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I’ve been having a hard time maintaining a regular writing practice. While I do my best to write a bit every day, I find myself skipping from prose to verse to doodle without giving any effort to consistency. I’m restless, scattered, cold, excited for spring. The chance to muddy my shoes on the borders of sidewalks, where the concrete drops off into muck, like the edge of a narrow cement world. Sleep with open windows and breath the same night air as the baby saplings, seedlings, also asleep in their own cool beds. This has been a week for revisiting an old poem, holding it like a picture frame, and blowing phhhhuuu the dust from its corners.
Here’s to Spring and the new growth.
“Spring Song”
It was time again to cleanse the banks:
March’s rain and muddy runoff tore
One dead tree from the rocks
Upstream. Now — branches
Battered, bared, and adorned with dead
Grass — the carcass clings
To the fourth pillar below
Park Road Bridge. Above:
A stream of sleepy cars
Passes by unconsciously.
Time slows on the road as
More and more snow is spilled across the hills and
Rolls into the horizon’s mist that deepens like
The dirt between like a Kline landscape and I am
A foreigner on the plains my sadness stretching
With the snow on and on and the
Enormity of it all finds grounding in me for
The first time my dreams have been
Uprooted I am now romantic and sedate and for it I
Hate the rolling on and
On and on my mouth is numb with words and coffee
My hands have lost their calluses I wash
My face with lotion and shave my head to test
My faith over and over again I long for both the
Space and time to write the poem that makes my
Parents proud but now untethered I
Free float and I can no longer sing of
Soft gentle earth and seed but only of
My wanderings.
The air smells of sighs
Of relief of earth shrugging
Off her winter coat at last
Of warm asphalt ovals of ornery wind
Gravel caked mud drying on
Driveways, sidewalks — to
The west, the sky is a blue wall
With a red window
Reflected in the swollen river. I wonder —
If the body were made of memories
I could slip downstream if only
Back through the body like
Memories I could if only
Through the branches like
Memories I could if only into
That which I can’t but
Help to recall
Could I can I push these lines out past
The margins into the void
From there I could write
Straight at it or I could
Linger awhile in dry grass my
Body bared below the sky or
Sleep beneath the branches and reach
Across my bookshelves to collect
Leaves I am not I O but can I
Can I sing of myself in Rockland
Where I wonder at peaches too
The color of wheelbarrows too and
Poppy seeds and stars and dreams too and
Prose and verse and poetic constraint and to
Tighten down, tunnel deep, plant seed or to
Release and expand and allude to
O please will someone tell me what to do?
So that by my could I push I don’t
Stunt the poem’s growth or think
About the body or of memories?
It was summer and I was bored drifting across the farmyard the gravel burned my bare feet I came across a stack of spare lumber torn from old A-frames and three-penners and a hand saw and a bucket of new nails and a finish hammer that better fit my small soft hands than Dad’s I worked all afternoon so by the time he drove the tractor back from the pasture at dusk the bookshelf I had had in mind was complete and when I hauled it to the tractor and held it up for him to see he said through a mask made of bits of reed canary and brome grass held together on a film of sweat better clean it up a bit before you drag it up to your room and I felt my own face flush and nod even though I never meant it to be for me.
