When Poets Pray by Marilyn McEntyre

Author:Marilyn McEntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Denise Levertov

The Avowal

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

I learned to float the way most children learn: my mother supported me in the water, her hands spread under my stiffened back, and I attempted, generally in vain, to relax. It’s hard to believe water will hold you up. It’s hard not to imagine that if you’re released, you’ll sink like a stone. But, after a certain amount of flailing and sputtering, it happened. Quietly, after my repeated requests not to let me go, she let me go, and the water bore me.

The first three lines of “The Avowal,” a poem Levertov wrote shortly after her 1989 conversion to Catholicism, awaken that visceral memory—the edge of fear, the curiosity, the little flickers of daring, and the lasting lesson about full-bodied trust. Floating, as much as any early experience I remember, taught me about trust. Though I climbed a challenging tree now and then, and worked up some speed on my roller skates, I wasn’t a particularly daring child. I’d try things, but it helped to have plentiful reassurance beforehand, and a back-up crew. So when the moment came to lie face to the sky and let the water bear me, I was exhilarated, and, somehow, my heart opened a little wider. Here was one more thing I could afford not to be anxious about. It was a moment of learning about faith.

It’s not only trusting the water and the buoyancy of the body but facing the sky that makes that first experience of floating epiphanic. In the same way, I loved to lie in the grass, looking up at the sky, day or—when allowed—night. The vastness, the unimaginable distance of light years, the news that the visible starlight was old, from stars that might already have gone out—all these and the sense of my own incomprehensible smallness in the scheme of things brought me to the edge of mystery, or what one physicist called “radical amazement.” Awe and fear are close neighbors. My brother, an amateur astronomer even at a tender age, used to recite facts that involved large numbers in powers of ten, assure me that there were meteors and meteorites on their way toward earth, and then drift off to sleep at night, leaving me to lie awake, wondering how to live with this unsettling information.

To lie face to the sky on water, I have learned, is to place oneself right at the riparian edge between heaven and earth, and discover how precarious and precious life on that edge is.

The poem makes no statement about that experience, except to let it hang, a suspended simile that continues to pique the reader’s imagination while it turns to another image: hawks resting on air that sustains them. Hawks aren’t altogether unusual where we live—not as rare a sight as eagles or condors or even

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