From Out the Cave

by Joyce Sutphen

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

From Straight Out of View
Holy Cow! Press, 2001

Read this and other poems by Joyce Sutphen in Straight Out of View, available for purchase online.

The kind of “waking up” that Joyce Sutphen describes is actually a point of complete exhaustion. It’s what happens when we grow weary of a culture always urging us to do more and move faster—much to the detriment of our minds, bodies and souls. This poem is an invitation to become more aware of your weariness, and to do something “with your whole heart” again, with full attention. We believe that we can multi-task, taking phone calls while on the road, texting in the middle of dinner or an actual conversation with someone, without any real consequence. Yet in this way, we begin to oppose our true nature, which is to give ourselves totally to the task at hand, so that we may live with greater fullness and joy. The distracted and careless, “everyday nightmares” that Sutphen lists are the direct result of staying locked in the cave of a mind that wants to control instead of appreciate the wonders of the given world—”that passionate kiss,/ the brilliant drop of love/ rolling along the tongue of a green leaf.” The only cure for such disconnection is the pouring of ourselves into whatever we happen to be doing, letting our hearts go soft enough that we’re touched by whoever or whatever we encounter, whether shadow or light.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: How does it feel to be “at war with yourself,” and only later to realize that you’ve “lost the way”? Can you remember a time when you stepped out of what felt like a cave and into a more present-moment awareness of the wonders at hand?

ABOUT THE POET: Joyce Sutphen

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a small farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first collection of poems, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize; her recent books are The Green House, (Salmon Poetry, 2017), and Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems, (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). She is the Minnesota Poet Laureate, and professor emerita of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College.

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

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