The Writer Thinks About the Donkey

The Writer Thinks About The Donkey

I gave my first public reading more than 15 years ago, during my first year of graduate school. It was a surprising experience—from the moment that I found I had both the nerve and the desire to ask if I could, in my first year, sign up for the student readings through the moment that I stepped up to the podium and, I think the term is: I kicked ass. I did a good job reading, and I learned something intoxicating about the writing that I do in private, with a notebook or a screen, living as communication between actual, living, breathing human beings.

I’ve given other readings since—one more in school, and then in writers’ center, even on the local public radio station. In every case, the verdict’s been that I am pretty good at standing up before a crowd and bringing words right off a page, to life.

So it’s been another kind of surprise completely, to discover that I cannot read to Girlfriend.

It started with this sweetest book of tales: The Riverhouse Stories, by Andrea Carlisle. Little stories, of two women living in a houseboat, with neighbors ducks and love and challenges. I started reading them as bedtime stories, snuggled up with Girlfriend on the verge of sleep.

Except…there’d be some passage of kind affection, gentle humor, beauty in each other or the day. And I would pause, for long enough that Girlfriend—usually dozing—would startle up, awake, to discover that I was struck dumb by tears.

We tried other books—and nothing worked. Poetry, nonfiction. Anything the least bit sad—you should have heard the sobbing as I tried to power my way through this story of a parrot, on a topmost branch in winter in New York, proud, lonely, and dying from the cold. But also, anything beautiful, anything that seemed to touch some small and tender truth about these human lives, about the struggle and salvation of kind love. Everything, there in the company of Girlfriend, silenced me completely.

We got where we would laugh, and I would, red-faced, shove the book her way, and she would finish off the passage in my place.

Then, just last week, I stumbled on the poet, Mary Oliver. (And yes, I only just discovered her, and my gratitude at that is tinged with shame that somehow, despite my student loan and graduate degree, I do not, in fact, know everything about contemporary poets). I found this volume, Thirst, that speaks of love and loss and the awkward, welcome, puzzling discovery of faith. It was a meeting with a fellow traveler, a reassurance that this path that I am walking has been traversed before, this overwhelming gratefulness that the breadcrumbs she has left behind are so ungodly beautiful.

So, clearly, there was no way I could read these poems to Girlfriend. There’s one I cannot even manage by myself:

The Poet Thinks About the Donkey

On the outskirts of Jerusalem

the donkey waited.

Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,

he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,

leap with delight!

How doves, released from cages,

clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.

Then he let himself be led away.

Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!

And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.

Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.

I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,

as he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to, forward.

Even just typing down the words, I feel my throat begin to swell, and I’m relieved I don’t have anything I need to say aloud just now.

The only other experience like these that I’ve encountered used to happen in the grocery store, when I was with another lover. MJ and I were young, and perhaps it was the newness of having our own household, of taking care of one another, cooking and sharing our own meals. But in the company of that abundance, I would feel sort of overwhelmed with love. I would take her hand, or touch her cheek, or call her “sweetie” in the produce aisle. And MJ, not so moved by groceries, would pull away and hiss: for god’s sake, we’re in public. And, still, I’d nearly swoon with this strong, odd, affection.

So Mary Oliver’s poem—her unspeakable (as far as I’m concerned) and lovely poem about the donkey Jesus rode into Jerusalem Palm Sunday, was this week’s final straw. What the hell? I wondered every morning. What is it that triggers this tide?

Here’s what I’ve got so far, with apologies to those who aren’t so wild to read literary explication:

So this donkey, the one that Jesus rode into Jerusalem—he has a small but vital role within the story. How else would the Messiah enter town? The donkey, in fact, is prophesied in Hebrew scriptures. And the poet thinks about this donkey: what does he know, what does he feel, as he moves this story forward? How long has he waited for his turn upon the stage? What, really, could we hope for him?

And I think about the grocery store, about the words I cannot read to Girlfriend, about this little donkey, and I think: what touches me, what swells my heart and fills my eyes with tears these days, is when something about the truth of us is struck. It’s like some sort of bell within me resonates—in a room of precisely tuned violins, draw a bow across one string and every instrument will sound. These days, I am drawn to something small, precise about our lives.

The poem about the donkey says something small and true, I think, about some of us who try to live in faith.

We tie ourselves to rituals and custom. We try to be obedient. We wait.

We work to build a subtle sensitivity for that small tug…we try to cultivate a willingness to follow where we’re led.

And maybe most of us will never understand the part we play within the larger story. Maybe we will never know what happens next, in part because of us. Maybe we will get a glimpse—

Girlfriend thinks I have a gloomy kind of faith—I often summarize the Christian story as: be good, be revolutionary in your love, try to make the world a better place, and pretty much, they’ll kill you for it. But also, I believe there’s something more, something larger and behind/beyond it. Not a puppeteer so much as this deep hope—that while we’re in the midst of it, all the noise and the confusion, all the violence and cruelty and destruction, even in the muddle of not knowing what—if any—difference we can make—in the midst of this, we might still be brave, and filled with love. And, somehow, that’s what matters most.

[The Riverhouse Stories, by Andrea Carlisle, was first published by Calyx Books (1986)

and re-released-yay!-in 1993 by Eighth Mountain Press.

Thirst, by Mary Oliver, came out of Beacon Press in 2006.

By them at your local independent bookseller!

To read about the donkey in the Bible, look to Zechariah 9:9, Matthew 21 and John 12].