet and lyrical thinker (he told me "I don't want ideas in my head"-I was stunned. I hadn't learned to wait for the other shoe to drop when Mark made this kind of pronouncement-"I just want images."). So I became a reader of Olson and Marcuse, mentors of mentors. Maybe "model" is the more useful term, since "mentor" has become a verb as well as a job description. Dante, whose mentor led him through Hell and Purgatory, said in De Monarchia, "The more closely we copy the great poets, the more correct is the poetry we write." We might quibble over the meaning of the word "copy," but arguing with Dante's interpretation of "correct" might prove hopeless. Mentor, so it happens, was the friend of the family whose form Athena took to teach Telemachus what he must do to become a man-go find your father, kill off these pretenders who waste your resources, seek the truth. It may be that any force guiding those about to take control of their lives, as Athena did with the son of Odysseus, could be called divinely inspired, or at the very least, available for free advice. Luckily or not, people have always dug right in to the project of giving me advice and I've been predisposed to take it, imagining I'd found guidance for my next decision.
Selecting mentors may be compulsive for writers, even those working against the grain. At an open mike in a Seattle coffee shop weeks after the riots in response to the first meeting of the World Trade Organization, many poets found inventive ways to complain about the treatment police gave protestors. Some talked about the WTO as the global oppressor, a term denied with all the imperialist naiveté and vehemence the designated spokespersons could summon for the papers. Those readers and reciters were alike in volume and emphasis, phrasing (influenced by rap in a few cases) and cadence, in vulgarity and downright nastiness. Having participated in many readings around the city, they were friends in a competitive slam, duplicating or out-performing one another's style. Many current poetry magazines adopt and promote a similar range of styles; contributors express like values in styles that have similar limitations. Certainly editorial preference accounts for similarity, but poets often write for particular tastes, so their work will be published in The Bigs. Perhaps similarities arise from workshops where good poetry and what is not are clearly discerned, and where doubt and self-examination are out of place.
The habit of imitation I cultivated in my early attempts at poetry was similar. All I had to do was learn how, and my work could stand alongside those in poetry journals. The role of the poet replaced my identification with the priesthood, yet it was a vocation, intimately connected to training in the spiritual life: rigorous discipline, faith in the existence of a soul, an inclination to believe in the efficacy of poems; like good works in the religious life, poems could change the world. I understood why Yeats dwelt so on the Spiritus Mundi, and I replaced religious views with Jung's collective unconscious. Although not everyone approaches poetry in flight from a strict religious background, writing to top our contemporaries, or copy great poets, is a step toward the first poem; yet we may work against our inclination and are easily satisfied, demanding less than the art deserves.
Come spring I was putting the finishing touches on what I thought of as "the long poem." There was a strong influence of the sea, a familiar setting, images triggered by sailing the Maine coast; one evening while I was seasick over the heart surgeon's starboard rail, Ivory looped a line around my wrist to ensure they could haul me out of the still harbor should I slip overboard in nauseated sleep. Something violent and complaining was in that writing, descriptions of islands and vessels Ahab or a similar figure passed on his way to an encounter in the opposite direction. The Divine Comedy, Pound's Cantos, and Maximus Poems-although I'd read only a smattering of each-I took to be my influences. I wouldn't have said "models" at the time, because I wasn't intentionally imitating: this was all my own. Yet Charles Olson's style-the page as graphic art, the line as breath, and close observations of the coast-had become a template. His and Pound's typical abbreviations and sometimes awkward hyphens, even their humor, had been precursors of the form I assumed. And from Dante I learned to see the world as allegory, or perhaps I could sustain three lines once in a while. This quilt of stolen devices grew to almost ten double-spaced pages and I was certain there was more.
Mark asked in August if I'd like to go to Gloucester, about an hour and a half north, to visit Olson before he died. He let me know that a friend of his was going to pay his last respects, that it would be good for me to go. Yet I really didn't know who Charles Olson was. In reading him and absorbing the tradition, I was aware of form, but I hadn't spent time with his vision (nor to be truthful, with Pound's and Dante's). I missed the meaning. I couldn't say that Olson became clearer to me. I hadn't imagined looking out his front window onto Gloucester Bay, or at his "Neolithic neighbors." Years later I used a street map to find his house; a helpful pedestrian there guessed he "might have been a painter?" He had neighbors downstairs, on three sides, and the sea in front; Gloucester's fishing history and New England's commerce streamed and sailed and motored past his window. I'll give myself credit for thinking it was a tacky thing to do, pay my respects to a poet I didn't know, though certainly there were reasons I can't recall, something going on that weekend I would have missed; I had never seen anyone close to death except my beloved uncle who was oddly unchanged by the hospital bed. Whatever my reasons, for years I've wished I had gone. Maybe I wanted to avoid intruding. Regardless-banishing altruism and pettiness, as Ayn Rand would have advised because it was a pivotal moment to change my life-I should have witnessed how a great poet dies. "I'm going to hate to leave this Earthly Paradise," he wrote in Maximus the year before he died. "Only the divine alone interests me at all."
Nevertheless, I continued my "long poem," saturated in Olson and Black Mountain imitation, immune to the idea it was inauthentic. I was showing Mark pieces of it at happy hour a couple of times a week, sure it was very good, that I was discovering my own "voice," as he used that confusing workshop nomenclature for the first time in my hearing to characterize the moment a poet masters language. My little allegory, however, was shit. I would like to say it was the first poem and leave it at that; that everything preceding this stylish dip into the silt bottom of the stream of consciousness was prologue; that resisting my orientation toward the spiritual, I avoided writing a sermon; that allegories of the Middle Ages had not been so obviously a major part of my early reading. To think of "the first poem" as a personal failure is to invert a certain standard. Without a standard how can anyone settle on a definition? There may be millions of definitions, yet if the term "poem" could stand for a kind of light, the best might keep it lit longest, and the worst snuff it out, making it only partly a poem, as mine was, which is to say "half alive," "still breathing," "not quite dead."
A few years later, in yet another phase of the career (another exaggeration whose definition I inflate by lack of standards), I arrived at this rather bloated definition: "Poetry is the practice of directing a line of thought illuminated by an arrangement of language of a diamond quality-rare, hard, sharp, incalculable-through a vortex of intuition built on emotion and reason and leading to clarity in human life, planetary affirmation, and priceless breath." I think it suits the expression of an ideal, and for all its romantic demands, does at least make demands of poetry. It notifies me of what I'd been working toward in those years copying the great poets. Galway Kinnell said a poet must bring his or her entire life to bear in a poem. Such a requirement defines a person as much as the act of making poems. It demands a level of concentration and risk artists and crafts people achieve at peak moments, qualifications unknown to me when I leaped from conscious imitation and studious translation into writing my own first draft of the "epic-lite," a masterpiece of lowered expectations. I suppose that advocating for standards in the early stages of writing is to argue with William Stafford's famous advice to lower one's standards in order to keep writing. Interpreting a "lowered standard" as a battle flag, however, indicates that the pacifist and conscientious objector advocated acceptance over aggressively "writing through."
Mark's encouragement was, surprise-surprise, half-hearted at best. He'd say, "Can you fit the word 'roseate' right here?" Or: "Don't juxtapose two abstractions; follow abstractions with concrete nouns, like 'mathematical peach!'" When I reached what was surely the final draft, I asked him to take it until Friday. Since I believed I had written something quite good, I anticipated Mark's perceptive reading, disposed to accept editorial advice as Eliot did Pound's. I grew impatient Friday with the ordering of beer, pretzels, fetching the glass, the pouring, salute, and a moment to stare into space. Our waitress, Andrea, was married to an actor. We found this out our first happy hour. One Friday I confessed to Mark that I was in love with her. Like the first poem, this too was exaggerated. I was too shy to say more than hello and order my beer, but in one of our sessions Mark declared to Andrea and the room that she and I were "electric together" and should have an affair. Embarrassed as I was, I liked her knowing how I felt enough that I had kept coming back, and now while I waited for Mark to say something about my manuscript, I thought his comments would impress her too.
I must have had more than one beer because my reaction was too abrupt to have been completely sober. He noted a few details, a line or two worth praise, but came quickly to the point: I should stop trying to write poetry altogether. I don't remember what I said or if I said anything, but I know I got up quickly and began to storm out of there. I must have appeared furious because he told me not to get mad; he only meant I should quit trying. Whether he was being conciliatory for my sake, or so that he wouldn't be left alone to drink the pitcher, Mark's dropping the other shoe only made me seethe further. I was sure he thought I was so bad I should quit, and I saw him as a pompous ass. Perhaps Olson would have told me the same, or I would have learned, had I gone, that death frees us from imitation, that poets and everyone else discover how to die from dying. That "copying the great poets" may make our poems correct, but whether they are or not, our lives like our deaths become our own. I grabbed my manuscript, my pack, my scarf which I tossed over a shoulder like Shelley might have had he been told off by that doddering idiot Wordsworth, and got the hell out of there.
The first poem is a matter of setting limits. What were you satisfied with? When did you know it was right? When did you make your first work of art? One answer might be, "I've yet to write my first poem." Not that I went right on to the second, but that in calling something a poem, the ideal is beyond what we settle for. Did Dante think he achieved the perfect expression of his vision? It's hard to believe any poet can say, "This is it, this is what I had in mind, and this is just as I heard the words." If it is facile to assume that fulfillment is the reward for creating great art, how can we expect a poem to make its author happy? I was shielded from that inconvenience; my apprenticeship, which had just come to an end, consisted of imitation and translation. Searching for spiritual insights to confirm those I recognized, I risked nothing. There was nothing true in my lengthy allegorical attempt. No compassion, no sorrow, no deliberate celebration, no voice all my own. I hadn't noticed how skillfully I'd learned to imitate. I left that bar and stepped into the street where snow was falling, the old army knapsack stuffed with new used poetry books. Irate as I may have felt toward him, I realized Mark had pointed out the vein of fools' gold I'd been working. And now that he had, there was no need of him. My obsessive imitations had no purpose other than to gain form, which as the Heart Sutra tells us, is empty, and as Olson says on the first page of Maximus, "love is form, and cannot be without important substance." I could walk down the street free of mentors, in revolt from the old ways, and, without a map but unable to speak the truth; I wanted to flee my limitless capacity for mimicry. The flight of the poem forming its own wings out of fire-even out of tin-doesn't make it a phoenix, but it does illuminate. A few months later, in love for once, I wrote my first poem.