Rules were made to be broken, runs the old saw, offering convenient justification for a thousand personal whims.  In truth, any rule made to be broken, on close scrutiny, is no rule at all.  Do not commit adultery, is a rule, an injunction designed to be absolutely inviolable.   But rules we mean to break are something altogether different – a parent's arbitrary standard of behavior, a social stricture dictated by our neighbor's opinion, a self-imposed obligation deemed virtuous, but perhaps a touch sanctimonious instead.  Such a rule remains in force only until good sense or expediency suggests another rule.  Perhaps such rules become a trick of habit merely, or a custom more honored in the breach than the observance, as Shakespeare once slyly observed.

Rules made to be broken lie at the heart of a good many hypocrisies and generate a multitude of delicious ironies and scandals.  This hidden connection between the observance of supposed good form and the inevitable hypocrisy to follow is the very formula of Wilde's zany comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.  Virtually every character in the play is a surrogate for Wilde's take on the rules of society.  From our infancy we are taught never to tell lies.  But Wilde's spokesman, Algernon, replies:  My experience of life is that whenever one tells a lie one is corroborated on every side.  When one tells the truth one is left in a very lonely and painful position, and no one believes a word one says.  So Algernon eats all the cucumber sandwiches before a tea with his aunt, the Lady Bracknall, then tells her with an undisturbed conscience that there were simply no cucumbers at market that morning, not even for ready money.  The lie is outrageous, and still we smile all the way through it.  Algernon's devotion to his gullet, we understand implicitly, must supersede any requirement for strict truth.  The rules of good society, even honesty, can be bent so long as one maintains a certain decorum.

For a number of years, I wrote a poetry column for an Internet website, Meridian Magazine.com.  From the outset, one of my rules for the column was that I would never publish my own poetry.  The only exception would not really be a departure from the rule; from time to time I would have to provide my own translations for poems in a foreign language.  But the source poems would always be the work of another writer.  I considered the rule sensible for two reasons.  First, I wanted to promote the best poetry I could and would critique Dante and Borges, but declined to consider my own work in that company. Second, I wanted to avoid even the appearance of self-promotion, always thinking it rather distasteful – an unseemly imposition on the readership, a breach of decorum – to trot out and display one's own work, like the overbearing parent who invariably raves about Johnny's latest report card.

But I learned, at the risk of hypocrisy, that this rule, like so many others, also begged to be broken.  My reason for breaking it on a single occasion was due, in part, to desperation.  At the time, my column was well past deadline and I had nothing to show for it.  But another reason for breaking the rule arose from an experience I had with my family at roughly the same time.  Over the holidays my oldest daughter and her husband had visited from Utah, and one evening as I recounted the story of her birth, I remarked that I had written a poem about the experience, and rather uncharacteristically, since I do not even force my work on my own family, I retrieved a copy of the poem and read it for the group.  I was somewhat surprised by the reaction; those who listened visibly connected with the poem.

This was surprising, because poetry has not typically afforded me any kind of social benefit.  The reading of a poem is not so much conversation back and forth between reader and audience, but instead a rather demanding, unilateral monologue, and so poetry does not normally induce social intimacy, but instead, solitude.  At its deepest level, we do not read poetry to connect one with another at all, not even with the author, but to connect with ourselves alone.  We read it to find and to define our own nature, to sift out what is best in heart and mind.  And all too often, we do not grant ourselves sufficient permission for the privilege.

Much of our enjoyment in this life frequently derives from simply giving ourselves permission.  Time and again we deny ourselves a worthy and legitimate pleasure, only because we do not think to have the time, or the money, or the right.  Granting ourselves permission for some solitary enjoyment like reading poetry, we might rationalize, would only be an indulgence, a word pregnant with censure.  Yet behind such thinking lurks a rule made to be broken.  Reading or writing a poem is only the act of granting oneself time and freedom for reflection, an act as necessary to life as eating or sleeping or breathing.  Any rules contrived against honest reflection are rules to be broken indeed.

And so I granted myself permission to break a rule, and to offer one of my own poems in the column, with the expressed intention it would induce others likewise to break a rule and indulge, if only for an hour, in the pleasures of their own aspirations for poetry.  If that wistful notion thinly masked the desperation I felt to produce something for my editor, I now risk a breach of decorum again and reprint the same poem below, not in anxiety to meet another deadline, but rather to suggest the aesthetic sensibility of all that follows in this virtual booklet:

PARABLE FOR THE PULSE OF THE WRIST

One bleak winter evening a good doctor deftly cut

the umbilical cord wrapped three times around the neck

of my firstborn to save her from strangling to death.

An intern noted the moment precisely, seven past seven,

because, like a garden hose suddenly  gushing water,

the cord, once severed, whipped a circle of blood 

half way across the room against a pale yellow wall,

against the blue scrubs of those standing by the bed,

against the face of a clock fixed at seven past seven.

The splatter of blood on glass could have been a chime,

a red stripe announcing its own peculiar name for the hour.

Twenty years later on the eve of my daughter's birthday 

I recite the story again.  I never tire of its strange beauty,

its happy ending returning over and over to smile at me.

This time I wonder whose blood stained the clock that night –

my daughter's, or her mother's, or both – a blood shared

between them, a story they traded back and forth over time.

There was a dark moment also, if stories are believed,

when blood fell in Gethsemane for this child and mother.

Another good doctor wrote a most refined Greek

translated centuries later in the authorized English:

And his sweat was as it were great drops of blood . . . .

Walking to my car that night I heard those words again,

as though a sentinel of angels in a trail of streetlamps

were chanting them quietly from one century to the next,

staking a course through darkness no longer eternal.

Sharing blood, the Innocent returned our innocence.

Stains on my own blue scrubs marked the happy ending,

the eternal round, and whose blood it was etched its name

indelibly across the face of time and all who bore witness.

Having lived now to an age several years past fifty, I have gradually come to see the wisdom in declaring one's allegiance early and accepting whatever scandal might ensue.  As evident from this poem, mine is a decidedly Christian sensibility.  The name of Christ is a great sword, dividing households and nations alike, and only a skulking knave would try to shroud his belief from the reader for very long.  I came to my own aesthetic sensibility quite unexpectedly my senior year of college when, reading the Sermon on the Mount for the first time, I became utterly captivated by the beauty of a single verse, "Consider the lilies of the field. . . . "  The Master Teacher was also a Master Poet.  I saw potential for a perfect marriage of ethic and aesthetic.

After all is finally said, it pleases me to believe the Creator of this stunning universe inspires also stunning poetry and graced a child ofNazarethwith such a lilied tongue as has never before or since been surpassed.  Emerson once lamented of the Poet, "What he knows, no one wants," and yet however rejected a minstrel may be, there is reward in heaven for every one of his sainted canticles, and we have this divine assurance in modern revelation from Christ himself:

[M]y soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads . . . .  

What follows is a modest enthusiasm, the song of a solitary heart.