Pretty, Pretty Words & Letters
“If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill! Kill! let there be fresh meat . . .
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.”
- William Carlos Williams
“There’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one.”
- The Brothers Bloom
So this is it, the last in my little poetry experiment. My tangent. It was kinda nice to change it up around here a little bit, search in the closet for some skeletons to fly on the flagstaff. What a rush.
What I like so much about writing are the surprises. I never initially intended to write warm-up acts to the poems I posted, disclaimers or parables or anything. That wasn’t the plan. Honestly, I was just trying to fill in the gaps. But I did want to set each one up somehow, with a date and maybe a tiny hint at each’s context. That seed eventually grew into all the pre-poem mini-narratives and analyses you see in the 6 posts below–which, I’ll admit, sometimes felt a little indulgent or self-serving but, let’s just be honest, this is a blog. Can it really be anything but indulgent? Really, cards on the table, who am I kidding?
But it’s the surprise part I like, how one sentence can sometimes open a floodgate and give birth to this whole other…thing. I love getting lost in the process. Other times, though, I’m suspicious of it, especially when I hear people talk about writing as catharsis. The method, they say, helps them put things into perspective, and then I wonder whether that perspective is a product of the creative “birthing” process, some kind of hidden peace or clarity coming out through the spontaneity of words on paper, or if it was the goal all along. And if it was the goal, is there really anything spontaneous about it? It’s closing your eyes before going from Point A to Point B …then acting surprised when you get there.
At some point I started wondering what writing really was, even started resenting it. With the right kind of prose, couldn’t anything look 20/20? How much of these interpretations do we control? What’s real and what’s rationalized, “sorted out,” tidied? Is writing just a tangible, more articulate way of lying to ourselves?
Then it happened. I was driving on the highway when all of sudden it’s bumper to bumper. Dead stop. And I see smoke in the distance.
When I get to the source I find a camper, one of those older, smaller RVs, completely engulfed in flames. And close, right there, on the shoulder. It must have just happened but there was nobody standing anywhere near it, no shocked or scared or breathless owner staring at what could have been his plastic-panelled surrogate for a coffin. There were no cops around, no sirens, only heat and the dull, rippling growl of something important burning.
We were helpless, all of us in our cars craning our necks and calling 911. Who knows, the camper could’ve been abandoned. It could have been left on the side of the road days ago because its engine gave out and then–it’s impossible to know–maybe the wiring was old and it sparked and started the fire. But then, maybe it happened while driving, while people were driving it, some kind of panicked explosion at 80mph.
This is exactly what I was talking about. How horrible. What an ugly, terrible, awful way that would be to go out, burning alive in a 25-year-old camper that probably hadn’t been washed or cleaned in God knows when. I wondered if there was a way to dress it up–to eulogize it.
I wondered if there was a make something like that beautiful.
I’m not sure that was accomplished with this piece but it’s what I was going for. You get the point. I think there’s something to said for the footprints words leave, how they’re often heavier than the actual foot leaving them. What we choose to say or post on our blogs, how we say it, what we withhold. That’s kinda what this poetry thing was all about. That’s completely what this blog thing is about. I think there’s something to be said for saying.
This one’s from April 7, 2009. It’s called “Prettier to Think in Metaphor.”
Prettier to Think in Metaphor
Fire,
just like you see in the movies,
barreled from a camper’s windshield
and reached greedily for the sky.
I felt its heat through the windows.
Arms of black smoke fanned the cloudbursts,
pushed through them turning light
to shadow, staining it
like the confused eyes of night
pulling up the cover of day and
coming out too soon.
It was a hunk of metal, glass and old rubber,
a fallen comet, a blur of home
that maybe sped too fast, laughed too loudly or touched too much.
It stood there still and half-dead
watching all the people on their cell phones,
watching them call for help.
It stood as though its back were straight,
as though it were regretless, and wanted to burn.
Inside were probably unmade beds and empty boxes of cereal,
maybe even people
on their way to something, something
new and different. I’d like to imagine
them singing, a whole family to their favorite record.
Dad drummed on the wheel while the others
made a harmony. Then they each stopped
to laugh, shake their heads and smile.
And for less than a second, the world felt humbled
and imperfect.
Then the moment sucked them in
through black smoke and embers,
time froze, the earth stopped spinning,
and they rose upward toward the sky,
sideways with the clouds toward the horizon,
never looking down at the lives they left
on the side of an old and broken highway,
in the middle of it,
between where they were and where they were going.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 10:38 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.
