These passages are from a book called From the Heart that arrived here a few weeks ago.
The author, Sherman Burns, wrote me, “I was reading my January issue of THE SUN when your editor’s note stopped me cold. It was the part about realizing you were trying to become a writer to perform for your parents. . . . How different my life might have been had I had that realization a long time ago. . . . I did retire from writing ‘serious poetry’ about five years ago to pursue a more difficult road, the journey towards personhood. My life is indeed a performance, but it is no longer a dance for my parents, it is a dance for the world, as yours is, you who collect reflections of the soul in a magazine.”
— Ed.
I’ve spent many years ignoring what my brother has to offer me by telling myself that he is sealed off, distant, and unavailable. Recently I tried unloading some of my guilt about him.
I told him I felt I’d stolen part of his chance for love in our family because I was a very noisy and demanding older brother. He replied that he’d never felt cheated, but that he’d learned from my hard-headedness to avoid hassles with my parents.
With this disclosure I came to accept his quietness as style, not as numbness. I began to realize he adjusted to his childhood in a way as uniquely suited to him as mine to me. We began to open avenues of love and communication between us which continue to grow.
As I learn to accept love as it is really given — not as I expect it to be — a vast amount of the precious stuff becomes available.
If I can see clearly what I need, even if I can’t have it when I want it or the way I want it, that need becomes much easier to live with.
The tough part has been to identify those needs.
Many of them I’d given up on and buried long ago. Like the way I looked for an ideal woman to love. That search kept me from admitting to myself how much I need a woman to care for me, to accept me, to make love with me.
When I got into relationships I would go on for a while pretending she was a goddess, until I noticed her “imperfections,” actually her needs, which reminded me too much of my own. So I’d just bail out, only to continue my unending search like a dog chasing its tail.
I’m slowly owning up to the fact the tail belongs to me, and I’m the one who keeps pulling it out of reach.
If I were to write a poem for you I could use words something like e. e. cummings when he said, “The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”
Or I could borrow from Yehuda Amichai’s bitter sweet poem, “When I am with you, my soul is damaged like the lungs of a diamond cutter.”
Or Osip Mandelshtamm’s, “We will tie together a legion of swallows to pull us through the sky.”
A long time ago in China someone said that all which was worth passing on died with old men. The rest they put into their books. And I have known for years that things very close to me, like people I have grown to love or unforgettable moments like my daughter’s birth, are beyond the reach of words. I too want the experience of those things to die with me, they are that sacred. There are many other things I’ll use words for.
I cannot write a poem which is anything close to the one we live.
As I listen to my own mother, eager as a small child, tell me of the new discoveries in her life, I know that she has always been telling me, that I have always been telling back, and neither of us has been heard by the other.
When I am able to listen to her, there will be little in the world I cannot hear.
Sherman Burns is a 35-year-old teacher who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. From the Heart is his first book. Copies are available for $3.95 plus 60 cents for shipping. Write From the Heart, P.O. Box 35287, Charlotte, N.C. 28235.
