who only by moving can balance

I find it hard to spend time with people I don't know well; I find it hard to get to know people; I find it hard to trust. This is the source of a great deal of on-going soul-searching and the beneficiary, I suppose one could say, of a great deal of my time and money.

There's one obvious exception to this, and that's poetry.

There's P: the first time I met him, it was an orchestra social; he was in the country for a conference and it was an opportunity to catch up with a lot of people he hadn't been able to see in a very long time. We got talking, and we didn't stop, and I couldn't even feel bad about monopolising him.

The second time we met, he was on his way from the Balkans to Paris. I was living in Zurich. He spent a weekend with me: nights sleeping on the floor of my bedsit, days cooking and playing Scrabble and walking in the woodland near my flat and, yes, swapping poetry. We don't see each other often - maybe twice a year - and we're both dreadful correspondents; and yet I always have space for him, in my heart and in my home, and it has never been awkward. Strange and sometimes too bright to look at, yes, but never awkward.

There's CK, too - Harry's widower. It was only after Harry's death I found out he'd been a poet; and that was, sort of, eventually, how I ended up spending time with CK. There's a pattern to our afternoons, our evenings: we talk about death, and we talk about music, and we talk about poetry. I loaned him Neruda's love sonnets; he loaned me Borges. And actually, more recently, there's been a shift: we talk less about death and more about life, and - it is, yes, that's the way to describe it: bittersweet. Again: I always have a space for him, in my heart and in my home.

I know jjhunter because of poetry: in my heart, and in my home.

I've been thinking about communication a fair bit, lately. Because I'm working on feelings with my counsellor, yes: and then the other night I realised that some of the reason they might be finding me hard to get a grip on, as a client, is that I am really very strange about how I communicate, as far as I can tell.

Here's the thing: I'm very open about an awful lot, but I'm close to almost no-one. There is nobody I trust to want me enough to make time for me when I need it, or, perhaps, there's no-one I feel comfortable enough imposing on, no matter how many times they tell me that they are willing to drop everything for me. This leads to obvious problems, of course, like: because I am so very open about so very much, it's very easy to assume that I am very open about everything, and I'm not, because it's easy to be open about facts and much harder to be open about feelings. The things I tell everyone about are the ones I can skate over, can ignore the depths of: I talk frankly and freely about mental illness, but only when I'm not mired in it, only when it is a ghost of a memory.

(That's - the tainted blessing, stubborn curse of depression, for me, really: when I'm bad, I can't remember what good feels like, and I can't believe it exists. But the precise reverse is true when I am well: it is as though I am looking back at events carefully pressed and preserved under glass. I know that this happened, that I said and felt these things, but it's wholly intellectual: it isn't in the gut.)

So. Being open, juxtaposed with being close: this is actually, I think, very indicative of the two modes of communication I operate with.

It takes me about six hours of in-depth in-person conversation to be reliably able to recognise someone. It takes me much, much longer than that to get to a point at which I trust myself to understand enough to not do harm - to switch from attempts to communicate explicitly and clearly and unambiguously, to communicating in nuance and resonance and things unsaid, in richness and in layers and in love.

Poetry sidesteps all of that. When talking about poetry - when I mean it - being explicit is superfluous, almost sacrilege. It isn't how I speak. It's unnecessary. I will say: ah, and I will tell you that I love you in the poem that I give you, in the care of my choice, in how I watch your face as you read it, in how I wrap my arms around myself until you are ready to talk about it and then lean toward you, closer. And if it will work, we will work, then you will smile I love you back to me, and in the spaces between poems we will lose ourselves in the spaces between lines, between words.

My poetry this year has been - raw, I think: it's about embodiment, it's about trust, it's about wearing our histories on our skins, it's about learning to read one another literally not figuratively, it's about flesh as poetry and poetry as flesh, it's about laying oneself bare, and it's about being safe.

Poetry lets me speak intimately with strangers, to give only of myself what is given in return - and "only" and "wholly" are, after all, so very similar in shape. Small wonder, then, that stepping joyfully (so whole-hog, so whole-hearted) into intimate modes of communication makes intimacy of mind easier for me, and yet it is only now that I begin to realise it.