Watch Me Edit

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of writing inspiration lately, though I have to say, hearing Barry Dempster read at Ottawa’s first ever VERSeFest was the highlight. I first encountered Barry’s poetry in an online magazine called Paperplates, where I read his poem ‘The Conversation’ about a man contemplating suicide. Here’s the opening:

Some days are sneakers, tramping through
the leaves, slowly getting soaked. Others
are buses, lumbering from pole to pole,
joining dreams with destinations
like a giant Lego set. Today was smaller, …

It’s a breathtaking poem and I wrote my first ever fan mail. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been learning from his poetry ever since, studying the way he uses metaphor to utterly transform the ordinary.

I’ve needed the lessons, since my writing started out as a lot of ‘he said’ and ‘she did’. Poetry’s power lies in its ability to lift the reader above the short story narrative, to take them deeper into an experience.

First drafts of my poems playing with metaphor, however, are likely to be pretty ugly. Take a look at this one:

Hunger goes with every word, is a drawer
where emptiness sits, the plate is a letter
containing no words. You rearrange alphabet soup
in your mind at lunch time, smelling
the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. You remember the agony of a school
trip where a two dollar bill would buy
a stuffed animal for the loved, two buns and a patty
for the not, you counting the coins left in your hand.

It clearly needed a lot of work. ‘Hunger … is a drawer where emptiness sits’ is redundant and ‘You rearrange alphabet soup in your mind’ is not very subtle. I found by taking out the word alphabet, I could leave the image hanging in the reader’s mind, especially given the previous phrase. I liked the image of the orange rind but simply cut the rest of the poem.

By the second draft, I had a clearer sense of where the poem was going:

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the wax sandwiches
came in and the chalk bullies draw pictures in the dust
with. Your hair lies like grief
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could have, you would have chosen
a mug to hide in, one of the scarred plastic
ones they served cabbage soup in once, you can tell
each time you pick it up. Hopscotch is too
many squares into a future you can’t
believe. If you could, your well would not
run dry.

It’s getting tighter. But there’s a new problem of smell in this version. I’ve got the orange rind smelling stronger than the wax the sandwiches come in. Hmm. Fortunately, I still remember my school cafeterias. It wasn’t hard to fix.

Next: do bullies really draw pictures with chalk? No. So even though fear is an abstract term I wouldn’t normally use in a poem, by changing the chalk to fear, I leave the reader with a more complex image.

I also changed the description of the girl’s hair. I may as well have put up a neon sign at that point. So instead I went for the more subtle ‘mat’. The whole cabbage soup episode just got cut. It didn’t work. In it’s place, I extended the hopscotch metaphor.

Here’s the current version. I don’t think this is one of my best poems. We’ll see what further edits it undergoes.

Looking Ahead

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the bologna
and the fear bullies draw pictures
in the dust with. Your hair lies like a mat
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could, you’d choose
a square to hide in, one of the blank ones not
yet drawn. But hopscotch is too many squares
into a future you can’t believe. If you could,
your well would not run dry.

I was a bit late noticing this as it was posted while we were in Ghana, but poet Pearl Pirie pulled a Gillian and did a ‘watch me edit’ post on her website. Check out her Editing Rounds.

It has been tough to write this post, to find a poem I’m willing to give away, since I’m realizing more and more that I can’t send poems out to contests or journals once I’ve posted them here.

This is serious, though admittedly not from an income perspective. I don’t earn much from publishing. My three forthcoming poems in Descant will net me $100 and I can’t bear to think of the hourly wage that comes to. Let’s just say poets are grossly underpaid. If you’re reading this blog (and 300 of you are each month, spending an average of 10 minutes per visit, do feel free to leave more comments) hoping to figure out how to become rich from your poetry, you might want to quit now. You either write because you have to, because that voice in your head is more insistent than the lure of old Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, or you pack it in and become an insurance agent.

So why is it serious? Because submitting to journals is an important form of peer review. If everything you send out is constantly rejected, then you have to keep working and working at learning your craft and fiercely editing your work. Rejection letters are as important as acceptances. Plus getting published in literary journals – and winning contests if you can – is an important stage in getting a book published.

But learning how to edit is why I’m here, even though I only produce, if I’m lucky, one to three good poems a week out of the seven I write. When I was first starting out, I wanted to know how others edited their own work. Yes, there are places on the web that will tell you the mechanics of editing. But I wanted to watch someone do it. So I’m writing the kind of blog I wanted to read.

Another reason it’s been tough to write this post is that I’m editing so differently now, it’s been hard to find a poem with enough stages documented to be able to show what I’ve done. Not because I’m not editing my work as carefully as I used to. On the contrary: I’m more self-critical than I was before. This blog has been good for me. There is nothing like knowing 300 people are watching to make me hone even more carefully.

The difference is, I now start editing in my head. I no longer even allow myself to put down on paper what I first hear. Instead, my new internal crap editor does the initial round with a coarse grain of sandpaper. It’s taken me a long time to make that an unconscious habit and it doesn’t catch everything but it sure helps. Also, my new style of writing means I’m often polishing fragments before I start piecing a poem together. I now have a Wordplay file where I work on lines a few at a time until I see how they fit. My drafts file is therefore not holding raw drafts anymore.

So this post is of necessity about how the editing process has changed for me as I’ve started to mature as a poet. I’ll show you some of the stages the following poem went through, but I can’t even begin to do it in the order it happened, nor can I start you at the very beginning. All I can do is give some of the pieces and how they evolved.

So here’s the written version of the original fragment that came to me because yes, it was snowing and damn, it was March, and still, Japan was so much on my mind:

the spring of birds chirping under cherry blossoms of late snow, the window a place
your eyes won’t go to, refusing the branches lined with new cushions
of white, the heavy greyness of sky’s weight
the snow a thick cloud the world lives in again, a dream of cherry
blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters tossed up

Now I knew, even as I typed, I was using ‘cherry blossoms’ twice but at that point, I just wanted to get the words out, so I silenced my internal editor, telling it I would choose later which line would keep the words.

At the same time, I’d also been playing with the following fragments:

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting metal’s rub across canal’s water

It’s quiet out when you wake, car wheels moving over the spaces
crystals leave as they fall

I decided to try putting them together:

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting commuting’s whine away
from your pillow. When you listen, you hear
the spring of birds chirping under cherry blossoms of late snow, the window a place
your eyes won’t go to, refusing the branches lined with new cushions
of white, the heavy greyness of sky’s weight
the snow a thick cloud the world lives in again, a dream of cherry
blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters tossed up

trusting that the ending would follow. The only fragment I had to help me was this one:

complaining about the injustice of the earth, the injustice
of birth, that arbitrary push through womb’s mouth into
a random land, a lottery of milk and honey or
nettles, green disguising a hidden tussle, a struggle under
the mud, below rock’s seeming stateliness, below
water’s doily edge. Some are born trusting each
day’s sun, hearing a scattering of chirps and caws as
bread comes

which wasn’t good but at least showed me the direction I could go in. It also shows just how much slicing and dicing can be needed in one passage, how much serious rewriting sometimes has to take place. ‘Injustice’ is an abstraction which meant it had to go. I realized I could say the same thing by keeping the word ‘lottery’ and adding ‘lucky’ before it. ‘Milk and honey’ is a cliché and I needed to shake it up if I wanted to keep the sense of it in the poem. And well, much of the rest just got cut. I trust my ear to tell me when something is bad. For example, I knew what I meant by ‘rock’s seeming stateliness’ (which is truly dreadful) but decided to replace it with what could be trusted instead, even allowing myself to use two forms of that word.

Here’s the current version of the poem. Let me know what you think.

On Not Looking Outside

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting commuting’s whine away
from your pillow. When you listen, you hear
the spring of birds chirping under petals of late
snow, the window a place your eyes won’t go to, refusing
the branches lined with fresh cushions of white, the heavy
greyness of sky’s weight, the thick cloud the world lives in
again, a dream of cherry blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters
tossed on a bed of house fragments. You’re still waiting
for green, the green you were born to, the lucky lottery
of birth in a land of milk and stable earth, the smell of mouldering
leaves, tiny shoots pushing the purple of crocuses under
a trustworthy sun. You won’t look out until the world
lies down again, until your feet can take
the sidewalk’s dry concrete for granted. Some people are born
trusting each day’s sun, hearing a scattering of chirps and caws
as bread comes. You weren’t one of them.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I have edited this blog post several times too. That doesn’t mean I’ve got all the mistakes out. Just that I’ve worked at it.

Well, I climbed my writer’s block and discovered the other side was a slide. All it took in the end was the usual combination of boredom, courage, and discipline. The first might sound odd, but really, you can only play so many games, watch so many old tv shows on your computer, before it starts to get stale. And I missed writing, like a phantom limb. I knew it had to be there, even if I couldn’t feel it with my fingers. So I went back to the root of the disease, faced it squarely, and have started writing a poem a day again.

Yes, that’s right. It was a big mistake for me to ever stop. I need that daily discipline the same way I need breakfast. I’m not saying the time away wasn’t fruitful. I started writing poetry in a different way, thinking about it as a combination of single thoughts slowly coming together, instead of as a single flash of glorious inspiration. While I worked at hearing poetry all the time before, it is now a more deliberate process. I realize individual fragments have a much greater purpose and deserve more attention than I previously gave.

Let’s go back to that phrase ‘hearing poetry’. By that, I don’t just mean listening to others read, or reading others’ work. I mean listening to the poetry my mind speaks out of everything I see, if I’m willing to pay attention. That attention becomes valuable when later, in a poem, I need to place my narrator in a real setting. Phrases as simple as the descriptors (‘the lavender sky, the twilight quiet’) from last week’s poem were ones I heard as I raised my head from reading on the sofa and looked out my own window.

This hearing is the result of an exercise I used to work at consciously, when I practiced metaphors, making up non-traditional, non-clichéd descriptions for people, trees, etc. (see this post for my examples back then. And to see how much I’ve improved. I hope.). After years of hard work, it’s become habitual now, to invert familiar images, to play with them almost without thinking. I hear them in my head: ‘Your face, the colour of a migraine’, ‘I think of the birch which always carry snow on their arms’.

So that reminder of the benefits of hard work has sent me back to a poem a day. I’m writing them differently now though. I don’t just sit down at one point and blurt out a single thought. Instead, I’ll write notes to myself all day, gather the accumulation of weeks and months, pilfer older unsuccessful poems to pull together a complexity of thoughts. This is how I plan to continue improving as a poet.

So today’s poem began with this fragment, written as we drove home the other night under the brightest Supermoon for nearly two decades:

the moon loses its glory over the city, sucked
into a fretwork of cables and chimneys,
voices the fleeting sparks of power through
the street-light bright night.

As I wrote it, I was remembering another moon poem I had written back in my undergrad
years, when I was planning on being a professional musician. It never occurred to me then to take poetry seriously. I don’t think it even occurred to me that other people wrote poetry too, other than what I’d had to read in high school. It was simply something I did late at night, sitting outside on the porch stairs. Here’s what I wrote then:

Stepping across the sand
to the white path
you have spread
over the waters:
Moon, I would travel towards you,
but my feet sink at every step
and I am afraid.

Other fragments and lines came together and after some serious editing, this is the result. I have found that every poem I have written this last week has contained some reference to Japan. Their suffering inhabits my fingers.

Moon

The moon is bigger tonight, a saved-up twenty year
shine, more a check-up on the planet’s marbled
health, a gleam over an expanding desert, a tighter purse
of those cratered lips at an island’s moved
mayhem, the missing houses and tankers, the timbers toothpicked
over valleys wide. As I watch, this moment’s
interrupted by embankment’s darkness, a road’s simple
curve, the orange ball rising higher for
its better look. But it pales, losing glory over
the city’s fretwork of cables and chimneys,
voices the fleeting sparks of static through
the street-bright night. Distance shrinks it to
a child’s toy ball, a bedtime book, a tea
cozy placed on a table between
the chatter of friends. Only the waves
keep its magnificence, only the waves spread
the white path. Moon, I would travel
toward you but my feet sink
at every step and I am afraid.

I didn’t write this poem today though I could have, given the swirls and gusts of snow sweeping down the road. But part of it was born on a similar evening, as I stood at the window watching the streetlight reveal the different textures of the storm. I’d just finished copyediting an entire journal on sea ice and had learned over seventy different terms for it and that reminded me of English’s great impoverishment when it comes to snow. One word does not capture the phenomena. Out of that thought came this first fragment:

not knowing the names for snow, the drifting kind, the driving
pellets scarring a lonely face, the fat ones you watch
make their stately way past your darkened
window, each one having its own weight, each one baring
its face to the world unlike the wet kind that clumps
together, losing themselves to a ledge

Thinking about being inside on such a blowy evening, as I watched a couple of hooded people huddle their way down the street, I produced this fragment:

This is your address, you live here. Your face
is the colour of a migraine looking at you
in the mirror. Thunder enters you, finding where
the broken places are, blowing smoke against
an angry sky, scattering white crows
to the wind. You hold them in the palm
of your hand as thunder enters
you.

As you can see, at this point, I’m just playing with a few ideas, finding out where they might work best. Eventually, I connected the fragments:

This is your address, you live here. Your face,
the colour of a migraine, looks at you
in the mirror, scattering white crows
to the wind. You hold them in the palm
of your hand as thunder enters you, finding where
the broken places are, where
your eyes have travelled as the wind
blows smoke against an angry sky. A single thought
weighs your head down and you realize you don’t know
the names for snow, the drifting kind, the fluffy
ones, the driving pellets scarring a lonely face, the fat ones you watch
make their stately way past your darkened
window, each one having its own weight, each one baring
its face to the world, unlike the wet kind that clumps
together, losing themselves in the heaviness
of a ledge.

The poem was starting to come together. It was still untitled at this point. But I remembered that I had recently written a poem called Snow/Light, so I decided I would continue with that pattern, especially since, by this time, I knew what the poem was saying to me. The ending came quite quickly and only needed a few edits:

Final Version:

Snow/White

This is your address, you live here. Your face,
the colour of a migraine, looks at you
in the mirror, scattering white crows
to the wind. You hold them in the palm
of your hand as thunder enters you, finds where
the broken places are, where your eyes have travelled
as the wind blows smoke against an angry sky. A single thought
weighs your head down and you realize you don’t know
the names for snow, the drifting kind, the driving pellets
which scar a lonely face, the fat ones making
their stately way past your darkened window, each having
its own weight, each baring its face to the world, unlike
the wet kind which clump together, losing
themselves to the heaviness of a ledge. This is
your address, you live here. You know
the contentment of your toes when they’re warm, the lightness
of a duvet’s feathers on your back, birds
calling to birds as morning comes. The scars
are your history, tracks made by a truck spreading
salt on a road. You heard it each time you woke
to change position.

I’m slow with posting this week’s poem as I’m suffering from jetlag after a long, involved trip home from a wonderful holiday visiting friends in Ghana. While there, I had to post early as internet access was erratic. The only constant was the steamy heat and the friendly people dressed in bright colours. To my intense pleasure, we were able to visit a meteorite crater but so far, the poem fragments I wrote that day have yet to be pulled together. Same with my poem on Ghana itself.

Instead, let’s look at an older poem:

First Draft:

The wind wants to weft to our skin,
reach our blood, wants us to know
we could be clouds in a moving
sky pushing through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. Wants to tell us we could
see lakes ruffle under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
as they pray. We could
moan when we reach
a mountain we can’t
climb, blow travellers off
a pass they’re determined
to cross. We could
have power over walls
if they didn’t block us on three sad
sides. Only one face
will let us speak. And even there
they insulate against our voice.

I wrote this draft while at the Banff Centre, looking out my window at clouds scudding across mountain tops. I had the door open an inch so I could hear the frozen wind’s call, feel it stripping the fibres out of my sweater and scarf. It was a pretty fast write (i.e., type) and as you can see from the final version below, most of the important images came out in this first flush.

I started rewriting it almost immediately. Here’s the next draft:

All afternoon, I listened to the wind
it’s conversation louder
than usual. It told me it wants
to cleave to our skin, replacing blood until
we’re clouds in a moving
sky pushing our way through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. It wants us to know
we could ruffle lakes under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And if
we reach a mountain we can’t
climb, we can moan, blow
travellers off a pass they’re determined
to cross. We’d have power over walls,
the ones that face us, not
the three sad sides blocked from hearing
our voice. And when it’s dark,
we can sing a thousand children
to sleep, the sad ones listening
for steps they do not
want. We can rock them
in our arms.

By this point, the poem was starting to take a darker tone, sparked by the image of ‘three sad sides’ blocking the wind’s voice. Though I guess it was fairly dark to propose pushing travellers off a mountainside, especially given that I was getting to know some very nice writer/climbers. I changed that because, through multiple drafts, this became a poem about compassion, the wind’s and the listener’s.

I separated out the two parts of the poem into stanzas (I have been teased in the past about only ever writing one stanza poems but I do use more on occasion, see Glenn?). The first one remains about nature and the travellers are the link to the human side of the second stanza.

Hearing the Wind’s Generous Offer

All afternoon, you listened to the wind, its voice
louder than your blood. It told you it wants
to replace skin, hollow bone until you’re in cloud,
sky moving, pushing your way through trees,
pushing birds across imaginary boundaries. It wants
you to know how to ruffle lakes under
your fingers, type words in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And when you come moaning
to the mountains, to hide passes behind
your skirt as travellers try to cross.

At night, you can howl for a thousand children,
the ones who listen for steps they do not
want. You can hammer walls, the ones
facing out, not the sad sides blocked
from hearing your voice. Shake
the studs you watched nails
enter, slip through cracks you widened
with your teeth. And then, touching
hair, do nothing but dry the tracks
salt leaves on a cheek, offering
a thought of stars caught
between the darkness of clouds, a brief glimpse
of space they can believe in.

Today’s poem is one of my constructed ones, lines assembled piece by piece from notes I wrote to myself as I worked on other projects. The first four lines came when I raised my head from a thorny patch of references I was copyediting and caught sight of the birch down the street, weighted down by the previous night’s snow fall.

First Version:

Message for God

When I see you holding yourself upright, I think of the birch
who always carry snow on their arms, a delicate weight
they don’t mind in the summer when leaves hide
their grief beneath the tint of green. At night, the sky
is the texture of gabardine, knife holes having poked
the stars through, the air is so crisp. I never forget
the proper use of stars, especially when the city’s lights lift
the undersides of clouds. When I’m alone
in the quiet church, I hear the clock tick by itself and know
it’s your heart beating. It’s your fault you’re alone.
You wouldn’t listen to us, though we bent our knees
to the hard wood in your name. Only a grey box holds
our voices high on a telephone pole before they start
crisscrossing streets, searching
for each other, because you no longer
answer. We trusted how things work, a kettle’s whistle
at the boil, the scrape of a plow down
a snowy street. But we can’t understand the monsters
in the pews, the ones comfortable on the red cushions, why
you made them and why they still remain. It’s your silence
we don’t understand. Even the stars sing if we listen.

Revisiting the first draft of the poem to write this post, I half wondered why I discarded it, why I felt I needed to change the voice and perspective. A quick first read and this poem almost seems to work.

But it’s not coherent. Take a look at the first line – is my narrator speaking to a God she visibly sees? What is that first section about, up to ‘undersides of clouds’? After that, the poem is both confused and too obvious in its complaints about God.

To fix the problems, I cut out the middle part and left it to be used in another poem (where it still isn’t working), deciding to stay with the perspective I’d begun with, that of the watcher and the watched. Once I did that, the poem rang true: it had the single clear perspective so many of my recent poems have had. See what you think:

Current Version:

I Know

When I see you holding yourself upright, I think of the birch
which always carry snow on their arms, a delicate weight
they don’t mind in the summer when leaves hide
the grief beneath the tint of green. At night, the sky
is the texture of gabardine, knife holes having poked
the stars through, though they only show when the air
is crisp. It’s easy to forget the proper use of stars
when the city’s lights lift the undersides of clouds.
I know it’s not your fault you’re alone. You don’t like
the grey box high on a tree’s trunk that holds voices. Sometimes
you hear them as they crisscross streets, searching for others
to answer. You’ve always trusted how things work, a kettle’s whistle
at the boil, the scrape of a plow down a snowy street. But you can’t
understand the monsters, why he made them and why
they still remain. It’s his silence that gets to you.
Even the stars sing when you listen.

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:

.
.
.
.

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.

Today’s poem was sparked by a line from a poem by Patrick Lane: ‘I have wanted to bear witness to the past’. This often happens when I’m reading poetry, but it’s rare that I find myself writing around the inspiring line instead of out of it.

Mind you, what came first was simply six brief lines. More a fragment looking for a home. It took two years for me to finish working on this. At Banff, Don had recommended that I go back through my discards and look for the good lines, the ones that rang true. This sextet did, though it took a while, as you can see below, before I found its proper setting.

1st:
‘I have wanted to bear witness to the past’
Patrick Lane

You turn the corner and I can’t think why
it’s not the way home, but I’m afraid
to ask, reveal another empty space. It’s
not Alzheimer’s, just my head accustomed
to losing time, throwing an afternoon away the way
a child throws a tantrum, block after block.

2nd:
Reading Between the Lines

I never know how hands move, what quivers they see
in grass that urges them forward. The sounds I hear may not
disturb you. But I have wanted to bear witness
to the past. Sometimes, when you turn
the corner, I can’t remember why. I know
it’s not the way home, but I’m afraid to ask, reveal
another empty space. It’s not Alzheimer’s, just my head accustomed
to losing time, throwing an afternoon away the way
a child throws a tantrum, block after block. I’ve always loved
the big bang of fireworks, the way the gold chrysanthemums echo
in my breast bone. And those silver sizzlers. They light
the sky with a glory I keep forgetting.

For the draft above, I started writing about time (though admittedly, I wasn’t explicit about whose hands I was referring to in the first line). It was an easy fit at first to slip my sextet in, but by the end, I was pretty sure I’d gone astray. The connections I wanted to make were too tenuous to hold.

For the next draft, I expanded on the theme of time, so it became clearer to the reader what I was talking about. But I abandoned my expansion of the theme of electricity at the end. I still could not get that concept to work.

3rd:
Reading Between the Lines

I check my watch every few minutes in case time has leapt
without me, leaving me in its familiar ditch. I’ve missed
buses watching its face, not hearing the message
its hands wanted to convey. I never know how
those hands move, what quivers they see
in grass that urges them forward. Often I have wanted to bear witness
to the past* [Patrick Lane] Yet sometimes, when you turn
the corner, I can’t remember why. I know
it’s not the way home, but I’m afraid to ask, reveal
another empty space. It’s not Alzheimer’s, just my head accustomed
to losing time, throwing an afternoon away the way
a child throws a tantrum, block after block. I remember
the big bang of fireworks, the way gold chrysanthemums echo
in my breast bone. And those silver sizzlers. The ones that light
the sky with a glory that’s hard to forget. I know the sounds I hear
may not disturb you. Perhaps you don’t smell electricity
in the house’s hot rooms.

For the current draft, which has been before Don’s fierce expert eyes, I changed the voice. I’ve been doing this with many poems lately, noticing how much quiet power a poem gains when it has that displacement.

I also did a tight edit, deleting all wordy phrases (‘leaving me in its familiar ditch’) and slowing down the mood of my verbs (changing ‘leapt’ to ‘slipped’, ‘missed’ to ‘have passed’, ‘hearing’ to ‘spoke’) so that the poem is ready for the fog by the time we reach it. ‘Throws a tantrum’ is the only glimpse of rage in this poem and it provides an example of what’s spoken of in the second to last line.

Current Version:
Reading Between the Lines

You check your watch every few minutes knowing time
might have slipped without you. Buses have passed
while its face spoke quietly beneath your cuff. You’ve never seen
how its hands move, what quivers they sense
in grass that urge them forward. Often you have wanted
to bear witness to the past. Yet sometimes when the car turns
the corner, you can’t remember why. You know
it’s not the way home but you’re afraid to ask, reveal
another empty space. It’s not Alzheimer’s, just your head
accustomed to losing time, throwing an afternoon away
the way a child throws a tantrum, block after block. Today’s
fog is a palimpsest on the city’s surface, rewriting
the contents of windows, the kind of glimpses you sometimes
allow yourself to see. Fog makes a day lovely.

I’m still not totally convinced by the segue to the fog in this poem. We’ll see if it undergoes another revision.