Free The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris Page A

“O Wisdom,” one of the antiphons I am just learning to sing, that we will be singing in choir a month from now. All things, sweetly. I find my place in the booklet as our leader intones, “Jesus called them away to be alone with him.” To be alone with Jesus is something I can hardly fathom, but the words we sing in response are words that have in some sense been realized in these holy women, past and present. I am aware of a difference between us, although we share in some sense a monastic call; maybe it is our very differences that have drawn us together to celebrate Gertrude tonight. “They arose and went to the mountain,” we sing, identifying ourselves with the disciples at the Transfiguration: “They went to be alone with him, and when they raised their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus.”

EXILE,
HOMELAND,
AND
NEGATIVE
CAPABILITY
    Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But
there are rules of light there and principles of darkness. . . . The
expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self.
    â€”Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS
    Â 
Negative capability . . . [is being] capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
    â€”John Keats

    A strange thing happens when I enter an elementary school classroom as a visiting artist, to read some poetry and eventually get the kids to write. It has much less to do with me as an individual than with the power of poetry, and may also be a side effect of the simple fact that I come to the children knowing very little about them. With me, they are suddenly handed a fresh slate. But no matter if the school is rich or poor, in the country, a suburb, or city, I’ve found that the kids that the teacher might have described as “good students” will inevitably write acceptable but unexceptional poems and stories. The breathtaking poems come from left field, as it were, from bad students, the ones the teachers will say don’t usually participate well in classroom activities.
    One day, when I was engaged with fifth-graders in a working-class neighborhood in North Dakota, I glanced down at a boy’s paper and saw the words “My Very First Dad,” and that alerted me that something very personal, very deep was going on. I no longer remember what my assignment had been, but I know it was nothing as invasive as “write a poem about someone in your family.” Most likely it was an open-ended challenge to work with similes. Given the freedom to write about anything at all, this boy had chosen to write about his “very first dad,” and while I left him alone to work it out, I did have several conversations with him. He was pleased, and surprised, when I pointed out to him that his similes were so good they had quickly led him into the deeper realm of metaphor. He’d written of his father: “I remember him/like God in my heart, I remember him in my heart/like the clouds overhead, /and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love,/as big as Texas/when I was born.”
    The boy said, rather proudly, that he had been born in Texas, but otherwise told me nothing of his story. It was his stunned teacher who filled me in. She said things that did not surprise me, given my previous experience as an artist-in-residence—“He’s not a good student, he tries, but he’s never done anything like this before”—but then she told me that the boy had never known his father; he’d skipped town on the day he was born.
    Oddly enough, hearing this was gratifying. Just a poet’s presence in that classroom, on behalf of similes and metaphors (officially, to justify my presence in terms recognized by the educational establishment, that’s what I was “teaching”), had allowed this boy to tell the adults in his life—his teacher, his mom, his