I am thinking about how to write a poem. It feels like it’s been so long and I used to know. Or perhaps it is more true to say, in this my new creative blogging state of mind, that I feel it forming. Maybe not like an oyster knows about the beginning of a pearl, but close. Can I remember how to write a poem? Maybe not. I know it is within my senses even if I can’t make out many details yet.
In the same vein, I’ve joined a group in hopes of encouraging myself to call the poems out of the fields now and again and let them have their supper. The first meeting is on Sunday and I am thinking about what I have to share. There’s a theme about “freedom of speech” for the poets that are going to participate. The meeting does not require me to offer up a poem, and I’m no William Carlos Williams, but this feels like potent, fertile stuff. This is National Poetry Month for those in the U.S. Suddenly, I feel inspired.
Suddenly and naturally, I have my thoughts about the freedom to speak I feel here, on my own, in a new life, in a new country. Thoughts about America in the Now-Right-Now which is crushing the larynxes of vital and relevant voices calling out for justice, for sanity. About what it means to be a quiet person. In my case, a quiet person who has rationed out her freedom to speak because of how complicated and frustrated communication can be with those you love. Safer just to zip the proverbial lip. And now I’ve been set loose, with no such strictures and I’m inventing them. I’m inventing silences because I’ve always found such luxuriant pleasures in the void. For reasons I’m not sure I can define.
Silence can be so healing when we seek it out for ourselves. Or so oppressive, toxic, punishing when we desperately want to be understood. When we want to hear from those whose words buoy us in the dark seas on which we sail. There’s something there, perhaps too much. As I sort through how to write a poem again, I have another option. Another poem that’s, at its core, is also about freedom of speech.
The dog sees. The dog barks.
And still the dog barks.
Why wouldn’t it?
Why should it
hold silent now?
Is the overcast sky that harries it,
forcing the hanging summer
hot and close
against our fur, our skin
not nefarious?
Are the gnats swarming near
its half-empty water bowl
not worth a groan, a growl, a clipped
bark calling
for a cloudless evening cut
straight from the
center of the season?
The dog sees, the dog barks.
A waitress today knelt down
and whispered into my ear,
“I just wanted to tell you:
you have such delicate little hands.”
This seems an awkward impulse
to have towards a fellow
human being.
Some aspect of their anatomy is
and this compels, repulses, allures,
draws, disturbs, unsettles.
So much so
that you cannot bear
them not knowing what you know
that you know
their phalanges are
covered in muscle, wrapped
in epidermal tissue.
Fae, irregular, babydoll.
All attached, all
quietly enjoying a hamburger.
It is strange to be admired
for cellular decisions, for something
you cannot choose or alter.
Only, perhaps, adorn or disguise
in rings and gloves and lacquer.
The dark red is half-flaked away
and has been for months,
a gory and scratched off mess.
How to respond to this compliment.
I wrangle into place, surround it
with airy self-deprecation,
sigh long over the rest of the body
that governs
these wee, elfin, gnomish hands,
these tiny, childlike empress
earlobes, these miniaturized, precious, bitty feets
being elephantine.
In the long view, sluggish.
Immorally decadent, extruded and
ill-formed,
an asymmetric center askew from its poles.
I think these things when
all that needs be said
is thank you.
This morning, I feel these elfin extremities
desirous of green grass and the slippery edges of a summer
already with its kitchen packed up.
One that only has the couch left and the
television to bear the lonely nights until eviction.
I want an some sort of escape,
flung free in a playground, park,
or even just a stand of aspens.
Want to touch the bark and stroke
the chalky tailings of its shooting, urgent life
that rub off in my poppet’s palm
and know that aspens still are as they are:
marked with dust and rain and
pocket-knived hearts.
All without my eye, my hand,
my abiding esteem borne from
ending up daily
in their presence, in the cool air.
But there was hardly time!
So I’d dreamed of mountains
and dreamed of roads up mountains and dreamed
of cracking eggs,
sleep leaving the amniotic sac untouched
so I could dream
the dreamy yolk,
the orange, glowing, golden prize
for a reality tv show judged on inventiveness,
on kindness,
and, finally,
on being good.
And woke up, banjo music soft in my ear,
an hour late.
The music, the sunlight, the traffic.
None of it minded.
None of it tapped its toes or tsk’d at my delay.
You wonder about the order of things, the reason
for a body and its constant
intersection with time and place.
On this way to Golden, I saw
a dead doe on the road,
Newly felled.
Its neck bent back 45 degrees against itself.
I saw the whites of its eyes.
Prayed to something and
drove on to work, a witness
to an end.
The dog sees. The dog barks.
Does anyone know how to write a poem? Does anyone know what we’re meant to know these days and how to get the wisdom in a spot where we can use it? I dunno, but it’s Thursday and I’m gonna do my best.
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