Makeover Poems

Sometimes a poem grinds to a halt and I move on. Either I get excited about something new, or the poem just isn't going anywhere, or is too much of a problem child. Often, I go back to these fragments and if the time is right I can take them off in some new direction with renewed enthusiasm. This happened yesterday with a poem I started in Taos in August. I visited a Hindu temple near my cousin Seamus's house and we wandered the grounds and meditated in the tiny, simple meditation room. Sitting still with my eyes closed, something I normally find close to excruciating, came easy at the Hanuman temple. Time seemed to slow and I felt very peaceful. I started to write about it but the poem foundered and I moved on to a different piece about that trip.

Two days ago, faced with the old blank page after finishing my last poem, I came across the Hanuman fragment. I had sort of painted myself into a corner by creating a framework of a single day around the poem: I visited the temple in the morning, sat in a cafe at lunchtime, and hiked down to the Manby Hot Springs in the Rio Grande gorge in the afternoon. But I couldn't figure out how the heck to end it.

So I took it to the computer and started fiddling around with it and lo and behold a whole new theme emerged. Right near the end of the poem, my mom's death pops into it: the fact that at her last birthday, she wasn't turning eighty-one, and the bittersweet thought that my daughter, who shared a birthday with her, is now going on without her, turning a new age every June 9th.

Hanuman

The temple garden trembled in the clear

fresh, early morning rain, lush

with hollyhocks, cosmos, leggy and leaning

heavily into the day.

In the meditation room

I sank to my knees, I put all hurt

to one side, there was ease,

the minutes passed like liquid

over the rocky floor, my thoughts were

stones beneath the river, waiting.

At noon in the Taos Cow Café

I lost connection, so I shut down

my machine and I turned

in another direction: scissors,

paper, stone. Hand, pen, page,

the connections that are always wired,

regardless of wi-fi,

no password required.

Early evening in the Manby gorge

I lay in the river, the river didn’t care

what brought me there

it flowed on over me

washing  my clothes, my hair,

moving my memories like river weed.

On her birthday in early June

my mother stayed eighty, she was

not going on this time, she stopped;

but my daughter, born the same day,

she’s going on, without my mum,

on her journeys around the sun.

I put my hands under the river’s stones

so as not to lose my hold

in the flow, so as to feel their weight

on my fragile bones, and the rain

began again, one drop at a time.

All Set

It's the morning after I finish a poem. I write a lot late at night, insomnia's silver lining. First thing after the news and email, I check out the piece in Word where I typed it up last night. How does it look in the cold light of 7am? It looks okay. I make a couple of tweaks: remove a word here, add one there, sizing up the rhythms, and of course read it aloud to see how it sounds. There are two chunks of reported speech in this poem, which I'm not sure what to do with. Quotation marks look clunky. Italics mean a sizeable portion of the poem is italicized. I could just leave it as regular text, but it isn't delineated well enough, and in the end I go with italics. I kind of like the look.

This is a confessional poem: more than most of mine. As an undergrad in Trinity College, I devoured the Confessionals - Lowell, Berryman, Plath. Their raw honesty, their blunt treatment of suicide, mental illness, addiction was intoxicating to me, following a sedate diet of Yeats and Heaney in my grade school years. But it was definitely a phase. I do reread my favorite poems from that time, Skunk Hour, The Bee Box, but in my own work I usually try to temper the directly confessional. I often write lines that I later change to make them less like a diary entry. So this poem is more of a risk for me. For one thing, it is about very recent experience that I'm living right now. Usually, events have to wait a while in the dark before they bubble up in my poems. I think that's a defense mechanism. The present is very raw. There is the concern that I'll put it out there in a poem and then feel I have said too much. But that's assuming it would be widely read. I think I'm safe. This is not going into the New Yorker any time soon. Besides, if you are not taking risks with your work, what's the point?

Let’s Pack All Our Clothes

October’s aflame, and my world too,

my world is on fire, snatches of panic

as the red trucks siren by, the yellows,

the orange haze and bursts of gold

exploding out of the funeral pyre.

Sun on dry leaves and the tinderish wind

wrestling their whispered secrets from them:

Let’s pack all our clothes, they say,

let’s enter another state

until our warm familiar lives

are deeply strange to us, until we barely

recognize our own reflections.

The leaves are falling now,

mere skeletons of their former selves.

I took my clothes off hangers and shelves

and out of drawers. I closed the door

of our home behind me for a final time,

my keys don’t work there any more.

I park my car in the gravel turnout

overlooking the saltmarsh and the wreck

of a boat near the tide line at China Camp

and I look out over the cracked hull

of my life. I came here in the dark

the night our marriage died.

I called out to the wolves

and the hunter moon and its entourage

of stars: Oh strangers with kind hearts,

circle your wagons around me now,

things that spark and flare up into light,

illuminate my way tonight. It’s a long

road from this moment to the dawn

and the map of my future just got erased

and redrawn and erased and redrawn.

It’s cold, and I’m booked into a hotel,

third floor, overlooking the parking lot,

toothbrush in a water glass.

Goddamn last lines

I'm working on a poem. It started out in the Fairfax Parkade where I parked one afternoon in late September among the flaming maple trees, before the first storm. So it started out being about September and fire and fall. Then time moved on, it was October, so I changed September. Now it's a poem about October and fire and fall and big changes. Then it moves to China Camp, a place of great significance to me, to a night I drove there when things were in disarray in my life. So the poem morphs as it goes. It moves from an observation of fall colors to a sea change, the wreck of a boat, a big life event.

As it goes, the form of the poem changes. I try four-line stanzas, but they're too choppy. Slowly, the poem fits itself into 12-line stanzas. Some rhythms assert themselves, some rhymes. Now I have two 12-line stanzas and I'm working on a third. That feels long enough already, like three will be enough. So I'm halfway through the third stanza, and I know there are only 6 lines left. I get four of them, they flow from the previous six, and it's feeling like a thread spooling out, like one long line of thought. The poem is moving fairly effortlessly, with a few brief diversions down dead ends, towards a conclusion.

But as I get closer to the end of a poem, when I know it's nearly done and there are only a couple of lines left to write, if the form is confirming that, the pressure increases. There's not a lot of time left, very little room to say anything more. I can't start a whole new thought. It has to be all finishing now, all wrap-up. But the ending: it has to be spectacularly final. It has to live up to the rest of the poem, maybe refer back to some thought near the beginning so there's a circular feel to the whole. Or it might finish gently, with something soft yet memorable. Or loudly, with triumph. No pressure though! It just has to be heart-stopping, that's all.

Endings are hard. This one moved the poem to an unexpected location. I felt like ending with a stark image, something simple, a little flat even, a little lonesome. I don't know if it has worked well yet. The poem's still wet. I need to leave it overnight, look at it again tomorrow when it's more set. Maybe I'll rewrite. Maybe it's done. Too early to tell.

Anatomy of a Poetry Reading

Like parties, every poetry reading is its own beast. But they have some elements in common. For me, a common element is that as I am driving to one, or sitting outside under some tree beforehand, I berate myself for agreeing to it. Why do I do these? I lament to myself. Nobody will come. People will come but they will be bored. This is the last time I'm doing this. Then the reading goes really well, some stranger tells me I touched them deeply, and I feel on top of the world.

Today I read in the tiny sweet Village Books of Los Gatos. Village Books is so small I wondered where on earth there would be space for people to sit. Then I remembered that it was noon on a Saturday and I don't know anyone in Los Gatos, so there would probably be plenty of room. In the end, about 15 people came. Most of them were South Bay relatives scared up by my sister-in-law Jan, but as a rule of thumb poets are happy if they do not outnumber their audience, so all was well.

As I got up to read, I noticed a small yellow paperback on the shelf behind the podium titled How to Lose Weight Before, During, and After Sex. I told the audience if they didn't fancy my poetry, they could always purchase the diminutive yellow book and their time would not have been wasted.

Another common element of readings, and I've been reading since I was 16, is that once I get up there all nervousness leaves me. I always prepare. I think about the order of poems to read, and general things I want to say about them. I make a set list with page numbers so I'm not leafing through the book under scrutiny. Poems have a way of leaving the book during a reading if you don't write down their page numbers. Sometimes I deviate from my set list because I catch sight of a poem in the table of contents that I suddenly want to read. Invariably, it's not where I left it and I have to flip through the book a couple of times to find it.

I try to make a lot of eye contact during a reading. I want people to feel I'm talking and reading to them. And I try to avoid the specially serious singsong sort of voice that some poets adopt to read their poetry aloud. I take the temperature of the audience periodically to gauge how many more poems I should read. Sometimes I have understudy poems that I substitute for the ones on the set list. Sometimes I skip a couple if it feels like it's going too long. Occasionally it goes faster than I thought and I add a couple. I have one poem I can recite from memory. I'd like to have more.

After today's reading, with money in my pocket from book sales, I started feeling optimistic about my next reading on January 13th at Open Secret, San Rafael. It won't be until about ten to seven that night that I start to seriously regret having agreed to it.

Wait, where are my books?

So now I have moved. My books have too, but not to the same place. They currently reside in boxes in a friend's garage. Why is it that my books have been within arms' reach for years and I barely seemed to need any of them, but now that they reside in boxes in the garage of friends, I'm suddenly missing them terribly?

First, I finished my current book (The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo, well worth a read) in the middle of the night and realized I failed to pack a single emergency book for my move. There are at least eighty-seven books in those boxes that I've been wanting to read for years. Thank goodness for Benjamin Franklin and his 1731 Library Company of Philadelphia.

Secondly, I have discovered a sudden need to quote from poets whose collections are now, well, you know where they are. I never realized that I sought out random quotes from obscure poems quite so frequently in my life. Do I need to get out more?

This Saturday, I will be reading from What Just Happened at the Los Gatos Listowel Writers' Festival. Apparently, Los Gatos is a sister city of Listowel. Who knew? Not to be outdone by their Irish sister, they have decided to put on their own Writers' Week. I'm reading at Village Books at noon on Saturday. Check out the festival program here, it looks like a lot of fun: http://writersweeklosgatos.com/

Here's a poem I will be reading.

What We Seek

We were dancing when the ground opened up,

the sky opened up, the world was cold space,

the sun slipped into the sea.

We were singing when the wind came up

and with it the trees—they rose in the air,

there were limbs down everywhere.

Halfway across the distance between me and you

a wall came up. You searched for a door,

a way through.

On my side I rallied, I found joy,

sparked it up from two sticks.

I discovered my words were words of burning

they caught from one another

the fire of longing, of despair,

they sent their flames far up into the air.

I risked their spreading, I let them,

it was heady, crossing early and quickly

from silent fear to conflagration.

Thus was I deep into oration when the wall

fell. Suddenly tired of all the conjuring

I watched the flames get sucked into the sand.

It was dark when I began to climb,

hand over hand,

the sea below, pacing back and forth.

A blue moon barely lit my path,

the birds wheeled, ready,

salt stung my eyes.

I reached the peak,

insatiable hunger, unquenchable thirst.

Knowing I was not the first

to consider launching myself

from such a height

I closed my eyes, felt for true north

the secret heart of all things,

and willed the red glimmer

of dawn to the tips of my wings.