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.