As you can tell (you, my audience, grown exponentially from 3-5 all the way to 6-8), I’ve been writing poetry. Quite a bit of it, for me. Prior to this, the only poems I’d written were for my dad, the year he was dying. Rhyming stuff to make him smile, story for a different time.
Lately, though, I’ve been writing poetry poetry. Trying to. Is it good? No idea. I don’t think it’s the worst stuff ever written. But would the people with MFAs who edit journals and dream of The New Yorker think it’s good? Probably not. But, hey, the likelihood that they are among the 6-8 is, well, slim.
So I’m writing poetry until the poetry runs out. I keep expecting it to, but so far, no dice. I walk along, a line comes into my head — “woke up bleary on a Tuesday,” for example, or “Come in from the fields now,” and I think “Huh. Maybe I should write an essay,” or “Maybe I should try flash fiction, for a change of pace,” or “People have gotta be getting tired of the poems,” but then I sit down at the kitchen table, just like I’m sitting now, and I start typing and…there’s another one.
On the other track of my life, the one that I do not live in words for public consumption, I have still been, a little desperately, trying to figure out how to live a life of love. “God give me a heart that does not insist on its own way; a soul also.”
And, oh, man has that felt like a stupid thing to pray. In the weeks since I started, my dogs ate poison and cost me thousands at the dog ICU; my fence got damaged in storms, had to be torn down, another put up, more money I didn’t have. Work got stressful in ways that would bore you but frightened me. There was personal stuff I wouldn’t put on a blog, but to give you an idea, everyone I told looked at me, kind of shocked for a bit, and then said something like, Oh or Wow, the word a pause while they figured out what came next.
I’ve been pretty upset.
I’ve been thinking, “I didn’t mean I never wanted my own way ever again as long as I lived. What the hell?”
And if that sounds childish, well, I’ve been feeling pretty childish. As though, all things considered, a temper tantrum might help. And of course I haven’t liked that, because wasn’t I trying to “live a life of love” and here I am acting like a petulant child, pouting because I’m not getting my own way, but also, please, please, please, I take it back. Give me my own way, right now!
But here’s the thing I thought last night. The dogs and I had gone for a long walk in a deserted nature preserve where the boardwalks across the marshes had fallen into such disrepair that hikers before me had pulled logs across the gaps. We did our best, but all ten of our feet got muddy. I saw a dragonfly that was so beautiful it made my heart stop. More than that, it carried me back to evenings with my father, camping on Lake Michigan, the smell in the air, the wildflowers, tall grasses, all of it the same. I’d sat on a little wooden bridge across a stream and taken a photo of the clouds and trees reflected in water. Saw trees reaching up above me where the birds were and down below me, where minnows streaked across their branches.
And then I’d written a poem I didn’t mean to write, in a style I thought wasn’t mine, but that, in the writing, became mine, a different part of myself revealed because I heard a line in my head and followed the words where they wanted to go, not insisting on my own way.
And I wondered if the poetry was showing me something about these twists and turns, how the car seems to be careering around bends now, back tires sliding out, my shoulder slamming into the window as I wrench the wheel, trying to wrench the car all the way back onto a different road, in a different state, one I would have picked.
I wonder if the poetry, until it runs out, is something whispering to me, No child. Just let go. Please. Just follow the words. See what places they’ll take you.
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