This morning I find myself thinking about a long-ago friend.  Her name was Barbara Esbensen, and she was a fellow writer—well, not just a plain old writer like me, but a poet—who taught me something profound. 

 When two words come together that have never met one another before, Barbara used to say, that’s poetry!

That statement has become a lens through which I weigh my own efforts at verse, a way of recognizing that what I produce usually remains just that . . . verse. I am a good storyteller, even a graceful, spare, occasionally lyrical writer, but I am not a poet.

 That understanding has taught me to recognize and rejoice in the work of true poets, too. 

 Barbara died many years ago from a sudden, virulent cancer.  The last time I spoke to her she was in the hospital having been rushed home from an out-of-state visit as a poet in the schools.  She was in her early seventies, but her career was just taking off, and she said to me, “Don’t pray for me.  Swear for me.  I am so angry!”

 Succinct, powerful, to the point.

 I don’t remember how Barbara and I had come to be paired the first time we met, but because she didn’t drive, I had said I would give her a ride to an event.  I picked her up as planned, but I had quite forgotten that the car I was driving had a hole in the floor on the passenger’s side, a hole through which—if you chose—you could observe the road whizzing by.  It was spring, and I hit some standing water at the base of a hill rather hard.  I meant to hit the puddle hard.  I remember thinking that it would give the underside of my winter-weary car a good wash.  I had, however, quite forgotten that hole.

Without a break in our getting-acquainted conversation, Barbara picked up her feet as the water rushed beneath her feet and gathered below her seat.  When I topped the hill and started down the other side, she picked her feet up again, still conversing, as the water rushed back out.

We were easy, relaxed friends after that.  How could we not be?

 She was older than I by more than a decade, and she taught me some important things about aging.  When I turned forty she told me, “Forty is the most wonderful age!  You still feel so young, but it’s the first age you reach that has any authority.”  I carried forty lightly after that.

On her own seventieth birthday, she announced, as she stepped into my car for another outing, “Who would have thought I could be seventy and still feel so damned sexy!”

 Barbara had lost a son, Peter, and she told me once that she liked to telephone my house hoping that my son, Peter, would answer.  “It gives me a chance,” she told me, “to say Peter.” 

 That was long before I lost my own Peter, long before I could truly understand the deep longing the shape of a name could take in a mother’s mouth.

 Barbara had lost more than a son.  She had lost an eye to an accident, and she had lost her first husband who, she once told me, “Went off into the sunset with a giant pair of boobs.” 

 But she often said, “I’ve had the most wonderful life!”

 I came, through our friendship, to understand that a “wonderful life” is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

All that, though, is a bit of a wander from the place I began this piece . . . with Barbara’s definition of poetry.  “Bringing two words together that have never met one another before.”

 In all my long writing career, I can name one place where I have done that for sure.  It’s in the opening of my picture book, The Stuff of Stars. 

In the dark,

in the dark,

in the deep, deep dark,

a speck floated,

invisible as thought,

weighty as God.

 Can you spot it?  The one bit of poetry that fits Barbara’s definition?

 Those two words, weighty and God, changing one another.

 That word, God, has created a fair amount of furor in reviews of the book on Good Reads and Amazon.  (I don’t remember that any professional reviewer reacted to it.) 

 “Bauer,” some point out fiercely, “is trying to climb onto the bandwagon here.  She thinks she can assuage those of us who know better than the nonsense of the Big Bang by hauling God into her story.  Well, it won’t work for me!”

 If it were permissible to respond to reviewers—which, of course, it never is—I would reply, “Weighty as God?  Don’t you see?  That’s not theology.  No theologian has ever uttered such words.  It’s poetry!”

But then I ask myself, What’s the function of poetry anyway if not to turn our world upside down and give it a good shake?

 And guess what!  I’ve done it.

At least once.

 I think Barbara would be proud.