4.10.2024

NOTES FOR AN EKPHRASTIC POEM ON A WORK WAITING TO BE PAINTED

     white night of pain
                             turned hatred of God





underground nurse knocking at first light


     cloudy ziplock
                          black-market morphine


soft talk of signs to track near the end





     well exhausted


                        grid a memory

(live wires arcing
                       blue fire
                                     sudden dark)





     Rufous hummingbird lost

                                 wandering
off the flight path back from Sonora

---

PROCESS NOTE

Today’s poem is a radically stripped-down revision of “Liminal” (below). My plan had been to post “Liminal” on Monday, until I noticed that it was reminding me too much of another poem. But which one? After some sleuthing, I found “A Cup of Tea” (also below), which appeared at Diary Poems last August.

“A Cup of Tea,” like “Liminal,” has a lucid first-person narrator who speaks soberly from outside of, but with knowledge about, a current or impending disaster or dystopian state of affairs. Both poems use conventional syntax, capitalization, and punctuation. Both are syllabic.¹ Both use the rhetorical device known as apophasis.

All of which is to say that, apart from their superficial differences, they are virtually the same poem. How boring is that?

I didn’t post “Liminal” on Monday. I didn’t post anything. Instead, I fell into a hole, a place small and dark and narrow, an echo chamber, a cold little cave where a voice claiming to be my own told me over and over what a terrible poet I am, if I’m a poet at all, which obviously I’m not.²

“Oh,” I said to the voice, “you again.”

And so I sat in the hole. I didn’t try to climb out. I didn’t try to argue with the voice. I waited it out, like the sound of a neighbor’s leaf blower. Yesterday morning, still waiting, with no expectations, I started to play with the poem.

As revised, it has a halting, impersonal narrator. Its white space creates four stanzas and smaller openings within them.³ Its music is somewhat changed. The poem still has nine-syllable lines (see note 1, below). But now the sentences have become fragments, with no punctuation and no capitalization except for three proper nouns. There are only two uses of the definite article, and there is only one indefinite article. The apophasis is gone, too—everything has already happened, or is happening in the time frame of the poem. Is the revised poem better? Is it worse? I know it’s different.

I gave it a new title. Then, to suggest a page torn from or fallen out of a stranger’s lost notebook—a page found water-stained in a gutter or scorched at the edge of a burned field or partially decomposed by toxic effluents—I used the homely typeface that Substack provides for computer code rather than the handsome one provided in the Poetry Block format.⁴

By this time I was out of the hole, but I called a painter friend to talk about it anyway.⁵

I’m sharing this story just in case you ever fall into a hole. If you do, remember that there is a way out. It’s called work—or, better, play.⁶

And now—“submitted,” as Rod Serling would say, “for your approval” (or not)—here are “Liminal” and “A Cup of Tea,” so you can see what I’m talking about, if you’re so inclined.

LIMINAL

Happy are we, my dear, in the before time.

     We can afford our fits of irritation
with each other, with a failing motherboard,
     with the misdelivered mail.

                                                     I’m not watching
and neither are you, after a white-hot night
     of pain turned to personal hatred of God,
for the underground nurse to come at first light,
     ferrying vials of black-market morphine,
and talk quietly—just out of my hearing,
     or will it be out of yours—about the signs
to be watched for near the end.

                                                       We have water.

     The grid is intact.

                                    The Rufous hummingbird
remembers the flight path back from Sonora.

---

A CUP OF TEA

Nothing else to do
     this morning
but watch the rabbits,

thrashers and blue jays
     in our yard
feed on the seed block.

The mountains could be
     a postcard.
Not a single cloud.

And doesn’t it all
     go better
with a cup of tea?

Isn’t that a thought
     worthy of
Agatha Christie?

Nothing dares disturb
     our pleasant
desert universe—

no one asking me
     for a strand
of my hair, no one

invading my mouth
     with a swab,
and not me waiting

in a motel room
     for the call
from the hazmat team

telling me your bones,
     the fragments
tweezed from the ash heap

that was our heaven,
     are tagged now,
ready to be claimed

in their vinyl bag
     far too big,
forever too small.

Not even a car
     on the road
to break the quiet.

1. “Liminal” uses lines of nine syllables. (Where you see a partial line, you will find that it’s immediately followed by one or more additional partial lines to complete the nine-syllable count.) “A Cup of Tea,” apparently made up of tercets, is actually a chain of thirteen lunes. (A lune is a self-contained three-line poem of five, three, and five syllables; I often use more than one lune in composing a single poem.)

2. Does anyone remember Flight of the Mind, the retreat for women writers that was held every summer between 1984 and 2000 at a former monastery on the banks of Oregon’s McKenzie River? My application was accepted for the summer of 1993, and I spent the retreat in a small workshop led by Ursula LeGuin. The food was outstanding—how validating to be nourished so well just for being a writer. I remember overhearing another woman’s ephiphany as all of us gathered for an end-of-retreat group photo. “Wow,” she said, “I’m a real writer!” She added, “Nobody said I have to be a good one.”

3. These features won’t display properly on the screen of a phone. Dear Substack designers, may we please have a hanging indent in the Poetry Block?

4. Dear Substack designers, may we please have a hanging indent in the Poetry Block? And maybe another typeface or two? And spell-check?

5. Thank you, Pamm Hanson, for listening and understanding and asking good questions.

6. Once again, I must recommend Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, by the poet David Biespiel, a liberating little book about revision.