So I started the month with two divergent paths: I decided to accept the challenge from the Academy of American Poets to write a poem a day, and I decided to run Emily Dickinson to ground, to really understand her, to get her under my skin. Outside of the fact that I was trying to follow both paths, I learned that to get her under my skin would take a spoon and a needle.[i] So I decided, about halfway through the month, to focus on the poem a day. So, with apologies to Dickinson and to you, I will return to her in May.
Today I want to share some of the better results of my experiment. Here’s a short one:
Voices of the Desert
She kneels on the trail
and bends to sniff a bouquet
grown from a single root.
“It does have a subtle fragrance,”
she says; “sweet, but not overpowering.”
“Like you,” I say — to myself,
hesitant to profane her prayer.
Valerie and I took a trip mid-month, stopping first at Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal and camping at Split Mountain Campground, which was full of ravens, rabbits and robber squirrels. A loop trail takes off from there, called “Voices of the Desert,” so when Valerie knelt to sniff the flowers, I already had a title and an image to serve as a scaffolding for the poem. That trail connects via a stem with the only other curated trail in Dinosaur, another loop called “Sounds of Silence.” Another poem occurred on that trail, and it could bear as a title that name. Maybe it should. But when it first came to me, my mind was elsewhere.
Some of you may recognize the punch-line of that poem as a standard joke rangers tell on nature walks. I first heard it in Grand Teton National Park, and I should warn you that, given the subject matter of the poem, you may just want to skip down a page or so.
Deer don’t go
Deer don’t go to the bathroom —
They just stop and drop
pellets that look like berries or beans
in a cluster in the middle of our trail.
Sometimes it looks like a whole herd
has stopped, faced outward in a circle
with one eye out for hikers,
and given a shit for the earth —
although, compared to dog or human shit
this stuff is re-digested & squeezed dry.
Elk turds, on the other foot,
though just as dry, are bigger,
and tend to settle in tighter clusters
sometimes just off the trail
as if the elk were leaving a farewell present.
We argue about what I say
are rabbit pellets but what she
considers to be small droppings
from fawns.
Maybe, when we get back to the visitors’ center,
we’ll find a display telling us how to size
the critter from its droppings.
Or maybe we’ll just ask the ranger
“What are these bitter berries?”
On the way back to the campground, yet a third subject presented itself as I toiled up and down the coils of Voices of the Desert — this one as I started down from the final ridge, on what the trail guide described as an arduous descent. I was reflecting on the calendar, since the 15th of April is my birthday, while still trying to memorize the other two poems — I had uncharacteristically left my pocket protector full of pens back in the tent, along with the catalog cards I keep in that same shirt pocket for just such occasions. So I was juggling two poems in my head and trying to stay upright with the aid of two hiking poles as I descended the trail when this started to emerge. Usually I subvocalize these things — that’s a fancy term for talking to myself, but now I was answering me — as they come out of my head, and now I was switching back and forth between three of them. Here’s the third:
Personal Calendar
I was born on the 15th of April.
She was born on the 15th of August.
We wed on the 15th of June.
Three months split by our
emergence and convergence,
and six more wherein other saints
joined our calendar:
Meadow on February 25th
Cody on December 26th
Marden on Mother’s Day (May 12th that year)
Rulon on Hallowe’en — the only other direct hit
Colin on May 23rd
Anders on July 28th.
We hold all of those dates to be movable feasts.
A full calendar, a full house.
But now our calendar is filling every month
with their spouses and their children
except the month of January;
what is it about the ides of April
that frightens them?
Thinking to myself “Out in the desert they wander,” which further mixed up the poems and jumbled them, I felt blessed to get back to the campground and to my pens and note-cards, and actually transcribe what I had been mulling over — a process interrupted by a chipmunk, or squirrel finding the fleece jacket I had worn on the trail then shed in the tent, and, gnawing through the right-hand pocket of that jacket, finding a little Mr. Goodbar, which she proceeded to devour. There were several other mini-bars in that pocket — a Krackel, a Special Dark, a Milk Chocolate — and I suspect they were saved only because Valerie at just that moment approached the tent, not knowing the squirrel (or chipmunk) was there, and scared her off. We think she was scared off because there were several rodent turds scattered around the shreds of the Mr. Goodbar wrapper. As the negligent party, I was delegated the task of cleansing the tent, hauling away the evidence, and further inspecting jacket, luggage and tent for the intruder. From that moment on, there were rodents infesting the tent, not just our picnic table (these were some of the most aggressive chipmunks, or squirrels, or both, we have ever seen — we were camped in the group campsite because the only other campground at Dinosaur, the Green River campground, was closed because the man who certified the water to be potable had died, and the NPS was looking for another certifier — rodents almost as bad as some raccoons our daughter Meadow encountered camping with her family in central Illinois, but much faster), so we packed up and left. There’s another poem in all that — it practically writes itself — but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
The process by which I wrote those three poems is a little unusual for me. Usually I get an idea, then record it on a card or a scrap of paper and proceed to lose it for a couple of years, then find it again and say “Say, there’s something I can work with.” This poem, the last one I’ll inflict on you today, grew from notes I made in 4 and 6 April 2013, coming together with notes I made on 3 April of this year. It’s a little more local than those desert poems; how does it strike you?
Fun Drive
My commute took me over the river
and through the ‘burbs from Kearns to Orem
and Orem back to Kearns in January —
the radio kept me awake, aware, alert.
We bought a house in Orem, I walked to work —
drove everyone crazy there playing the radio:
classical music — complete works — all day,
a little news, a load of jazz all night.
Started running with a Walkman radio;
didn’t mind the earnest pleas for cash
when I wasn’t listening to a cassette;
started calling in to pledge some dough.
Still listening when KUER switched
to talk and news, and outsourced all but jazz;
bought the long-form journalism jazz;
even volunteered to man the phones.
Now the fund drive never ends; I can’t
out-drive it even when I drive for fun —
a self-inflicted wound I know, but still
it’s shorter stories, self-ads, talk (jazz ditched),
thanks that are really requests for further scratch,
adverts that urge me to become a sustainer,
special technical fund drives to maintain
the infrastructure that keeps them on the air —
so when I tune to other stations now
listening for the ghost of that radio,
full-length organ symphonies uninterrupted,
long-form journalism, less glib gab,
I ain’t leaving, just being driven away.
And really, I’m not leaving. There are so many more poems I have to offer to you. But hold on, I hear you say: “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!” Eftsoons my hand dropt me.
Your turn.
[i] Sorry, no end-notes for this post. This outing is entirely self-referential. No scholars at work here. Nothing to see. Move along.
So did you succeed in writing a poem a day?
Clearly once the poem habit takes you, it’s like popcorn: one after another.
I have written poems a few times in my life: as a child (had one published in the Children’s Friend when I was 8–my first publication!), in high school, as a college student–not continuously, but in short separate bursts. And then the impulse leaves me. and I turn to writing blog posts or essays or whatever…
Actually, I succeeded in writing more than a poem a day — but I cheated a bit by selecting some of my old notes and using them to seed new poems. But in a battle of wits, I did not want to enter the lists unarmed and unarmored.
I am now in the process of tidying up the poems prior to sending them to my family — like Dickinson, I don’t want to be represented by sloppy copies.