Words that Never Met One Another Before

I once had a friend, a poet, who taught me important lessons about poetry.

The most memorable one—and she was emphatic about this lest I miss the point—was that I am not a poet.

Our friendship didn’t end over her lack of appreciation of my attempts at poetry.  Rather she left this world and took her own talent for vivid poetic images with her.  But even in her absence, I have never lost track of what she taught me, that there is an important difference between me—a spare writer, even a lyrical one—and poets.

“Poetry,” she used to say, “is the place where two words come together that have never met one another before.”

How I admire those writers who can, again and again, bring words together in a new way, who can create truly fresh images.  I stumble upon such an image from time to time, and I have the good sense to recognize its value when I do, but it’s always a lucky accident when it happens.

When it does, I feel as though I’ve reached for a goldfish and come up with gold.

One of those lucky accidents came about in the opening line of The Stuff of Stars:

In the dark,

in the dark,

in the deep, deep dark,

a speck floated,

invisible as thought,

weighty as God.

None of that is fresh or surprising until you come to the final words, weighty as God.  There I’ve done it, done exactly what my friend asked for.  I’ve brought two words together that had never met one another before.

The meeting was both a lucky accident and very intentional.  I don’t know how those two words came together in my mind, weighty and God, but they were exactly what I was looking for to describe that indescribable moment in creation before the beginning of time, the beginning of space, the beginning of everything.

I wanted to emphasize how infinitely tiny that speck had to have been.  So tiny that speck is too large a word to describe it.

And I wanted to emphasize how dense it must have been, how important, how full of everything that will ever be.

We all know thought is invisible.  No surprise there.  No poetry, either.

But to give weight to God?  Who thinks of that?  Except a poet.

I hesitated over the phrase even as I wrote it.  These days the word God is more controversial in children’s books than the f-bomb.  Many, I knew, would decide my book inappropriate for use in their schools because they will see the word as religious rather than poetic.

And, in fact, one of the very first reviews of The Stuff of Stars posted on Amazon turned out to be from someone who has no concept of poetry.  The reviewer accused me of “pandering” to the creationists by bringing in a mention of God in an otherwise serious scientific account of the beginnings of our universe.

The truth is I was pandering to no one.  I knew the word would cause problems with the we-can’t-touch-anything-remotely-religious mindset, so I asked my agent when he carried the manuscript to my editor to present it with a question.  Did she want to eliminate the potentially offensive phrase?  If she did, I was willing.

I didn’t want to take out “weighty as God.” It says the unsayable, which is what only poetry can do.  But I understood the Pandora’s box the word might open.

To my relief, my editor appreciates poetry, too.  She not only accepted the manuscript; she said immediately and decisively that the phrase should stay.

Weighty as God.

I wonder if my long-ago friend was watching from some other realm, rejoicing to see I’d met her expectation . . . at least this once.

Certainly the friend who lives inside me rejoices still.