This is a poem from my time at the Banff Centre, when I spent long hours looking out my window, up the slopes of mountains, the tree-covered slopes, the almost entirely coniferous-covered slopes, broken only occasionally by the brief flames of yellow aspens. Fortunately, they were autumn flames, not forest fires, but it got me thinking about fire and out came this poem:

First Version:

Letting a Forest Be

Each pinecone places walls around seeds,
allows wind into each tiny lung
as paper grows, shapes
fans to fly with, fans
to flame in dry times, allow
life to reinvent
berries red among
black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling
Shiva breathes onto green
spare the burnt backs
of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view
of beauty against
the backdrop life paints
over every time she looks
our way. We can’t
though we fly water through blue
sky and are always too late.

The first time Don saw this poem he said it was too short. That I had truncated my ending. I also hadn’t done my homework, I realized, when I went back to work on it. I’m an avid researcher and I like all facts to be right in a poem. So I looked up pinecones just to doublecheck and found out that only female pinecones produce seeds (duh) and only after they’ve been fertilized by the male cone’s pollen.

After correcting the facts and extending the poem, I also played with the line lengths. First I tried it in a longer length, to see how that sounded:

Letting a Forest Be

The mating of pinecones places walls around
seeds, slides wind into lungs so paper thickens, shapes
fans to fly with, fans to flame in dry times, allow
new berries to pop red among black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling Shiva breathes
onto green, spare the burnt tails of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view of beauty against
the backdrop life paints over every time she looks
our way. Feeling the anxiety of birch in a tight
field, we cut the deepness of ditches through
the homes of worms to save our own, forgetting
the passion of bushes, forgetting how needles knit
a forest floor into a casket flowers bloom from.
Birds flit at the first crackle, listening for the marathon
animals run by heart. Though we fly water through blue
skies, we are always too late. Nature burns.

This doesn’t work for me. I find line lengths need to be dictated by the mood of the poem and by its movement. I’ve been writing much longer lines lately, but that’s because I’ve been writing more reflective, more elegiac poems. I have wanted, in those poems, to keep the reader moving slowly through each line.

This poem is different. It’s about forest fires. They flame fast once they get started and the poem has to reflect that speed, it has to drag the readers’ eyes down, down, down.

So here’s the line lengths I went with:

Final Version:

Letting a Forest Be

The mating of pinecones places
walls around seeds, slides wind
into lungs so paper thickens, shapes
fans to fly with, fans
to flame in dry times, allow
new berries to pop red among
black husks. We want to stop
each towering height of crackling
Shiva breathes onto green, spare
the burnt tails of rabbits slowed
by love’s teeth, hold our view
of beauty against the backdrop life
paints over every time she looks
our way. Feeling the anxiety
of birch in a tight-knit field, we cut
the deepness of ditches through
the homes of worms to save
our own, forgetting
the passion of bushes, forgetting
how needles knit a forest floor
into a casket flowers bloom
from.  Birds flit at the first
crackle, listening for the marathon
animals run by heart. Though we fly
water through blue skies,
we are always too late. Nature burns.

While I was working with Don Domanski at the Banff Centre, Don bought himself a meteorite. Well, a lovely great chunk of one, at any rate. Having paid the fees to go there, I couldn’t afford to buy quite such a large piece, but I knew I needed to get one for myself. As I’ve said before, I’ve been an astronut all my life, wanting to go into space and see the stars. If I couldn’t do that myself, the next best thing was having a rock that had. Or so the theory went.

I was so excited after I bought my rock, that I went back to my room and wrote this poem.

First Version:

Shopping for the Universe

It’s a short hike down into town, quiet
today, only the sound of wind soughing
through pines far overhead, a song
I know by heart. I keep my eyes
open, watching for the rutting
of elks, not wanting to intrude on antlers
long enough to gore me until
I bleed but the way is clear. When I reach
houses, their lawns are smooth, no
hoof has marred the green.

The sun is so far away, a cold
thought in a blue scattered sky. I tie
my scarf tighter around my neck,
walk a little faster as I search.
I expected to be pulled
to the shop, a power stronger
than a magnet to grip
my heart as I neared and pull
me closer but no. I have to walk
looking up in the usual way.

And then I find it, the place where
earth’s heart lies sliced, displayed,
parts wrapped in silver to hang
around a neck, grace a finger
where light can see it. Still
no call, no way to tell
which cabinet holds outer space.

I ask for help, am guided to the boring
part of the store. Plain black, only
the slimmest glimmer of red
an occasional streak. A silver
polished side to show how pretty
the universe can be, if you
work at it.

But I don’t need
prettiness. You place
a planet in my hand, what was once
part of its heart or maybe
a mountain range. We’ll never
know. All I see is the end, edges
smoothed by air’s hot
buffing but I know, oh
I know where it’s been. It’s seen
more than me, slipped through
the rose gas heart of a nebula, flying
on its way to me.

I use credit
and walk out, wearing
the universe around my neck.

Don saw a later version of the above draft and he hated it. He’d warned me and his other students that he would be blunt. And he was. This poem didn’t work for him.

Or for me. I’d got carried away in my enthusiasm for the meteorite and had allowed it to overrule my standards. I knew the poem needed a lot of work. But I didn’t do it then. Instead I buried it until it spoke to me again a few weeks ago.

When it did, it came back in a new form:

Shopping for the Universe

You’ve come a long way from home, flying past
the dust space holds, the iron sparks
of stars clustered in black vacuum, the swirling
clouds of nebulae where worlds
are born. Did you see Alpha Centauri
or the rose gas beauty of Orion? Did Sirius’
gravity tug at you as you flew? We’ll never
know where you came from: ripped
heart from a planet’s rage, a collision, the deep
thought of a star’s explosion. Only
your landing remains, the scattering
of tektites past impact’s high wall, the sizzle
of the small ones caught under
your hot breath, the scorched earth, the fried
worms not able to grow
again. And the long settle, the wait
for time’s cooling years, the chisels
to carve your ribs into splinters that land
continents away, in a cold
place where you sit polished on a glass
shelf. Twenty-nine, ninety-five says
the sticker and you’re mine.

But sadly, this still isn’t good. I foolishly sent it off to Don before it was ready and before I’d received comments back from a previous set of poems. His comment on one poem in that set was that I’d started with just one idea and stayed with it throughout, that I hadn’t allowed my imagination to move beyond. Ouch. But he was absolutely right. And worse yet, I could see I had done the same with this poem.

It’s a nice idea, mind you. I like it. But that’s because I like space and the thought of where my meteorite’s been. But is that enough to carry a poem? No. There has to be a deeper thought. A deeper reason for it. The language has to challenge the reader in some way. As Don said to me, “If you feel comfortable writing a poem, you know it’s the wrong path.”

So here’s the current version of this poem:

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I’ve pulled it. Watch this space in future. It may reappear.

I’m writing this in the middle of a swirling snowstorm, as buildings drift in and out of view. The fire flickers warmth while the wind does its best to suck it out of the house. The wind is winning, cooling my tea as it sits, waiting for me to notice.

I wrote today’s poem the day after another such fall, having stood at a window to see the accumulation on the ledge. It was a dry snow, each flake knowing its own name under the blue sky.

First Version:

Snow/light

Each flake carries a reflection of the sun from
the darkness of space, each crystal remembers each
crystal’s origin, the sun’s heart, the furnace
that hammers the hot edges into
shape. Each hot arm remembers
its origin, the dark space
it came from, the silence
it once floated in, formless before
the occupying began, when night meant
the sleep of unknowing, the shapelessness
of peace. Each cell holds
the memory of what could
have been, the scissor cuts
of prettiness hung
on a proud door, the asymmetry
lauded with kind voice the way
each flake is hailed
as solo on a sleeve before
the melt. Kindness can be measured
in drifts piling up before
a door, in snow shovelled
in trees lined and crevassed with the soft
white insulation beetles count
on. You sit here imagining
their tiny feet, the coldness
of their hands, remembering.

Some poems come as a gift, simply flowing out in a coherent structure that stays constant throughout the editing process. It helps if I don’t stop to edit while writing. That way, I don’t impede the ideas that have been forming at the back of my mind.

This is one of those poems. It was wordy and I had to do some serious pruning. But that’s nothing new for my work. Otherwise, the structure was sound. The only big decision I had to make was how much of a mix I wanted between the natural elements and the personal.

I decided I wanted to turn it down a little, make it more implicit. So I replaced “hot arm” with “tiny arm” and stopped the drift into memories of “when night meant/the sleep of unknowing, the shapelessness/of peace” by replacing it with “when night meant/peace”. I took out the word “voice” but then expanded on the metaphor of the beetles in the closing lines.

These changes were made to allow the snow and its weight to become a greater metaphor, one my narrator uses without naming. In the end, the poem passed two important tests: my own standards and Don Domanski’s approval. I hope you like it too.

Final Version:

Snow/light

Each flake reflects the sun from space’s
darkness, each crystal remembers
earth’s origin, the sun’s heart, the furnace
that melted rocks into the planet’s
core. Each tiny arm remembers
the place it came from, the silence
it floated in before
the occupying began, when night meant
peace. Each cell holds
the memory of what could
have been, the scissor cuts hung
on a proud window, each flake hailed
as solo on a sleeve before
the melt, measuring kindness
in drifts piling up before
an unshovelled door, trees lined
and crevassed with the soft
white insulation beetles count on. You sit
imagining the tiny feet, the coldness
of bellies under snow’s weight, the weight
of flakes landing in a flurry the sun
can’t imagine.