When is a poet like a city?
When is a poet like a city?
When
the bus is ten minutes late
inexplicable steam from beneath the street
strangers speak
lights gleam
the orange vests place an orange cone
the orange vests share a sandwich
music comes in your windows
a hydrant leaks
each crow and some rats
the bridge a modern marvel
these powerlines connecting
language after language
a child drags a leash
fruit rot on the corner
green breaks through the concrete
it whirs like a stream
Last weekend I encountered Anne Carson’s Plainwater, a collection of quasi-essays and quasi-poems, a style of writing that I adore because it is practically custom-made for mornings. This book ends with an extended section called “The Anthropology of Water” where she recounts time spent on El Camino de Santiago. Throughout the section, she ends entries with the sentence structure of “When is a pilgrim like a…? When….” and I can’t tell if I got hypnotized or what but I can’t shake it. It’s a perspective earworm. An eyeworm? I’d rather not.
Anyway, I was writing a poem which turned out like everything else I write when I just shut my mind off. Some combination of platitudes about beauty, awe, etc. and it wound up smack dab in Anne Carson land.
This morning I
tried to find
a poem humblein its making one that
takes a knee to beauty
but came up emptyperhaps Dewey’s decimals are a goose chase
perhaps I didn’t read closely
enough
and that is every poeman observer standing
at some fathom or friendship
marveling at its presence how it rolls on!when is a poet like a city?
when you see the lights come on
To me, it felt like the poem found itself in the last 6 lines:
and that is every poem
an observer standing
at some fathom or friendship
marveling at its presence how it rolls on!when is a poet like a city?
when you see the lights come on
In fact, I probably like that abbreviated version more than the poem I published today, but the last line generated something, so I ran with it.
When is a poem finished? When you remember to breathe.
With gratitude,