This week’s poem isn’t hard to understand. Yes, there are a few metaphors in there - a tide, a burn pile - but for the most part, what you read is pretty much exactly what you get.
So instead of diving into the lines (which somehow broke not as I intended here…”crossing Lincolnville Avenue” should go on the second line), I want to tell you where this poem came from. And I don’t mean what was swimming in my head at the time I wrote it but literally, the block of writing from which I chiseled out these lines.
So…without further ado:
I want to love the weather right now, this not-quite rain, not-quite snow that the sky is dripping down. I want to love the catastrophic sheet of ice on the lawn, and the deck, sagging on its own weight. I want to love the bare trees, and my stiff-upper-lip neighbor across the street. I want to love the day, just as it is, opening, unfolding, revealing itself minute by minute. I want to love the scar on my arm, the divot in the middle of my forehead, the draft coming in the windows. I want to love the ridiculously early wake-up of the cats, and the slow drain of the sink, and the stubborn crust of the dishes in the sink. I want to love everything that’s uncertain or vague or so far in the distance as to be indistinguishable from the fog. I want to love the way my knees protest the deep bends I make while brushing my teeth, counting all the way up to 30. I want to love the index finger that never quite straightened after that soccer injury 15 years ago. I want to love the vigils I keep over my own body, watching for distress signals. I want to love the catalog of emails that need responding, the holiday cars that have yet to be sent, the return call to my sister-in-law that fills me with an unkempt dread. I want to love dread, even, the frisson of tension and turmoil that nevertheless pulls the doer of me, like an animal, backed into a corner, unfurling its claws. I want to love unfinished business. I want to love longing. I want to love the real things more than the idea of the real things.
What can I say, I slept poorly, waking up only an hour after falling asleep to a vigorous, anxious pawing on the blanket. What can I say about the frozen pipe that unleashed itself only a few hours later, in the middle of my dream about Niagara Falls. What can I say, every day I look at a map of my country, growing more purple each day a the virus counts metastasize? What can I say, there is a story in the news today about an 80-year-old man who died crossing Lincolnville Avenue at 6 o’clock in the evening, and the 37-year-old man who was behind the wheel of the car, and this isn’t what I mean about holding the contradictions. Sometimes there is just sadness, just loss, just the walloping of grief like a tide that refuses retreat. Sometimes you can’t pull any sweetness out of the burn pile. I am tying my fortunes to the sight of an island three miles from here, the way its faint outlines emerge as the sleet descends. I am listening for the subsonic purring of the world at a deep rest. Whenever that comes, and however, and even briefly. Last evening, I watched a full moon rise out of the water. There are miracles still possible on this broken planet.
. . . . .
This poem came out of a writing session using the poem “Transplant” by Elizabeth McMunn Tetangco:
I guess the nice way
to think about it is to say
the pig was tissue paper,
packed around the
heart. It’s best to make
it all seem
clean. In the picture, the men pulled
the whole red heart out through a hole
in a green drape: underneath—
what we don’t talk about, the soft hurt tender
pink—and held above—
the heart alone, like glitter stars. Nothing
distasteful. It could be a Valentine, if you
like that. You stole
my heart.
Of course a pig’s not tissue
paper.
Of course we have to
make decisions.
I used the words “a Valentine” as my jumpstart and was thinking about what it means to want to love something but not exactly being able to love it in the form that it is. The writing session was 20 minutes long, and as you might see from above is broken up into two pieces and uses two repetitions - “I want to love” and “what can I say” as devices to keep churning out my thoughts.
For the poem, I challenged myself to find 10 lines that might work together to do the same legwork as these two paragraphs. It took some time because, due to the constraints of my email newsletter format, I kept ending up with 11 or 12 lines.
So more ruthless slashing and burning had to take place. I find this remarkably easier than writing itself, and often way more thrilling as a practice. I can practically feel the blade of my “delete” key as I keep hitting it again and again. I love this practice of paring back and weeding until what remains is a bonsai tree version, close-cropped, free of extraneous ornamentation. There’s something deeply satisfying about pruning a piece down to the studs.
That said, it is a practice of discernment, deciding what is discardable and what is crucial to keep the narrative flow of the writing. In this case, I had my set-up already - this “I want to love” and then the reality of waking to what is.
I feel like I’ve both heard and written a poem like this before - its themes are almost achingly familiar. But, as I often tell myself, just because I’m writing another poem that’s ultimately about hope and beauty and resilience doesn’t mean it’s the same as other poems about these same topics that have preceded it. As I wrote in another “10-line Tuesday” poem - “cut and paste” - in January of 2017, I stitch poems to the backs of those that came before. This is the nature of the beast, perhaps. You haven’t finished saying what there is to say. So you continue the conversation.
And this may be, now that I’ve written it here, as close to a mission statement for my poetry practice than I may ever get.