The Poems

 (In which I describe the process of putting a chapbook manuscript together for a contest).

  

The Poems, Day One

I'm working on a chapbook manuscript for a competition, the prize of which is $1000, 20 copies of the chapbook (which, despite the origin of the name--"cheap book"--is to be more than just a stapled-together printout), and the best prize of all, an "amethyst Depression glass trophy, circa 1930."

Yes! The perfect prize for any poet: a trophy for depression! I could have won several of them in my lifetime.

I haven't written a poem in over ten years. A door shut somehow, and I'm not sure why. I began as a poet here in Santa Cruz. What stops me, even now?

I think of that question a lot. Toxic hesitation is one thing. Self-doubt, pain over the past--when a poet dips into the well, everything comes up, whether you want it to or not. That is just how it is--a palimpsest of toxic hesitation, doubt, fear, memories good and bad: you have to peel away those layers to get to the jewel at the center, if you're lucky.

Going through my poems, I realize it would be good for me to get back to it--I've been feeling the pull for a long time. But oh, these old poems are just...wow. I wrote some things about my mother that are, in the light of my elder years, very unfair. 

My elder sister had many deeply unresolved issues with my mother and because my sister was dynamic and intimidating, and I was very young, and still a dutiful sister, it was easy to get lost in the eddies of her anger and follow her derision of my mother.  I was too young when I wrote those poems to realize how broken my mother was. I believed she should have realized she was broken and straightened the hell up. But I know now, as I approach my 66th birthday, that her motherhood didn't equate to an ability to gain magical skills to heal herself. She was sick and wouldn't allow herself to be helped. And truly, very few people tried to help her at all.

The poems about my father really bother me, as if I'm trying to convince myself that I forgave him easily and there was no more work to be done. I could feel the suppression of anger in them. I thought the director of my MFA program was being stupid when he told me I was holding back in my writing: now I know what he meant.

So I've chosen for the chapbook what I think are more meaningful: poems that consider my mother as a flawed person, but not a "bad" one. No poems at all about my father--I have to think more deeply about those. Poems about pregnancy, childbirth, an elegy for the children I lost.

And of course, a couple of love poems (which both involve naps). At 66, pretty much everything leads to a nap.

Then there's the miscellaneous pile: an elegy for a friend, a description of a quilt made by an anonymous hired man from scraps of his old shirts, and three poems about "nature."  Really, nature's where it's at. You can write about nature and your entire life can peer out from the trees behind the poem, unseen but there. 

Perhaps I'll try my hand again. I've been duly depressed about the world right now. There's so much painful change, within and without, events I can't control, and a real sense that I'm falling, with everyone I love, off the edge of the world.

But the writer writes through everything,

Here's a link to one of my best poems. I'm still proud of it after all these years. It was published in Poetry magazine, September 1998, so long ago:

                 

            Morning Glory

It is as if all sorrows vanish into the earth
and re-bloom into flowers like this,
an origami shape filled with sky.
For weeks, the small buds stayed shut,
spiraling ovals on a waxy vine
that laced the stems of the last sunflowers.
I thought the first frost would darken it,
tighten it to coils of thin black wire,
but then, this morning, the blossom’s open dress,
blue silk that will wrinkle in hours,
yet for now, like a watercolor painted in the air,
one luminous white star in its shining throat. 

 

The Poems, Day Two 

Putting together this chapbook manuscript makes me shake my darn head from time to time.

I just edited a poem I wrote long ago, titled "Garnets." It's a fair poem, about losing my virginity, of all things, in my twenties (that's how old the poem is, lol), and I described it as some sort of holy ritual. 

Holy ritual?! Talk about rose-colored glasses!

I edited the poem to put the kibosh on the "holiness" and tease out the frank cheapness of the experience, which brings it closer to the truth, and will include it in the manuscript. 

The  other "love poem" (such as they are) I chose is called Night Cove, and I think it is one of my best. I was in my forties when I wrote it, in a relatively happy time in my life (when I also had dark hair, still. It's almost completely white now, and I don't dye it anymore. There's a little weirdness in the poem (note the line about my hair--I don't know why it did that, because it did--maybe we were opening and closing our mouths like codfish). 

This was published in Catamaran:

                      

             Night Cove

Long after love has veiled us both with salt,
we lie beneath your raveled blanket,
soft breathers, our sleep a tide going out.
Your skin is freckled like sand and my dark hair slides,
slippery as kelp, into both our mouths.
Here the sea is so close fog muffles the sky in white wool
and the mile buoy sounds its dull gray note
all night until I float precariously on the surface of dreams
like the small boat we saw off Monterey
anchored after dark, its blazing lamp
shining into slick waves the color of ink.
You told me how squid rose to the net, silver souls
drawn to the beams of that artificial moon,
while, thin as a kayak, the real moon rode
through flowing sable clouds, its whiteness vanishing and reappearing
like the glimpse of a woman’s shoulder in the folds of a ragged shawl.