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.