You Can’t Take a Picture of This: An Old Shirt
“Half of what I say is meaning less
But I say it just to reach you”
-The Beatles
Every now and then something happens and the air around you gets heavy. Nothing changes in these moments–things look the same, smell the same, even kind of feel the same–but you know that whatever is going on in those few seconds when time slows down is important, representative of something bigger. You usually don’t know how or why, but instead of just passing, these moments present themselves to you, stop dead in their tracks as if to tap you on the shoulder or wrap themselves around you. “Something’s happening here,” these moments whisper in your ear. “Are you paying attention?”
Times like these, I think, are what poems are made of.
I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about. The blog, all the words and pictures and poems and theories, it’s all spackle covering up the total wordlessness of not knowing. But a poem is like a snapshot, a firefly you catch in your hands but can’t fully analyze or admire because you know that if you loosen your fingers just a little too much, it’ll fly away and not make sense anymore. They’re tiny, piecemeal stabs at understanding and remembering. If I can only capture why this moment is important, what about it made the lighting dim and the camera close in, remember the motion of her lips when she spoke, the pit in my stomach, the sound of the wind, then I’ll know I’ll have lived. I’ll have proof–on paper. A history. Something tangible.
This piece spawned from a moment like that. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering or huge–just something I noticed, a shirt, and what I thought it meant
Poems, I think, are attempts at achieving those other, rarer kinds of moments, the seconds that pass where all of a sudden you’re a million years old and sitting in a rocking chair, wise and completely at peace, content in knowing that you finally get it, you’re not confused anymore–or better, you’re just old enough to understand that there is no “getting it,” there’s only trying. And that’s okay.
This one’s from March 5, 2009. It’s called “An Old Shirt.”
An Old Shirt
“Today’s a sad day,” a friend said to me softly,
standing inside my doorframe like a picture
set in broken glass.
“My old band teacher,
Mr. Cassels,
he died this morning.
Heart-attack.”
He brushed lint from his tee-shirt,
an old white rag
with a music scale on it
and tiny black notes dangling on its lines,
hooked onto them like they were trying
not to fall.
“He was a good man,” he told me. “He had
a great laugh.
I used to love making him crack up.”
He brushed his shirt again
as if he were polishing the metal
of a statue. His hand
passed over it
like an apologetic wave goodbye—
as if he knew that that shirt,
that visible moment of silence,
that tiny personal tribute
was the best he could ever do,
and for that he was truly sorry.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 5:20 pm and is filed under poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
