I’ve been listening to dark voices this weekend, the kind that drain oceans, leaving plastic bags and broken coffee cups behind. New projects and poems are moving but nothing is willing to be born. Nothing will look at a page and settle there. My fingers hover over a deck of cards on a screen, choosing words and discarding them before the pack flies off and I hit again. But I trust. In a universe where these nebulae exist, I trust.

No editing this week. Just this:

After Your Diagnosis

Words line the wire stretching
its highway between us, lit buses
blinking in and out between
the darkness of trees, fireflies offering
their scraps of light. Semaphore
would be more useful, the flags’ waving
ushering the sun into your lungs.

Or so I think. What do any of us know
when we set out? Pictures show
survivors, the way a forest grows
sheltering ruins. Tree tops
and clouds, birds floating
on a wind blowing us away
from the furrowed earth. Rip you open
and minerals might glint, might not.
Either way, you’ll burn.

I’m just home from two weeks of treasure hunting at the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio, where I was part of a convergence of the like-minded. It was a great time of sharing tips, encouragement, and way too much food. We worked in a bowl of mountains and I had a close encounter with an elk while prying a piece of cliff out of the ground. I managed not to get et.

I’ve left feeling like I’m learning a new language, like I need to learn that language. My usual one is boring me now.

Don Domanski challenged me to go deeper into metaphor and to stop truncating my endings. He shared an exercise that has transformed the way I begin days, so I now start by playing with two disparate words, looking for the connection that is always there. And he let me hold his meteorite—we have the same passion for rocks from earth and space. I left Banff with my own billion year old chip on a string around my neck. ‘Shopping for the Universe’ may appear here one day, when it’s feeling better.

Today’s poem is a revisit of the one in my Editing an Ending post. My hard work had paid off. Don liked it when I submitted it to him as part of my three poems a day. He just didn’t think it was over yet. He wanted more.

Let’s look at what I called the Current Version last time:

Wind Moans

We’ve pulled the curtains, can’t see
the estuary’s mouth black rippled
under barest glint of cloud
torn stars. Can’t see Wales
gold and silver on far shore,
can’t hear cars whizzing down
its ribbon strips of highway.
Glass is old, sits wind-rocked, allowing
the tossing of frenzied leaves, rush
of tide on beached rock to enter,
a long, undulating moan.
You lie in deep duvet my body needsas cold finds bone, thinks of days before
metal clanked heat out, to when sleet spat,
found gaps, when coal dust’s black-sooting
of fingers, lungs couldn’t reach
room’s corners. We are temporary, one night
on a long road, our journey the safe kind.
Those who came before knew only
river and winter’s bite.

I told Don how many endings I had already written for this poem and that I wasn’t good at them. He suggested I treat them as a new beginning. He wanted me to pay attention to the breathing.

So I did. Starting a new stanza forced me to revisit the movement in the poem and I realized I’d left it hanging. That was Don’s point.

I had started that morning by playing with the two words Don had given me as an example for the word/play exercise: bathroom and cemetery. Not perhaps the most obvious choices. But I’d made it. I’d sat there breeding images under my fingers until the leap between the two words became clear.

And that became the ending I wanted for this poem. Don approved it too.

Latest Final Version:

Hearing Your Voices

We’ve pulled the curtains, can’t see
the estuary’s mouth black rippled
under barest glint of cloud
torn stars. Can’t see Wales
gold and silver on the far shore,
can’t hear cars whizzing down
its ribbon strips of highway.
Glass is old, sits wind-rocked, allowing
the tossing of frenzied leaves, rush
of tide on beached rock to enter,
a long, undulating moan.

You lie in deep duvet my body needs
as cold finds bone, thinks of days before
metal clanked heat out, to when sleet spat,
and found gaps, when coal dust’s black-sooting
of fingers and lungs couldn’t reach
the room’s corners. We are temporary, one night
on a long road, our journey the safe kind.
Those who came before knew only
river and winter’s bite.

I brush my teeth, knowing the mirror wants
to let me go. It erases us
each time we pass, leaving no stones
in grass, no flowers propped
against a few sad words. Each soul
is rootless in the room’s darkness
when I turn out the light, joining
you in bed. I hear their coughing
louder than your breath.

Of course, the other way time passes is with great poetry. Since I’m working with a master, I’m rereading him. Besides All Our Wonder Unavenged, I’ve also been lingering over Parish of the Physic Moon (which is sadly only available used).

My mind likes to tell stories. It likes to take two plus two and end up with sixteen or thirty-nine. By this, I mean I can start writing with one detail and watch words unfold a whole life. As I’ve said before, I don’t mess with this process. My job is to stay out of my mind’s way while it works. And then afterwards do the editing.

So if you’re a neighbour of mine reading this, don’t worry. This poem is not true. Yes, I can see the lit window of your kitchen. But not these details.

Here’s the first draft of today’s poem:

Watching you eat dinner

Call it out of the rain: a lit window obscured
by air’s wet breath floating above
the half-seen earth. I see red
tonight, see plaid settling itself across
your back as you spoon dinner
on to plates. Or I imagine
the plates, Thursday night ones, almost
the end of the week and you’re on
the rough ones, edges chipped, dish
washer full and you forgot to hit
on before you left this morning, kids
cranky with the wind’s gusting
cough. An arm stretches out, not
yours, pours from a jug the colour
of our night sky spotted with
the drops of a thousand clouds then reaches
up and pulls the blind down.
Only leaves left to watch, their wet
droop blown out of their control.
I turn away.

Editing this was easy. The middle part was so sloppy and talkative, it was almost like overhearing a conversation. That’s fine on a bus but not good in a poem. So my first job was to make the middle match my opening and closing images.

That meant omitting details from the story. But then, it isn’t a story. It’s a poem, an important distinction. In a poem, I want to use fewer words to convey a picture, words that persuade the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. So my long section about the plates and the dishwasher becomes simply ‘time for chipped edges,’ an image which allows for a double meaning.

Despite the first draft’s obvious flaws, I liked the line break: ‘I see red/tonight …’ The ambiguity of that hanging ‘red’ allows the reader, by the end of the poem, to question whether the narrator was referring to the shirt or her anger.

I also deliberately left ‘not’ on another line ending for the punch it gives to the narrator’s shock at seeing someone else in a place she clearly believes is hers. And finally, I was pleased with the tree I was watching in the rain as I wrote this poem, its heavy wet leaves blown out of control by the gusting wind. Out of control is how I wanted my narrator to feel by the end of this poem without actually saying so. The tree allows me to hang the phrase there for the reader to make the connection.

Current Version:

Watching You

Call it out of the rain: a lit window
obscured by air’s wet breath floating
above the sodden earth. I see red
tonight, see plaid settled across
your back as you spoon dinner
on to plates. It’s Friday night, time
for chipped edges, kids
whirling with the wind. An arm
stretches out, not
yours, pours from a jug the colour
of our night sky spotted with
the drops of a thousand clouds. Then
reaches to pull the blind down, leaving only
trees to watch, their heavy droop blown
out of control. I turn away.

I’m not the only one with story issues. Robert Kroetsch has written an excellent piece in the new magazine Eighteen Bridges. You’ll enjoy ‘Is This A Real Story Or Did You Make It Up?’

I’ve been enjoying/studying Don Domanski’s poems, preparing to work with him at the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio (which is where I’m posting this from).

Don won the 2007 Governor General’s Award for All Our Wonder Unavenged. There is so much that is beautiful in this book, so much technical mastery that is never thrust in our faces. What has really struck me, though, is his ability to take us from the natural to the personal in one breath. Look at this from ‘Walking Down to Acheron’:

today there’s my shadow on the summits of dandelions
on damp weeds    on the figureheads of stumps
there’s the ache that goes before me    wraithing
around turns in the path    that desire for deliverance
the soul’s nudge    that little jinx in the body

Besides catching my breath on so many lines like these, I’ve been learning from them and also finding my writing being sparked by his images. The following, for example, grew out of Don’s poem, ‘Drowning Water.’

First Version:
Watching

It draws my eyes.
each drop having travelled around
the world, each drop holding
starlight, a trace of our dna.
But right now, rain is a mist
around us all. A common pool ponding
on a grey sidewalk, sliding
through gutters thirstily
drowning a city’s exhalation,
drummed on a thousand
backyard tables till we all
sleep. Some hear it
in the night, a conversation
extending centuries but still
I don’t know
its tongue.

Silk is a word that Don has slipped into several of his poems. I didn’t mean to appropriate it when I sat down to edit. But my poem needed a better beginning and this simply was the right image to open with.

Thanks to Don, I learned to look (as his poem does) at where the rain has been. He talks about physical locations but when I wrote mine, I was thinking of my brother whom I miss, so it was natural for me to think of rain as something we have in common, despite the distance that separates us; to remember that the water that circulates through the precipitation cycle (which I learned about in grade 4 and have loved since) has been through us all.

That thought guided my revisions to the end, from the vague abstraction I had in the first draft to a much more concrete image.

Current Version:

Around the World’s Curved Edge

Rain’s silk draws my eyes,
drapes itself across streets
and windows until I have to admire.
I know each drop has circled
the world, each drop holds
starlight, a trace of our dna,
having passed through
us all. A common pool ponding
on a grey sidewalk, sliding
through gutters, thirstily
drowning a city’s exhalation,
having drummed on a thousand
backyard tables while we
sleep. I hear it
in the night, a conversation
extending centuries reaching
to where you sit. It knows you,
after all, has touched
your face a thousand
times and then
returned to me.

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to add a third version of this poem. A commentator (below) pointed out a flaw that I’m not happy with, the repetition of ‘a thousand’ within a few lines. Now, I liked both usages. I guess that’s why I never saw them in my repeated edits. But Deepa’s right (thank you, Deepa). They weaken the poem and I don’t like that in my work.

So I’ve just spent time considering what to do. Change the first one to a different number? A million is too much, a hundred paltry. I know I’m not deleting the last one–that’s where it’s crucial. So the first is gone. I’ve decided the poem stands without it and that I can make the line break work around its absence. Just like I did with ‘common pool ponding,’ I deliberately leave the ambiguity hanging, even if it’s only for that fraction of a second.

But sorry Deepa. ‘Grey’ stays. I want readers to really picture the sidewalk in the rain.

Revised Version:

Around the World’s Curved Edge

Rain’s silk draws my eyes,
drapes itself across streets
and windows until I have to admire.
I know each drop has circled
the world, each drop holds
starlight, a trace of our dna,
having passed through
us all. A common pool ponding
on a grey sidewalk, sliding
through gutters, thirstily
drowning a city’s exhalation,
having drummed on backyard
tables while we sleep. I hear it
in the night, a conversation
extending centuries reaching
to where you sit. It knows you,
after all, has touched
your face a thousand
times and then
returned to me.

I’m looking forward to working closely with Don and seeing how my poetry grows. Watch this space …