Gillian Wallace

As I said in a previous post, I think I’m working on a memoir in poetry form. I’m not sure yet; I have to see where this series of poems ends up going.

Here’s one of my new ones. It’s been through Don’s eyes once in a version partway between the two below. I warned him in advance that I didn’t think it was good enough. I was right.

Here’s its original version:

Longing to Let Go

Where to bury you? I look at my dresser
drawer, wood sides dovetailed to hold
a week’s worth of life, the necessaries
laundry takes for granted and eyes
barely see. I could slide memory, a flat
blank envelope under my winter socks, thick cables
to weigh it down, keep it out
of sight, better yet, buy liner, pink chrysanthemums
on thick paper that won’t show
the thinnest bulge so I can forget.

Earth would be better, a dark spade under
a city’s stars, except grass cries when its ripped
and a flower bed will know the hoe. I don’t want
you coming back, stained with more
dirt. I need a building site, the hole
dug, forms laid, waiting for the white chute
of concrete to thunder down and me
a shadow first slipping you under a veil
of fresh earth. But how could I allow
another house to stand on your lies, how could
I allow children to sleep where you
wait. I walk streets, carrying
my knowledge of you in a splitting
head and cannot lay you down.

When I went to edit this, I found I automatically switched it to the second person, which is what I’m now mostly writing in. This voice allows a certain distance, one I am more comfortable with. And it matches a certain distance in myself, an observer stance I have had since my childhood.

Don had told me the language needed more work, more deepening; criticisms I agreed with. I briefly used the wordplay exercise he’d given me to reimagine the beginning of the poem. I cut and rearranged, rephrased the ‘pink chrysanthemums’ to better contrast what it is my narrator is hiding. And I tightened everywhere, so the images I use can sing better.

I also slipped in a time reference: ‘before the fall’, that I don’t expect some readers to catch. But that’s all right. Finally, I changed the trite ‘splitting head’ to ‘a head of cracking porcelain’, which for me evokes the line ‘things fall apart’ from Yeats’ The Second Coming.

Longing to Let Go

You need a burial place. Search your bedroom as if it were
a flat green space studded with the uprights of rock. A dovetail
joint catches your eye, a drawer holding a week’s worth
of life, what a washing machine knows
by heart and eyes ignore. You could slide memory
as a fat envelope under the thick cables of winter’s
socks. Or better, buy liner, summer’s pattern on a thickness
of paper to hide pain’s bulge. You know earth
would be best, a dark spade under the city’s stars, but grass cries
when it’s cut and a flower bed remembers the hoe’s sharp
edge. You don’t want them coming back, stained with more dirt.
So you search out the dug depth of a building
site, forms laid, waiting for the white chute to thunder
down and you, a shadow slipping them under a veil
before the fall. But how could you allow
another house to stand on their lies, how could you allow
the little ones to sleep where they lie waiting. You can’t.
You walk streets carrying your knowledge in a head
of cracking porcelain and cannot lay it down.

I think this poem will need another revision or two. But it’s getting there.

I remember Mike Blouin, before a reading from his wonderful book of poetry I’m not going to lie to you, telling me that he often constructed poems line by collected line. At the time this made no sense to me. I wrote poems in non-stop spurts. Yes, I would edit them relentlessly, but I always kept within the bounds of the original inspiration.

This became even more true when I started my poem a day at the end of January 2010. When it was time, I would sit, fingers poised, and either let the poem pour out or sometimes push. Hard.

As I’ve said before though, my time with Don Domanski at the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing program was transformative. Don taught me to play with combinations of disparate images as a way to deepen my metaphors, to go beneath the surface of a line. He taught me how to construct a poem.

So when I came home from Banff, I questioned whether I wanted to continue with the poem a day discipline. I loved it. I loved the way it guaranteed that ennui, despair, a bad day or week would never stop my writing.

But it also meant pages of crap in my poetry file. And lots of good poems, but pages of crap. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what I had written. I found it hard to keep up with the editing. I always had to choose what deserved my time. I was pleased that every day I honed some tiny part of my skills, but I didn’t always develop it. Great lines went unnoticed in the midst of dross.

A 10 day severe, untreatable migraine settled the issue for me and I stopped. Though I still miss it, I find myself thinking about poetry and writing it in a different way. I now do more piece work, following Don’s advice to look through the old bad ones and find what was good there, what might speak elsewhere. I now construct at least parts of poems line by line. I find they still come together coherently. And I find I can spend more time on them individually when I’m not being swamped continually with new material.

But I don’t regret my daily poem exercise. I’d recommend it to other beginners. It’s a great way to build up your chops. And who knows, if I get stuck some day, I may go back to it.

So here’s one of my constructed poems. I’ve revealed some of its early evolution in a previous post, Editing by Stages.

Earlier Version:
Round

You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
walls with a can of paint. Tracing the outline
of Catharina’s tired rim on the moon, you know
colliding with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, will break
the sea over your knees, swirl clouds of dust
into a stranger’s face, hold the atoms
in your desk still as you lean a pillow’s
stuffing on a bird’s soft back and turn
a swastika into a star with your pen.

Before I sent it off to Don, I worked a lot more on this poem, going through my Wordplay file and looking back over older poems to see what might spark inspiration. I found lines that spoke to the poem’s ending. Here’s what I came up with. The changes start after ‘swirl clouds of dust into a stranger’s face’, the point at which I knew I’d lost it previously. I wanted to talk about the atoms in a desk surface – I will never forget the class in school when we first learned about the permeability of atomic bonds and how I looked down at my desk and poked it, tried pushing my finger into it, knowing finally what it was made of. And then looking up into the air, where more atoms swirled. Seeing the miracle of connectivity, of clustering, of density. All this was powerfully on my mind as I initially wrote this poem and as I worked my way to its proper ending.

Final Version:

Opening the Door

You can’t draw your knife against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
walls with a can of paint. Tracing the outline
of Catharina’s tired rim on the moon, you know
colliding with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud will break
the sea over your knees, swirl clouds of dust
into a stranger’s face, bring the brush strokes of black
and grey that change a street into a scroll. If you trust
the atoms in your desk to hold while you turn
a swastika into a star with your pen, the milkiness
of sky will come. Each day
is a joy I can’t control. Each day carries
its own epithet, a stroller sitting on a porch holding
groceries. Only the stars don’t move
in my lifetime. Only the stars.

Don liked this version. It won me “applause from Halifax”.

ps: Do read Mike’s novel Chase & Haven. You will never be able to forget it. I’m happy to say he has a new book coming out soon too.

The more I read of Don Domanski, Don McKay, and Steven Heighton’s poetry and work with Domanski, the faster my poetry is evolving and the more I can’t bear to look at my earlier poems, which include most of the ones on this website. Don D. was the first to teach me how to go deeper into a line. Not to repudiate narrative, but not to stay with its surface either. To constantly find a way to dive below.

Here’s an example from Don’s website:

EPIPHANY UNDER THUNDERCLOUDS

each night I spend whatever
God made during the day
spend it freely
on paper and empty air

I spend because God is only
a resemblance of God
only a conjuring built out
of nebulas and wheat
by a few old men
asleep in their escapes …

Don Domanski

This and so many other of his poems teach me how to narrate what’s in my head as if I were talking about doing the dishes. There’s a profound (extra)ordinariness about Don’s words even while his subjects aren’t. I am learning this technique from him just as fast as I can.

One of the questions I’m dealing with is whether it’s possible to apply this knowledge retroactively to my earlier poems (while writing new ones). I’m finding it difficult. But here’s one attempt that will illustrate a few of the lessons I’m learning.

Version sent in early October 2010 to Magma Poetry:

After the Battle

We walk through water, placid, domestic
under hot sun, wading pants-rolled
by children’s paddles. Then a breeze lifts,
wind’s feet skitter along newborn wavelets,
feeding off a back-stiffening current of air, pier
shaking struts in refracted patterns. We’ve missed
the show, the ocean-deep storm layering
friction, pressing air on water in swirl-pulling
ripples, sinking playful dips until Newton
took over, not an inch above the level
water once knew. Its weight argued wind,
wind argued back, and wind won, waves climbing,
spitting foam before they crashed
beneath their neighbour. We know
the great green glass walls they became,
having seen, if only in movies, the tossing of ships
from stories high. Now we watch storm’s end,
energy pushing crests our way, land’s raising
squeezing them higher until they plunge, curling
their lips on arrival, reaching us in a thunder
of foam, rock-raking as they suck their way home.

I’ve never been truly happy with this poem. I wrote it as a response to an article in the Guardian by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, an excerpt from his book The Wavewatchers’ Companion. I loved the subject matter and some of the images but the poem itself was simply too descriptive: and then this happened, and then this happened.

My newer version below isn’t brilliant. I don’t think it’s going to earn me applause from Halifax. But I’m happier with it because, starting with sand, I began to think of how to convey the usual in a newer way, one that a reader can grasp without sighing. (I hope.) And I remembered to end it, not to leave it truncated. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Latest Version:

After the Battle

We walk through water, placid under hot sun, the sand
a roll of pants away, beaten by the sound
of children’s paddles. Then a breeze lifts, skittering
wind’s feet along newborn wavelets, pier shaking struts
in God’s patterns. We know we’ve missed the show,
the storm ocean deep hiding layers
of friction, where unseen it pressed air on water in swirl
pulling ripples, sinking dips until Newton took over,
not an inch above the level water once knew. Its weight
argued wind, wind argued back, and wind won,
waves climbing Jacob’s ladder before crashing
beneath their neighbours. We never saw
the great green glass walls they became, how
they dreamt of tossing ships. Only distance’s softening,
energy pushing crests our way, land’s raising squeezing
higher until the plunge, lips’ curl a thunder
of foam, rock-raking the trip home. We walk back
to the car, knees wet with fury’s end.

I’ve also been enjoying reading been shed bore by Pearl Pirie. On her blog, she has some very helpful things to say about What Works/Doesn’t in Poetry. Robert Peake, the senior poetry editor at Silk Road Review has some valuable insights into what makes good poetry for him (and for me) at his blog, from the Road.

I’ve been contemplating writing a memoir and wondering what form to do it in, novel, non-fiction, or poetry. Poetry seems a natural choice, given it’s the language I hear in my head so often. But perhaps I’ll do a combination.

I avoided writing for years because I knew the power words have. But whenever I avoid, I am unhappy.

Here’s a poem I wrote in 2007. It’s the second one I had accepted for publication (in The Antigonish Review). I’ve lost my drafts from that time – I didn’t start being obsessive about filing until I realized I was serious about poetry, that I was going to stay the course. So this is the (current) final version. Its title comes from one of my favourite Stevie Smith poems, Not Waving But Drowning.

Waving

I remember falling out of boats twice
when I was little: the rush of dark murky water
brown tangled weeds, panic, no panic
someone, you Dad, jumping in to save me.
You’d think I’d be afraid after, but I wasn’t.
My excuse the second time?
Fascination. The fronds calling me.
Even then I knew it was deliberate:
the water was friendly, kind, closing
over my head. You weren’t.

I recently received a great rejection letter for a couple of poems I’d sent to the British journal Magma Poetry. The editor said she’d received thousands and thousands of submissions for this special theme issue and, if it was any consolation, I was ‘among the two hundred or so people [she] really wanted to publish, but [she] only had space for fifty five poems’. Yes, thank you, that did make me feel better. Not great, but better.

I also received notice I’m getting paid for the poem accepted for the Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s Poem of the Month website (I’ll be up December 2010). Well, that was only if I wanted the money. They did say I could turn it down. Yes, that’s right. Our government thinks poets are so well off, we can say, ‘No, it’s okay, you need the money more than me. Go spend it on a fighter jet.’ Sure. Admittedly, it is the equivalent of selling 50 books of poetry. But sadly, that’s not much.

Today, I thought it might be entertaining for you to see a few of the stages a poem goes through as it edges toward a finished version (not that a poem stays finished around me). Here’s a sample that’s still on its way.

1st:
You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut. Carve fault lines
through a saint, turn a swastika
into a star with a few quick
marks you can smell in the air.
You can paint your walls
the colour of your canoe or a suburb
the desert’s dawn shades. If you collide
with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, waves
will happen, washing rocks
at your feet.

3rd:
You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint, or stop a swastika
with a few quick marks you can smell
in the air. You can paint your walls
the colour of your canoe or a suburb
the desert’s dawn shades. If you collide
with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, the sea
will break over your feet, washing
the rocks you sit on.

4th:
Round

You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
a swastika with a magic marker.
You can paint your walls the colour
of your canoe, trace the outline of Catharina’s
tired rim on your skin, but you know if you collide
with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, the sea will break
over your knees, swirling its clouds of dust.
If you can’t say hi to a stranger, trust the atoms
in your desk to hold still, then lean
a pillow’s stuffing a bird’s soft back
and turn a swastika to a star with your pen.

Editing this poem through its various stages (and there were many more than I’m showing here) required me to continually decide which images worked and which didn’t. It meant some tough choices as I have a bad habit of growing fond of the sound of my words. But a poem’s integrity is more important to me, so I let go of the canoe (just didn’t fit) and suburbs the colour of the desert (despite knowing it can be true: see Calgary). Other images were collapsed (it was urgent I get rid of that desperately bad ‘say hi to a stranger’; later drafts aren’t always better) or changed (I wanted to keep the walls and the colour). I play with images in draft after draft until they finally speak true. That’s my job.

Latest Version:

Round

You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
walls with a can of paint. Tracing the outline
of Catharina’s tired rim on the moon, you know
colliding with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, will break
the sea over your knees, swirl clouds of dust
into a stranger’s face, hold the atoms
in your desk still as you lean a pillow’s
stuffing on a bird’s soft back and turn
a swastika into a star with your pen.

I’ll be sending this poem off to Don Domanski after some more work. Watch this space.

P. S. Check out Eco-Libris for reviews by bloggers of ‘green books’ printed on recycled paper, an earth-friendly choice. I didn’t participate this year but hope to do so in 2011.

Bad Head is an appropriate poem to revisit, given what weather systems have been doing inside my brain for days now. It’s one I took to Don while I was at the Banff Centre and while he liked almost all of it, he wondered where the ending was. Ah. Ditch the last line, he said, and get back to work.

Previous Version:

Bad Head

Carla stayed the night, so did
thunderstorms hovering over
nearby towns. It’s too far
to see the jagged edges slice
my face open but their weight
presses skull-down. Voices
are thunder enough, all touch
the spike of rain pounding
pavement. I am skin-sensitive,
nerves the tiny fuses lightning
sparks from, a system strung
on power cords I don’t control.

I have a penchant for the short punchy ending. Don doesn’t. That doesn’t automatically mean he’s right—he’s told me to ignore his advice when I feel a poem’s integrity demands it.

But I’m always going to take what he says seriously. So far, I’ve only kept one word that he questioned. Every other time, his comments have led me much deeper into the structure and meaning of the poem we’ve been discussing.

So I started my revision of this one by wondering what was missing. Why wasn’t Don content if he liked it so much? I realized I’d started the poem’s arc but hadn’t finished it. If this was purely a descriptive poem about a migraine, I might get away with ending it there. But it’s not. It’s got a time frame that needs completing. If the thunderstorm and the migraine start, then they should end. And Carla* shouldn’t make a one-off appearance.

Finishing the arc made me revisit and revise the beginning too. I have a feeling I’m not done with this poem yet.

Current Version:

Bad Head

Carla came to visit, so did
a thunderstorm hovering over
the city’s streets. She can’t see
the jagged edges slice my face
open, the weight pressing
skull down. Her voice
is thunder enough, all touch
the spike of rain pounding
pavement. I am skin sensitive,
nerves the tiny fuses lightning
sparks from, a system strung
on power cords plugging sky
into earth, flashing down sight’s
erratic lines.

Clocks count
the seconds between crashes
as drugs slip into cells’ grim
spaces, pushing veins apart
so blood can breathe. The wind
curls leaves around its fingers, sweeping
the road dry, letting starlight shine
in a few small puddles. This
is the way earth calms itself, singing
to worms as they inch their way
home, fearing the morning’s
beak. I rest, sofa-bound, each nerve
a crumpled piece of tissue,
as Carla pours tea.

*You should try to see Carla too. She’s got a magnificent voice and is a superb actress. Check her website to see if she’s coming soon to a city near you.

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 …