Lawrence Wray

The poem I hope to write is alert to how I am disposed. I’m probably influenced by Gabriel Marcel’s notion of being disposed—available to others, given to them. I walk in the woods as often as possible. Feeling out of place in the social, human-centric world, with all its technological whirligigs, threadbare assurances and delusions, walking in the woods helps me maintain balance and remain alert to older, fluent relationships. Though my walks are often partially enclosed by neighborhood roads, and I have no unimpeded access to hills and rivers, something new about the place I live is often revealed when I walk. So, the poem I hope to write is an act of disposal to that new oldness. During the first spring of the pandemic, I made several blossom pilgrimages, inspired by Basho’s walking, past all the quiet houses. Each time seeking a different direction, I saw countless enclosures beyond the merely human—leaf and branch, texture of soil, movements of air, sunlight filtered through clouds. Walking allows language to rise and flow. Poems are passages of disposal in the sense that they attempt to hold what emerges long enough to acknowledge one’s indebtedness, even to the squattings of earlier people. A stone wall that surrounds a tree like Andy Goldsworthy made in Peter’s Fold holds an interior space that is looked in on and entered by people who visit. I like to think that poems become places of similar disposition and deposit. The hills around the Allegheny river are myriad layered. So is my city, and the hills and river ways, and poems are all exposed to outside influences, but both the outside and the inside are so intermingled that it’s difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. Perhaps what people call mystic, whether they embrace or reject the spiritual connotations, is shorthand for a devoted paying attention to the animating relationships to which we are given.