Fall weather

 

October makes me think about school. And school makes me think about trees and songs and coffee and walks with a boy I (secretly) loved and goodbyes I thought were inevitable. Thank God I was wrong.

October snow
It snowed that day,
the quiet kind of snow, the kind
that feels like dandelion fluff
floating on the wind.
Outside was white and gray
and red brick
and green grass tips
and October. I wore a black dress
and leggings, because of the snow
and a smile
because of the snow and the boy
who wanted to walk in it with me
even though he and the snow
don’t get along.
I said he’d learn to appreciate its beauty.
He said maybe.
It was cold, but we only felt it
against our clothes.
The snow smelled clean
and slowed the space around us
as our feet swept up dandelion fluff
on the sidewalk.
I said I didn’t feel
any strangeness between us.
We had been friends from before the beginning
of things.
He smiled. A dangerous thing,
that smile. Like a flame had been lit
behind his eyes.
It was beautiful and real
and sad,
like the snow on his eyelashes,
like the air on a late October day,
like his warm hands around mine
and finding excuses to stay
just a bit longer.
Time taunted us. We couldn’t
stay. Not forever.
So we created forever in that moment,
in all the unfilled spaces of our lives
in every glance reluctantly hidden.
Our words spelled love
in every way but one.

He was worth the cold and I
was worth the snow
and we were worth the pain
of letting go.

A poem about anything

 

My husband and I talk a lot about poetry. What it is, what it should do, how it should feel. He’s a lyricist–a singer/songwriter, as they say–and I am very much not that. His poetry never comes without a song; I don’t think my poetry is well suited to songs, at least not the kind of songs you hear on the radio. Maybe some 19th-century art songs.

It’s interesting how, despite the different forms our respective poetry takes, Zac and I find a lot of common ground when we consider its purpose, and what makes it more or less effective. The biggest thing we disagree on is whether it’s a good stylistic move to rhyme a word with its homophone (I think it isn’t. Feel free to argue).

In one of our more recent conversations, we both lamented the tragic way poetry is handled by many grade-school teachers, who perhaps have never written a poem in their life and are now expected to impart poetry’s essence to a group of third graders. I remember growing up thinking poetry was meant to be sappy or sad, or preachy, or hilarious and rhyme-y. There was no room in my conception of poetry for subtlety, for suggestion. A poem’s purpose was to have a purpose and make it painfully obvious to the reader.

I hated that about poetry, so I never voluntarily wrote any until high school, when I read some Billy Collins and realized poetry could be meaningful and unobtrusive, and surprising and confusing. It wasn’t about controlling the reader. It was about inviting them into your train of thought and letting them get off at the station of their choice.

Zac had a similar experience. He found it frustrating that his teachers would encourage students to write “about anything,” like simply describing an object could make a poem worth reading. “No one wants to read a poem about washing the dishes,” he said.

And I thought he was right, but also wrong. What if the dishes were just the train, but poem’s destination was really something almost unrelated?

So, to Zac: here’s a poem about washing the dishes.

When the Teacher Says Anything can be a Poem
This is a poem just for you
and you already know what it’s about.
No need for any long-winded effusions,
any grotesquely determined imagery
strung heavily with pearls of soap
and perfumed with lemon verbena,
or whatever that smell is.
You don’t need words to tell you what to smell,
or how to feel the bristles scraping,
an extension of your water-spritzed hand,
its length providing some protection
from day-old crusts of egg,
a smear of peanut butter on a knife,
the gristle of bacon seared onto a pan,
so salty the air can still taste it.
The act itself is enough,
mundane repetitions soaked into your shirt.
You’ll do this a million times, probably,
every time, water erasing the memory
washing it down the drain with all the other
unremarkable leftovers of life.
It’s as though
these plates have never been used.

Pain on a beautiful day

 

It’s been a little while, friends. Life has been a little hard, a little painful of late.

So this is where I’m at today. I wanted to be honest with you and me and God. It’s okay to be in pain. It means something is changing. I’m trusting that God is the author of that change.

I think God gave us poetry so our thoughts wouldn’t have to feel so lonely. A truth outstretched, an offering. A prayer.

Enough crying for today
I feel… heavy. Like, spirit-heavy. Dunked-in-a-pool-of-water
heavy.
Heavy like a peat bog. Like the suction of quicksand.
Like I am the quicksand,
not drowning in it.
Like my limbs are eroding, collecting
at the bottom of an hourglass. Changing shape.
Am I enough to hold me together
is my essence still essence
or where did it go. Is it hiding
like a reluctant monster behind a closet door

am I a monster
spike-toothed and sad

Going through something.
That’s the phrase. It sounds like action,
it feels like
stuck-ness.
Air isn’t something, at least not enough
to be heavy. Air makes room. Air shapes to fit you,
not you to fit it. Something, though
is something.
The some implies stuffing.
Going through it is heavy like breathing
through a marshmallow
going through means the something
goes through you too.

and you feel heavy like atoms
like gravity in a pinprick
like the question of who you are–

but at least
you know
going through something
will get you some
where