Marie Howe's Spare, Wonderful Poem “Maps” – Marginalian

“If we look at whether life is worth living or not, it can lead to answering a fundamental philosophical question,” wrote Albert Camus in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So there you have it, you've answered in the affirmative, whether you know it or not, now you're faced with the second important question that comes out of the first: How are you going to live?

Perhaps the sharpest, most repetitive shock of life is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer – not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new pope. Only life itself. It's just what Seamus Heaney calls your “secret knowledge,” which you can spend your life learning, but which it always whispers to you if you're quiet enough and still enough to hear your voice over the screams of confusion and appropriate uproar.

In this sense, Nietzsche was right when he warned that “no one can build a bridge for you, and you alone, over which you must cross the river of life.” In some cases, he was wrong in portraying life as a river standing on the bank and waiting to cross. No: You are water. You are a molecule that floats among all the other molecules of all other living things, the flow of life lives in you, the answer is complete to it.

That is why I will take, over all the world's collective philosophy, Marie Howe's spare and wonderful poem “The Maples,” which is attributed to her. New and Selected Poems (public library) – that blessing of the book that won him the Pulitzer Prize – is read here by the sapling poet Rose Hanzlik in Debussy's voice:

FLOWERS
by Marie Howe

I asked the maple stand behind the house,
How should I live my life?

They say, shhh shhh shhh…

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to flow and shine.

The bird called out from the branch with its tongue.
And on the branch across the yard, another bird answered.

The squirrel raised its trunk
then the length of the branch.

Stand still, I think,
See how long you can put up with that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few seconds,
easy breathing

Couples with two kindred answers to the same question in the same vein — Mary Oliver's “I Go Down to the Shore” and Anna Belle Kaufmann's “Cold Solace” — revisit Marie's timeless song of being human.