When I originally wrote this poem, it looked like one long paragraph of incredibly dense language; it was exhausting to get from one end of it to the other. After I presented it in class, Lorri Jackson made a suggestion: She liked the words and hated the form, so she thought shorter lines would make it easier to digest and give the words more weight. She was right. I even went a step further and broke the poem into stanzas--small islands of wire-tight verse for the reader to skip across. Sometimes, it's not what you say; it's how you say it.
Time spent sniffling
the turpentine years,
the slipslide hours of
grace and aptitude that
rattle the ends, that
set off the winky little
in-jokes about moving
through this vast
velvet space with
coffee breath and
no urge to find
God, don't get
tacked on the way
knotted shoelace days
waiting to be greased
and relieved do. The
corners hold gently, but
the in-between crumbles
like Jimmy Cagney
tight-fisted screaming
"I made it, Ma!
Top of the world!" And
this doesn't settle a
thing. Too bad the nights
are so real, so bolted:
Horns seen by streetlight
that've never been fingered;
boomerang moon dipping
behind a cloud to run
the Hail Mary Pattern;
cups filling and dropping
over like laughter at
a wedding. There are
worries about how tight
the stitching should be,
about working on pages
for an untitled breakdown
whose meanings are
turtled by too much
study, by never coming
to terms with broken
July or the ashes of
heartbeaten weekends. But
things still make their
presence known, creeping
desperation into the
fever dream, making
it all whipped-puppy
wasted. Knowledge of
"Making the Juicy," of
lacing words together for
impressions sake isn't
demanded here like knowing
that "Yes" and "Yes"
are opposites when one
means "Maybe" or that
open-ended curiosity is
fatal are. But being
dead is the easy trip:
Don't have to thirst
after smooth minutes to
fold into tiny squares
and tuck behind my
MasterCard and favorite
poet--don't have to decide
how many women won't
be spoken to today.
Baseball cards mark
the chapters like
divider's in a magician's
trick, but the studies
slog on, making me
scoop air with my
tongue for the sake
of heaving, making me
settle on the floor and
tear myself to sleep.
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1 comment:
Rachel here. I really like this + agree w/ Lorri, but might go one step further with the form. I like how you've got the mostly alternating 3-line/4-line stanza breaks, and would a) create 3 or 4 numbered sections then b) stick to a 3-4-3 form (or 4-3-4). This concentration of poems w/in a poem, depending on how you break them up, might give the reader bites instead of a long go. Does this make sense?
Like this:
1.
opening thesis
sets it up
curt and tight
clever bit
you can see where
it's going/ unexpected
punctuation that adds/
leads into this
tie it up
lead into the next,
2.
further to thesis
deeper now word
play clever profound
keep going, etc....
(let me know if this doesn't make sense...)
:)
R
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