Confession time.

   When I was sixteen years old, I ran away from home. It was February, and cold, even in California, where cold hardly has a place in the dictionary. There were many nights I sat in a yellow-wallpapered Denny's drinking cup after cup of terrible double-filtered coffee because unlimited refills were 79 cents and I had nowhere else to go. One night I slept on a bus station bench. Another I spent huddled into the corners of my college, trying to leech warmth from the brick walls.

I'm telling you all this because the book of which I speak is irrevocably tied to that time in my mind, all braided together with the hard, bright stars and bus exhaust. When I left, I filled a battered green backpack with some pitiful belongings, intending never to return.

And I never did.

One of the very few things I took with me was a book of poetry, which I used to read at those awful 24-hour diners and under sallow streetlamps. It transported me totally out of the freezing wind and rain, and I would read it shaking, filled up with the pure light of the words. It is now well-worn, folded, creased and underlined within an inch of its life, the same copy nearly ten years later which has followed me across the Continental Divide and the Atlantic, and will ridein my saddlebags wherever I go. In the strange and mis-guided quest of my home-leaving, this beautiful book was my Sancho Panza.

The book was Diane Wakoski's Medea the Sorceress.

Whether or not you have heard of Diane Wakoski is not my concern, though, incidentally, you really ought to stop reading this and not come back until you have bolted out and bought an armful of her books. I had never heard of her when my mother tossed that little rose-colored volume onto my pile of yet-to-be-purchased used books because she knew I would like anything with Medea in the title.

Medea is not merely poetry, though the poems themselves are enough. It is a collection of letters, maps, ruminations, and poetry, interspersed with theoretical physics and meditations on American movie-culture. It is, in fact, part of a series called "The Archeology of Movies and Books," though Medea is by far the best and most vivid of the four volumes. Wakoski pulls together all of these visions of culture into a conversational style which is simultaneously filled to bursting with stunning imagery and language. Many of the poems weep from the page, needful and radiant:

I want to be the water and the swimmer. I want to be
the Moon, the girl with the silver ankle
who disappeares just as you try to grasp her foot
"Moon, Moon," cried the one-eyed poet, "when you
leave me
I am alone." But the Moon never leaves the Lover, the
Poet. She is there, quiet as light. I want
to be more
than I was meant to be.
Light. Light. Can anyone want as much
as I have wanted?

Many conversational poets give up the idea of lush language, but Medea seethes with it, boils and bubbles like the cauldron of Macbeth's witches. Wakoski wraps herself in mythology, morphing her own life into the flax of Greek legend, transcending the law of realism which dominates so much of postmodern literature. She drives Persephone, Jason, Medea, and Diana before her like sleek horses, inhabiting their stories and in some sense becoming them. It was this conflation of myth and woman which enchanted me so, when I was Persephone caught in darkness and winter, unable to climb to light.

Particularly, The Eyes of Laura Mars: An Orchid Myth, Crocus, The Lady in the Garden, and The Last Word on Sex are exquisite and powerful, though those words are terribly cliched when used in criticism. Perhaps it is better to say that they walked with me in the night like long-lost sisters, wrapping me in their long white arms and showing me what poetry could be.

Persephone, anyone who can listen to Winter's voice,
fall in love with the Prince of Darkness, can also
hear many other voices. You hear one
now. I know you hear it
outside your dark bedroom door.
Don't listen to me;
listen to your feet running each dawn
as you circle darkened stucco houses and shrubs
of nightblooming jasmine and mock orange.

Diane Wakoski, as she herself points out, is well named. She is the moon, pale and remote, lover of the tides breathing light into the sea. Her poetry is mysterious and yet warmly familiar, each line ringing in the soul as though one had already read it a hundred times. Medea the Sorceress is a singular work, better than most modern readers deserve, who are generally sated with so little. It is a book which will claim you as its own and cover you in the skin of a dozen strange moons. Let yourself be claimed.

I have made this personal in order to show you how poetry can live inside a person like a heart or a bone, how it can literally keep you warm at night. When we created this section of Marked Accordingly, we all felt the need to justify devoting space to reviewing poetry, as though it were a stain on the nice new couch. This is, of course, ridiculous. Poetry requires no justification. It is, as Plath said, the blood-jet. The purpose of this column is to dive into the lake of that blood and dwell in it. I cannot separate Medea from my psyche, and that is the trademark of truly great poetry--it crawls inside you and becomes a limb without which you are not whole. Wakoski remains the only living poet that I adore. In some sense, her book saved me, showing me the higher gestalt of suffering and sorrow and joy as well, allowing me to find the sublime within the world. I offer it to you like a Eucharist, in hopes that you will find in this revelatory book the same communion and beauty that I did.

Oh, California American girl,
you cannot escape
your destiny.