Cary Tennis, you might think, writes advice columns for Salon–not poetry.
But some of his writing–all it needs to be blank verse is chopping a few line breaks into its punctuation:
You take your place at the table and you do your part.
You do your part in the ancient chain of being and history and fathering,
of war and redemption and wounding,
of burdens too heavy to carry and roofs too old to keep the rain out,
of hardy shrubs aspiring to be trees and old warriors wandering lost among their medals.
You take your place at the table and you do your part.
That fragment was part of Cary’s advice to an adult son unsure how to help his increasingly troubled Vietnam-veteran father.
Only part of what makes Cary Tennis “poetic” is his use of wording and cadence. His work runs in the old (Old-Testament old) tradition of poet as prophet and healer, poet as expositor of the Big Picture.
- A young couple kvetches about their nightmare cat–Cary says that the really big issue here isn’t a cat but “whether you cringe with shame or beam with pride when you think of this years from now.”
- An anxious mother wonders how to explain to her already-troubled eight-year daughter that Dad plans a sex change? Stop with the verbal reassurance and throw a party, says Cory–let the family celebrate that Dad can be happier being who he really is.
- A young woman agonizes over being guilt-tripped toward inviting difficult but pushy friends to her in-laws’ lake house. Cory’s advice helps her figure out how to say no “..in the traditional sense of its meaning no. Or, as Albert Einstein replied when asked if he wanted some coffee: no.”
If some of the problems above seem a bit exotic, not to say borderline twee, here is Cory’s response (expurgating one word you won’t find in my blog) to the modern but heart-breaking question “How long will it take me to get over my divorce?” Cory says healing arrives, but not on schedule, only…
… in due time,
and you will receive it as a gift;
you will see that this was not
some .. accident on the way to an appointment with life
but life itself,
your life, your fate,
with bloody scratches from your own fingernails dragged heavily across its back.