Latchkey
Anything—by these terms—may be a poem.
How
does that feel?
Cold...as
a stethoscope...as a dense fog...
Does
a poem know its own name?
Will
it come when called?
Will
it come if you call it something different?
Today a truck parked in a
tunnel proclaimed to me:
"Trucks
are like women—if it's not yours, don't touch it."
I'm over-punctuating: there
was no comma, no long dash—surely no "quotation mark."
The truck, stagnant & driverless, interrupted my train of thought,
firing—or so it
seemed—a live assault.
"When the times get tough,
the tough get going"—
And
the weak intellectualize
That's what I thought
anyway— weak
& voiceless in a tunnel
hollow
as my pagan heart...
(Do you like that flourish? That flare of melodrama?
When I send a signal, I'm
seldom subtle.
I call six times just to be sure
you heard.)
First, I laughed because it
lets the sting out. Laughter
deflates the ripe balloon.
Then, I squirreled around the
subject & made a strike-through on the words inside my mind.
Improper
syntax
Revise!
Suggest
alternatives:
(singular) "A truck is like a woman: if it's not yours, don't
touch it."
Aphoristic. Expanded simile. A recognizable rhetorical form a la
Eleanor Roosevelt,
sometimes
credited to Nancy Reagan—and who to believe?
"A
woman is like a tea bag: you never know how strong she is
until she gets into hot water."
And that's another thing: the
problem of "it" & of pronouns all together
A
tea bag is now a "she" (personification?)
(anthropomorphism?) (pathetic fallacy?)
The
woman is now an "it"
Comparing animate to inanimate is risky business.
Risky
Business. 1983 Tom Cruise flick where he dances in his underwear. Beware: may not be appropriate for all audiences.
(plural) "Trucks are like women: if they're not yours, don't
touch them."
That
solves the problem of parallel structure, of noun-verb agreement, of
contradictory pronouns.
But
every statement poses problems the words can't discern, those heel-nippers:
Ideology & Context
I think a poem is a thought.
(Is the converse
true? Is a thought a poem?)
The statement a dart, the
mind a board.
Questions raised by this assertion—this
bumper sticker, this city slicker's fortune cookie.
Two-for-one
special at the cinema:
City
Slickers (plural, non-possessive). 1991. Billy Crystal in mid-life crisis. [followed by]
Fortune
Cookie. 1999. "Three couples, one
night—No two fortunes are ever the same." [not to be confused with]
The
Wrong Fortune Cookie. 2002. "Because some cookies just don't have the right answers."
And
there's another one, from 1966, with Goldie Hawn.
There is no evidence to
suggest that women & trucks have anything in common. Some women drive trucks. Some men drive women crazy. I was almost driven crazy by a
man—not that I blame him entirely, since "crazy" is a lazy word &
quite subjective, a bead on a sliding scale. Let's just say I couldn't stand the sound of him crushing cans
of Barq's root beer between his bare hands & tossing them across the floor,
like a new sport: a combination baseball/bowling.
I think a poem is a
thought.
Linda Breuer used to say,
before she married Paul Applewhite & became a different person:
"If
you love him, you won't mind the little things he does. If he throws his socks on the floor, or
his
underwear, you'll just pick them up & toss them in the wash. After a while, you won't
even notice
anymore."
I think a poem is a thought & a disruption of thought.
Jeanette Winterson on
Virginia Woolf: "She was an experimenter who managed to combine the pleasure of
narrative
with those forceful interruptions the mind needs to
wake itself."
Wake or
rouse.
I had not been sleeping, not
like the Beauty whose pointer was poised, then pierced on a spinning wheel; drowsing
under the weight of that spell.
--As under glass. An artifact of difference for the
masculine museum.
--As pheasant even. The elegant. The hunted. The
contained.
I had not been asked to turn
flax into gold.
Yet how that permission (birthright?) (compulsion?) binds like a contract I
was coerced to sign!
Passive I do
Kempt I do
Inured I most certainly do
(And what is this word by a 'j' away from injured)
"You're such a spitfire!" my
father exclaimed, but neither he nor I were sure what this should mean
Spitfire, as in The Spitfire Grill: "To a town with no future comes a girl with a
past." 1996. 3 nominations, 1 win.
As
in, literally— "capable of spitting fire."
We have a dictionary in our
house now. I can "look things
up." Like raising a periscope over
a very high (Secret Garden high)
wall:
spit•fire a quick-tempered or highly excitable person [then the
subordinate clause],
especially a girl or woman
If I were Gretel (or Hansel
maybe), what kind of seeds would I throw down?
(Not crumbs, you see, which decompose—but seeds:
resolutions: the kinds of things that grow)
Flax, Sesame, Poppy
And from flax shall come
doubloons a' plenty
And from sesame shall come
streets paved with gold
And from poppy—sweet
poppy—a field of flowers & a deep dream like an after-thought
I think a poem is
pre-meditated. Like a crime. Like the hardest kind of crime to
solve.
If I were Hansel (or Gretel
maybe), what kind of stalk, what kind of story?
Experiment, Pleasure,
Interruption
--the spitfire
--the extortionist
--the "break in the flow"
I think a poem is a thought. And a counter-thought. A promise & its palinode.
Where the pretty words kiss
& crumble—flummox & fawn—
Where
"visceral
whiplash,"
"cerebral serenade,"
the pressure to combine these pleasures...
Anything may be a poem.
Is there a "theme"? Is there a "thesis"? Is there a "point"?
You say: "Maybe you're
looking at this the wrong way."
(A shrug.) (An eyebrow raise.)
"Maybe that truck wasn't
talking to you. Maybe you
intercepted someone else's message."
If the words are little
inkblots, like I like to believe,
Then we learn to have a sixth
sense about them:
The
Sixth Sense. 1999 drama about a boy who communicates
with
people
who don't know they're dead. "Not
every gift is a blessing."
Like if I say story, you don't have to say moral, even if it's the first word that comes to mind.
Or maybe you do, & that's
good too because then we can talk about it: this assumption that morals
underlie things—undergird them:
that old graffiti beneath the green bridge.
Or if you say poem, & I say malice, to throw you off, but also because I think a poem
has a dark side.
Malice.
1993. Baldwin. Pullman. Kidman. "You
ask me if I have a
God
complex. Let me tell you
something: I am God."
Poet.
Now there's the one with the God
Complex.
- No, I don't think poets are "more spiritual than
other people."
- No, I don't think it's a "gift" or a "blessing."
- Yes, I think it's "work."
- Yes, I think it's a "worthwhile undertaking."
How come, if I tell a joke,
no one calls me a comedian?
But I write a poem, and just
like that, I'm a poet.
(A shrug.) (An eyebrow raise.)
Earl Lovelace used to ask,
rum-soused & wide-eyed:
"Where is the story?"
Only he stretched story out to three syllables & let it linger like taste
on tongue...
Where is the st oo ry?
As if the story were hiding
somewhere, that tiresome imp.
That cow that jumped over the
moon.
I have been accused of being
cold.
--as a stethoscope
--as a dense fog
My gears & wires, like a
yellowed slip, have been accused of showing.
What ever happened to Show
'n' Tell? Nowadays everyone wants
a Confession.
con•fes•sion Avowal of faith (or) admission of guilt
A promise & its palinode.
Sharon Olds on brainpower:
"To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body."
I can show you what I see, I can tell you what I think, but do I owe you my faith or my
guilt?
Terry Crabtree in Wonder
Boys: "What he means is...it's difficult to distill the essence of a
book because it
lives in the mind."
And where is the mind again?
All over the body.
My Dear Mr. Descartes,
we've come full-circle &
still no sign of the Soul
Here about the time, counter
& clockwise & running out of & once upon, I was a citizen of a
strange land of phrases. Province
of "white elephants" & "elbow grease." No table quite complete without a "cheese ball." And my father called his suitcase a
"grip" & gripped it tighter, not sure who would be first to fall. And my mother, who was once almost
eaten by a mountain lion, survived to play dice games like "Fill or Bust" &
piano instead of accordion.
And so in this way, I learned
there are rooms inside words, spaces for a mind to crouch inside them.
Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 2000 Ang Lee film
about
a stolen sword & a notorious fugitive.
("About": some endless handkerchief a magician pulls from
his pocket)
Who hasn't written the poem
she's supposed to write?
The teachers will praise you
for it. The class will agree.
There will be a lot of buzz
about "accessibility."
How does that feel?
I never saw Dead Poets
Society—or once, with a fever,
in a college dorm. I kissed my
boyfriend afterward. He was
churchy & prim & pleased with himself. The next day he started "coming down with something."
A whole architecture rests on
a single word:
coming down (or)
letting (or) going
He did the second but
never the third...
Or when my grandmother,
rattled or pleased, exhales an "Oh my word!"
--As if she couldn't pick
one
--As if I could ever blame
her
I think a poem is a
thought. I think a word is a room.
Words in a poem are optional.
(See Moonlight &
Valentino. 1995. Elizabeth Perkins & Whoopi Goldberg.)
Have you ever spun doughnuts
in a parking lot?
Popped wheelies?
Gone for a bumper ski?
The sheer futility...of actions unprovoked...of outcomes unexpected
But you like it: Sisyphus meets
Hercules on the rope tow to the future & the present (for once) is
neither a gift nor
a blessing
The
Gift: 2000 Sam Raimi thriller
starring Cate Blanchett:
"The only witness to the crime was not even there."
Questions raised by this
assertion—how much of the poem is futile? how much inevitable?
ad hoc For the special purpose or end at hand
& for no other; also, by extension, improvised or impromptu; as in "case-by-case
basis"
post hoc The
logical fallacy of believing that temporal succession implies a causal
relation; in or of the form of argument in which one event is asserted to be
the cause of a later event simply by virtue of having happened earlier; as in
"post hoc reasoning"
And what to believe?
Kierkegaard on progress: "One
must live life forwards, though understand it backwards."
This the problem of the
post-hoc, the poem's problem, Houdini's chained box submerged in water, yet the
contents disappear...or were they ever really there to begin with?
Does reflection generate
insight or delusion?
Is hindsight 20/20 or
profoundly blind?
In my life as an amanuensis,
I have typed these words, fingers haltingly across the keys, that fragile
feeling rising up in my mouth & pressing deep in the soft palate tissue: The
type of "understanding" he cites is that found in everyday life; we begin with what
happened (consequences) & find appropriate causes (antecedents), often by
creating a "good story"—i.e., one compatible with our own & our
culture's understanding of life.
In love with a woman, the
oxytosin overdrive:
My mother first, sobbing into
the phone: "So that's why you don't wear make-up."
And then my father: "She was
always different. Not that she
played with G.I. Joes, but she didn't seem to like those Barbies either."
I think a poem is the best
story we have.
(Remember when "telling
stories" was the same as "telling lies"?)
Rapunzel releases her long
braid.
Material she has made useful.
A transformation: this yellow
ladder of hair.
Wait for it—the crux, the fulcrum.
Somewhere the poem starts to
reveal intention. A rope dangles
from a tower window.
(Will you climb it?
Will it hold you?
Will something have to give
way?)
If I say story, you don't have to say lie, even if it's the first word that comes to mind.
Maybe you say myth—a lie cloaked in cache—or superstition, post hoc caveat
(And
what other kind?)
Or if you say poem, & I say comeuppance or closed system or schadenfreude—
my fondness for compound words;
a house with an attic inside.
I think the poem is an
alter-ego.
Not an after-school special
or a tinder box.
(Where the thesis, also
the anti-thesis...)
Not only to educate—
Not just to contain—
Think about the "a" that
makes person a persona
Think about the shape of
those words
Like if I tried to draw a
line between James Stewart & George Bailey—
right down the middle of
their bodies
(The same body, but not
the same mind...)
I think a poem is a thought
with a transom. I think a word is
a room with a skylight.
Crawlspaces.
Curtains.
Or my aunt:
how
she could never look at Bing Crosby the same way again: now knowing
he had beat his kids & been a Catholic.
The man who was my grandma's
window-washer for close to twenty years, confiding:
"I
washed windows for Donna Reed. You
never met a nicer lady. Real sincere.
She
didn't play no character on
television. She was just bein'
herself."
Does it stay separate? I
wonder.
Like the poet & speaker, the
actor & part?
One a dart, the other a
board.
Or the woman who is also a wife—her name she has changed to duplicate her
husband's.
Coordinate.
Copy.
What of the maiden name & the married name?
Mary Hatch, then
two words & she turns to Mary Bailey
It's
a Wonderful Life: Frank Capra's 1946 classic about a
disheartened
businessman who is given a chance to see "what the world
would
be like without" him. A horror
film. A promise—& its
palinode.
From which: a new word:
Cap•ra•esque Of or evocative
of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of
individual acts of courage
And
the best piece of advice I ever took from a film: "Why don't you kiss her
instead of talking her to death?"
Like
a trap door & falling through it, or Alice down the rabbit hole, or Dorothy
caught out wandering in a storm.
Something there is that
doesn't love a wall—but wants
it all the same.
- No, I'm not trying to "exclude" you
- No, I wouldn't say I tend to "dissociate"
- Yes, I will "leave a light on" for you
- Yes, I will place a key "under the mat"
I think a poem is a
thought.
A three-story stand-alone
with an alley out back.
A long braid. A wrench & a rope.
No pasting Zuzu's petals
back.
(Though
we like them: these
beautiful lies)
Not happily always,
But alert & ever mindful after
I think a poem is a thought
& a compendium of thoughts.
A probe & a white-water
raft.
Also (clearly): a metaphor.
Also (necessarily): an inventory.
Remove stars from eyes *
Repeat maxim: Good fences
make good neighbors *
Lock back door *
Lock front door *
Open shutters on upstairs
windows *
Shovel walks *
Warm engine *
Leave a light on *
Place key (duplication
prohibited) under the dark-woven mat *