A poem about how my life has dramatically changed in the past few months, with emphasis on the happy, the optimistic, because really, hope seems to me the only possible response right now on all levels of what is going on around me.
On the 29th, the next time I worked on it, the notion of jumping: metaphor for how it felt to leave my marriage in September. The sunrises over the city were replaced with unfamiliar tracks in the snow:
I added some flags, some bugle sounds, some red balloons - signs of joy and life and celebration that I see as key to the surviving the human condition.
Today, taking it up again with the distinct feeling that I had it in me to finish it, the work was inspired by a single line from a snatch of conversation overheard in a cafe this morning. Someone said that around midnight in the city last night (New Year's Eve) there were fireworks and a gunshot. I don't know why, but this single phrase worked its way into a poem where it doesn't even really seem to belong, at a point where i was losing focus, and took it in a new direction. The journey down takes up the long second stanza. It's full of hope: there are the flags (now candy striped), bugles, balloons, there's the light going and coming back, and then there's the gunshot, and at the moment in the poem where I have to land, I hit the ground and run. The image is meant to be a shock, a jolt, and yet to give the impression that I have hit the ground running. Leaving was shocking as a gunshot. But you can't stay still for a moment. You have to keep moving.
The poem has its title now (I called it "Fireworks and a Gunshot" for a while, enamored of the image, but it's a poem about taking my wedding rings off, not, after all, about fireworks or a random gunshot.) The second stanza is complete and giving me an opening to explore what happened when I hit the ground, where I ran to.
The last two stanzas came pretty quickly with very little rewriting. The rings come off, and there's the light, the illumination, the warm rooms of my new home that I have found for me and my daughter.
The "Looking back" stanza needs to be the last, but it's fragmented and too long. I realize I want it to be four lines, to mirror the four lines of the first stanza both in length and subject. I've realized they are my own tracks in the snow. I want to end on a note of celebration - I know the last words should be "my brave new year" but I need something brief and powerful before them. Finally, I get it. Here's the reworked last stanza:
The end of fear. Wishful thinking, but a nice solid idea to end with. So here's the finished poem:
Rings Off
My life is another country now,
there are unfamiliar tracks in the snow, there are
fields of grain that burn, there is frost
that rises into mist in the December sun.
When I jumped,
I thought there would be broken bones, I thought
there would be severe weather on the way down.
I didn’t step or fall, I launched, and instead
it seemed the air was all
that held me there in its open arms.
The reservoirs of the human heart sent up their candy
striped flags, their bugle sounds, their red balloons.
As I came down I saw the light leave the town
and I saw the promise of light return in the pre-dawn,
all of that, the endless circular goings-on of the globe
and at midnight, fireworks and a gunshot,
and I hit the ground,
and I ran.
My rings are off, they are in the
tiny silver box I set aside for them
and here come the twelve bands of light
all the way from ultraviolet to infrared
taking me from utter darkness
to this ousized pale star in the dark
illuminating the warm rooms of my house.
Looking back I see now
those are my tracks in the snow, this is my exotic
garden of cloud out beyond the shadow of doubt,
my eulogy to fear, my brave new year.
