***
I posted this some time ago, in my pantoum-writing phase -- then, she was just going back to college in Texas, which seemed far enough away, thank you very much. But already I was thinking about today.
DEPARTURE
From the security checkpoint she waves
Once: Handling this. You can leave.
Of course we don’t leave, but keep watching
Her red hair burn in a dark sea of coats.
Who’s handling this? Of course we could leave.
Nothing left but to go home and dream
She’s burning in the sea off some dark coast,
And be saved by the night’s blank stare.
There’s nothing left to do. What she dreamed
She’s living. Did we fail to think that far,
All those blank, staring nights when we’d saved
Worry to jangle in the mind’s pocket –
She’s living. Our careful thinking falls short.
We can’t change the clock, backspace the time,
Hoard the jangling coins of our worry.
The line moves forward. She’s laughing with someone.
Calendars and clocks pay out the time
Relentlessly. This is what is real:
The line moving forward. A stranger laughing
As if he knew her. Death touching her shoulder
Relentlessly, because this is real.
This is what you’re for. She shifts her backpack
With its mortal weight to her other shoulder.
Phone to her ear, she shuffles forward.
This is what we’re for. Shifting her backpack,
For the last time she turns and waves at us,
Phone to her ear. Then steps forward,
Leaving us to keep watch.
***
I didn't like the original last line, and I don't really like this one, either. Help.
UPDATE: Now I'm considering that it might end thus:
... Phone to her ear. Then steps forward.
Leaves us keeping watch.
But I dunno. Commit yourself to a form, paint yourself into a corner. There is a life lesson here, I feel sure.
We don't leave, but keep watch?
We keep watch, don't leave?
We leave the keeping watch?
Watch the we leaving keep?
No watch no leave no keep?
We wah woh woo kee na na na . . .
File this one under: Poetry: Nice Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder If You Can Get It.
UPDATE: Now I'm considering that it might end thus:
... Phone to her ear. Then steps forward.
Leaves us keeping watch.
But I dunno. Commit yourself to a form, paint yourself into a corner. There is a life lesson here, I feel sure.
We don't leave, but keep watch?
We keep watch, don't leave?
We leave the keeping watch?
Watch the we leaving keep?
No watch no leave no keep?
We wah woh woo kee na na na . . .
File this one under: Poetry: Nice Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder If You Can Get It.
***
Yesterday it rained and rained. And rained and rained and rained. The girly and I went out in it, first to sign up her brother for a YMCA runners' class called "Train Like a Spartan," then to get her a flu shot and pick up her dermatologist prescription and look for a pair of flipflops, which, why, no, nobody carries in January. Not here, anyway.
By the time we were finished with all that, we felt cold and mildewy and miserable. The house was warm -- thank you, new 95%-efficient furnace -- and bright and full of soft blankets, and I think both of us felt we never ever wanted to leave home again. This, at any rate, is how I always feel the day before I do leave home. The world outside impresses itself on me as an uncongenial place; my home is safe, comfortable, and happy, and I want to burrow into it, safe, comfortable, and happy under my quilts, while rain strikes the window but can't get in. Forever.
Actually, I kind of feel this way just about driving somebody else to the airport. At least, today I think I do.
***
Somewhere I have pictures of myself in Rome, in the summer of 1985. Some of you reading this blog may have been alive in 1985: I was twenty. Most of the Rome pictures involve me striking classical poses with a bottle of carbonated water in the Forum, and then graffiti my friend and I saw while wandering around lost, which was mostly what we did in Italy. In fact, I could probably file the entire experience under Wasted on the Young. But we did have fun.
***
Time takes me by surprise continually, as in, I got up at 4:15 a.m., and now it is 6:12. What a surprise. It's the surprise of not having accomplished much in the hours, or months, or years, that pass away while I'm looking out the window or brushing my hair; it's the surprise of realizing that while I was doing these trivial things, people have grown up, and now they are the ones stepping off the edge of the known life into something big and mysterious and transformative. Wait. Hold on. It's not still 1985? I'm sure there was something else I meant to do, there in the Forum, after I finished striking those stupid poses with the water bottle.
***
In the other room the alarm clock has started up its annoying little twitter, which if I were actually in that room, in bed, I would not hear. But I'm in the living room, in the comfy corner chair by the window, a plushy blanket across my knees and the quiet darkness all around me, while outside, at the end of the block, the red traffic light is flashing, flashing, flashing. Stop! Stop! Stop! it says, while the alarm clock says, Get moving! The world seems wrapped in night, but time, arbitrary time, insists that the day is here. I'm not ready for it, but one way or another it will turn out, like all the other days, to be some kind of gift.
8 comments:
I know you've got your form to consider,and you may have already thought of this, but what if, instead of ending on you and your watching, you somehow end with her stepping forward? To me that's the stronger image/message.
Great minds. That actually just occurred to me. In my book, inverting the form in some way is still observing the form.
Also, perhaps she takes a step forward and, wait for it, you take a step back.
Okay, that's it, back to writing about how chemicals can make papermills more efficient, etc. :-)
I'm thinking:
...
Phone to her ear. Leaving us
Keeping watch, she steps forward.
But while I'm at it, I really want to work some line about how "gift" is not a verb into it somehow. Just because.
To my astonishment, my English-professor father revealed in the course of his recent visit that he likes "gift" as a verb. He thinks it fills a useful niche, more succinct than "give as a present" and more specific than plain "give."
I love the poem. Oh it takes me back.
Funny, I was reminded this past week of a poem I wrote either during my Rome semester or right after I got back. It was a version of Catullus 101. My kids found a letter from my high school Latin teacher-- I must have sent her a copy but have no memory of doing so nor do I remember this reply but I must have tucked it into a book. I have no idea where I might have a copy of the poem. Now I wish I could lay my hands on it.
I like ending on her stepping forward.
Wow, big news!!! So has she gone for a visit or a uni exchange year?
The latter, Erin -- University of Dallas has a campus just outside Rome, and classes in the university's intensive two-year humanities core are taught there. It's a pretty intensive semester by all accounts, though they also do a lot of traveling and sightseeing, as you might imagine! Ah, to be 19 and doing that . . .
Anne-Marie, that does surprise me. "Gift" as a verb just seems like one of those "new-cliche" verbs, like "impact," which seems to suggest that the user hasn't considered that verbs for what he/she wants to say already exist. I might find it less irritating if the entire internet hadn't jumped on the bandwagon of using it (but then I might not even have known about it). The usage I find most grating is the "We were gifted a _______." a) Not that you can't ever use the passive voice, but . . . . Then b) here the fact that you were given a present, say, an iPad is self-evident, because there it is as the direct object of the sentence. Do you really need to emphasize twice the fact that it came with, apparently, no strings attached, and no price tag? And c) nobody's given me an iPad yet, or gifted me one, either, so I am predisposed to be grouchy about it all.
Melanie, I know that these experiences are life-changing. I keep finding, from time to time, the journal I kept the summer I spent in Oxford (the same summer that I went to Italy and struck silly poses with a water bottle in the Forum), and every time I flip through it, what strikes me is the headiness of it all. Not that I'd never read the Romantics or Eliot before (those were my courses), but to study them *there,* and to be there at all, on my own, really remade me as a person.
And yes, I'm going to invert the form in those last lines, to end on her stepping forward. Much the best, I think.
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