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There's a poem trickling in like charge filling a capacitor -- a green feeling, a restless, frightening, frustrating, wonderful, before-the-storm feeling, where I'm 14 and out under the silver maple, its leaves stirring pale and dark -- will it spark, will it be soon?
Off to read the "Great Mary" Litany again. Something there, something there....
______________
(later)
Or, maybe not.
So, I read the litany, so I went out hungry and walked in the cemetary and tried to fit the walking to the words, so I huddled under a tree and scribbled about the sudden influx of ladybugs and the incinerator next to the fallout shelter in the basement of my high school, so in short I did everything except strip naked and shout Take me, poem, I'm yours! which I skipped because I work with people who can get you committed.
Nothing.
Last week in the cemetary a big tree went down bolt-struck. Today on the twisting paths I can't find it. I have no powers of discernment. I watched a squirrel top-heavy with a green walnut bound through the grass in the happy-dog-in-snow way squirrels have. Watched him stop and scramble at the ground, pause reject, bound bound, stop dig, pause bound, over and over. Stupid, obsessive, bird-brained creature me, who had the nut of a poem on Monday and lost it looking for perfection.
There's a grave here, white stone weathered as dirty soap. Little creature on top of it, once a lamb, now looks like a baby fur seal, the kind that get clubbed in Greenpeace ads. A child's grave, 1937. A cross of flowers is fresh.
Who remembers, who knows, who knows?
2 Comments
Love your description of trying to hunt down the poem … or waiting, making oneself available to the poem … or attempting to flag down a poem like a taxi in NYC, etc. Absolutely dead on! And those poems that seem to slip through one’s fingers … argh!! We have a sudden influx of ladybugs here, too … I know I want to use them … that they mean something, appear somewhere …I just don’t know what or where yet! :)
I was in a cemetary once when I noticed a huge pine growing through a grave. Not beside it, or behind it, but right on top of it.
On the woman’s headstone, there was the usual cliche: Gone but not forgotten. Her photo was on it, and between that and the dates I could see she was an attractive 30-something when she died.
I got a poem out of it, but not a very good one, and it’s still bugging me…