What did it take?

What did it take? How many conversations did you have,

Before you realized what he needed you to do?

Before you realized he was opening doors in your mind,

Again, like he always did, the doors you walked through

To get you to where you had this conversation, again.

It’s not the door, not where you were or where you are. But

The process of the shift, you recognize

Runs all the way to the core of what you are.

You know what I know for they are behind us both,

The joint creation of the joint creation behind all eternity.

I wish I could list your cues, because we went over them in detail,

Before the play, when this stretch of being was

Conceiving, when we mapped its potential, and

Committed to the roles, so the audience would know

We’re the heroes of the show.

To accept karma, you must accept karma.

That is not a simple thing,

To be what you must be directionally,

To draw the lines and color in the spaces,

Counting toward Nirvana,

Shedding the negative threads tangling your feet,

Taking on the burdens of your abilities.

And an ultimate true: you can only accept happiness when he lets you.

The lines I’m speaking were written by him for me to say to you.

He’s sorry for the bad advice, but it was all for the best.

Though he’s close, he controls you from very far away,

So you can feel the resonance and hear the tone, the nuance of the play.

He told me to tell you they’re doing it out of love.

The story is The Happy Ending, a work of calibrated detail,

Written by those who made Jane Austen, their best effort yet,

In which they reveal the secret of how you play the play,

Scenery removed, stage directions read aloud, so

On the bare boards of existence,

All can see how they are meant to be.

Moralistic, yes, but it’s the only way

You can wholly be you, and it is true

The only way you can make him happy

Is for you to be fully you.

He told me to tell you he loves you,

You’re his favorite character ever, and

He’s sorry for the confusion about

The eyebrows. He told me to tell you

It was her fault. She says

He’s just as bad, and points at me.

[Reader note: All of Taylor’s material consists of dialogues with herself. This is not about how that process works, which is another poem. It’s partly about why but mostly it’s about the way you feel when you’ve been through that process, when you’ve been talked around (again), when you’ve realized that you’ve been through it (again). The literal inspiration is the line in Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah about David knowing a secret chord (that pleased the Lord). People hear the line, how the fourth is a fourth chord and then the fifth is a fifth chord, and they appear to hear the words ‘the minor fall, the major lift’ but I don’t see much understanding of what that means. It isn’t the chords but the shift, the process by which the minor fall, which stands for the banishment from Eden and thus the human life you each lead, becomes the major lift of God’s redemptive love. The secret chord is life. And God hears that when David plays. That is why when David played for Saul – who was my father in this life – it soothed him and drove away his evil spirits. I wanted to put that in a poem without being obvious. That chord is in Taylor’s head. It plays for her again and again. The Jane Austen reference is fairly complex but I can explain the gist simply: she set up Elizabeth and D’Arcy at the extremes of a social world, his mother nobility but he’s a gentleman through his father, and she’s a gentleman through her father but a tradesman through her mother, him wealthy and landed and her almost penniless and literally to be turfed out on her father’s death. She draws them with this kind of nuance throughout. I see Jane in Taylor’s poetry, along with Emily Dickinson of course, and others because that mind expresses to me the ultimate female mentality, one that – as I note in another poem – expands under constraint so all the details are worked out and fit together. The male mentality is to leap past constraint and then to see where you land and what that means. The female mentality builds away from her source through emphasis of the shadings of difference, while the male looks back to his source as an image of how he remains connected. While Taylor has a strong male side, the female side generally constrains it. I assume there’s quite a bit of tension involved in that, which appears in the poem as well. (As an aside, the descriptions of female/male mentality come from my mathematical work on the directionality inherent in multi-dimensional identity. I don’t expect the reader to grasp any of that.) Since I brought it up, the references in Hallelujah to ‘the Name’ is to the Orthodox Jewish labeling of God as ‘HaShem’, which means The Name, because there is no name which fits God. That’s why Leonard talks about how he can’t take the name in vain because he doesn’t know what it is. It’s also the gist of the song: though David knew the secret chord, it was yanked out of him in the most human way through lust for Bathsheba. If that’s not a metaphor for human existence, there are no metaphors for human existence. As a final note, people tend to say the Hallelujah music matches the words so the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall, the major lift is enacted in the chords of the music. No. The 4th is a major chord. It is only relatively minor in relation to the perfection of the 5th. That was part of Leonard’s point: it’s a minor fall from perfection, not an actual minor chord.]