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.