Either my wife’s prayer, a cup of Prince of Wales tea (don’t buy any) or the deadline of “before the holidays” forced me to complete the first draft of my second novel shortly after Monday’s letter post.
It felt nothing like the first time.
The first time, finals week loomed in the dorms. I keyed in the last word “come” and leaned back. I had finished.
Wait… I had finished?! I slammed back hard against my chair, slamming it to the floor (a floor that doubled as the roof above my resident director’s apartment), busted open my door and ran screaming down the dark hall: “I DID IT! I FINISHED MY FIRST NOVEL!”
A visual artist some referred to as Old Man Spiel waddled out in a stride hunched by his rude awakening and yelled in his psuedo-smoker voice, “QUIE-UT HOURS!”
Nothing like that. This time I felt weight fall. No running. No high fives after Old Man Spiel retreated to his Old Man Cave, only the cold quiet of those rare December rains we receive in Joplin – the same kind that stopped by in May the day after the Tornado. Dave Matthews, of all things, strummed in the background. My cocker spaniel came in and cockered her head at me. “What’s wrong?” she seemed to ask.
“Nothing’s wrong, my girl. I finished.”
She returned to her perch on the love seat and watched out a rain-streaked window for mom to come home, much like the kids in The Cat in the Hat.
Soon after I finished Milton’s poetry. In volume three, I had already read about how he emancipated the printing press – a poignant topic in today’s political climate, the stuff of thunder and brimstone. In his poems, Milton meditates on life when his wife dies. He opens his eyes to visions after he goes blind. A good friend drowns and Milton learns how to conquer the sea. I reveled in the poems, in the insolent hope that while the world was freezing over, Milton was just warming up. While everything chilled to the marrow, Milton melted.
It rained in December.
I finished my first draft.
I sympathized with twenty-three year old Milton who pulled the emergency brake on his meter halfway through a poem on the Passion, who found the topic “above his years.” When he returned to it later, he found it too petty an opening. In the the Passion he recognized the inexpressible.
Then came The Nativity poem and I wondered if it was truly a December night when Mary first introduced Jesus to Judah. Sure, there wasn’t room in the inn, but December? I looked up the climate of Bethlehem. If weather maintained over two thousand years, Bethlehem gets little snow. As a Mediterranean climate, they welcome hot summers and shun cold winters. Snow falls seldom, but it does rain. Twenty-eight inches per year, in fact. In the midst of Milton, finishing my crappy tea, glancing at my stack of 169 single-spaced pages, I remembered the rain. It’s December. Could it have rained on that cold December night when Jesus himself was just getting warmed up?
III
Say, Heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now while the heaven, by the Sun’s team untrod,
Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?IV
See how from far upon the Eastern road
The star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet!
Oh! run; prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessèd feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the Angel Quire,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.The Hymn
I
It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature, in awe to him,
Had doffed her gaudy trimWith her great Master so to sympathize:It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun, her lusty Paramour.
Words I learned:
- frounce – a form of trichomoniasis affecting hawks, resulting in a sore with a cheesy secretion in the mouth or throat.
- brinded – ?
- madrigal – a part-song for several voices, esp. one of the Renaissance period, typically arranged in elaborate counterpoint and without instrumental accompaniment
- inveigle – persuade someone to do something by means of flattery or deception
- sate – satisfy a desire to the full
- monody – a poem lamenting a person’s death
- welter – move in turbulent fashion (or lie steeped in blood with no help or care)
- meet – suitable; fit, proper
Comment early, comment often, keep it civil: