FRATERNAL LOVE
BY TRACY SCHLAPP
“Friendship, Fellowship, & Brotherhood, the building blocks that transform a stranger to a member of the family,” writes Jacob W. Harper from a freewrite exercise at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton. We asked the men for their opinion about an article from Psychology Today called “Why It’s Hard for Many Men to Form Close Friendships.” We were curious to learn about their experiences of male friendship and how it extended to fellowship, brotherhood. Our intention was to spark more writing on the topic of love for this issue. My agenda was transparent. I hoped to read examples that described what Danny and I have witnessed in our writing groups that have met regularly.
Austin Clark, our resident Puck, is skillful in his use of language, like a slight of hand. When I say Puck, I really must clarify that he is only mischievous. His clever turns of phrase mostly distract from his deeply held attachments. In “Firmament” Austin plays with the arch of heaven created in Genesis with an Ark that contains his fellows. Clark has a wing span wide enough to include many travelers: “For they all know, they could not be their brightest self,/ If it were not for the contrast of their neighbor’s personality.”
If Austin’s geometric configuration is an arch, Nolan James Briden focuses his gaze on “Cubic Squares.” In the confined carceral spaces, the floor tiles graph over a once rolling landscape — one that contained no structures. Like the floors he contemplates, his grieving brain is still held by a linear landscape. Even with enlightened understanding, the worn routes in our bodies make it difficult to freely reach out. “Exposing ourselves to memories within the grief, helps us to really understand it. We are developing new skills, regulation, and what not. I look around the circle of people comprising the room and I feel grateful … ” Entering the circle (writing, drum, sweat) are all ways for these friends, these fellows, these brothers to liberate themselves.
The kyte from Snake River arrived March 1, just in time to include Chris Lewis’s “Confined Acknowledgement.” Here is the evidence that he feels the connection to the writing tables — and we return that energy with thoughts, with the ring of our singing bowl, and through returned kytes. Chris extends our writing circle to the farthest reaches of Oregon. “Barefoot and alone, I bask in blissful abundance, for I am home; Understanding you are my passage/Out of hell.” If there is a love poem to fellowship, we find it in this writing that holds onto the truth found in poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca, in Denise Levertov, in the writing of peers. | TDS