Do you ever find after you’ve written a bit of a poem and come back to it that it’s locked away in a cell of the mind, its biology petrified, beautifully preserved, but no longer living, growing? What to do with these little petrified bits here and there? No longer accessible, they are just frozen in their own time, stolen from a strenuous engineering degree, hidden from deadlines and assignments, and clocks of all sorts, oblivious like a cat on a sunny day, of mice racing, tick tocking, in the grass, and parking lots, and over the arc of the earth. Some lines I love, and I read again, and again have no idea what to do with them, or where they belong, or if they can be used. To make a poem out of stone…How can I? When fresh, fresh, fresh sensibilities come pouring in every day, new ones, gleaming like milk from the udders or manure singeing the nose or waking up midmorning, eyes ushering in consciousness. There’s the bread, freshly baked, an aroma divine, the smell that reaches deeper than the stomach, and dew on the fields, speckling and shining, glistening in the steaming, rising morning. Freshness, clean, organic, living, growing, edible, tactile. Perhaps the best I can do is really piece together a mosaic, splay out the tiles of poems in a patterned way, but even the prospect of the process is wooden. What kind of forest is a forest whose trees are unearthed, petrified trees placed in arbitrary fashion? No better than the Stonehenge, great, but mysterious. My soul blocks up a little, cubing at the notion, but I’ll go forward anyway to see if it works. I’ll paste a tidbit to see if it informs anything I’ve said, or if it just proves my case. In a Word doc simply titled “poem” we find:
A poem can always be spoken
A new day, a new image always
With the sun, the morning glories ever trumpeting their
distant song
Light, the never-ending, always moving golden drape,
Coats an object, a leaf, and digs deep, burrowing to
awaken
Molecules in their orbiting vibrancy, shining as revolving,
as star,
Billions, eons of trillions, compressed into one
Leaf, etched into the veins of tired eyes.
Eyes that see the poem, take it, and equipped
with tooling thoughts and carving apprehensions,
sand the leaf, seeing its singing, drinking its being
You may have a better idea where to go than I do, because you have not written such a thing. Is this where my jurisdiction ends and fresh eyes get a chance to build high castles from my brightly colored blocks of Legos? Do they not have all the right? If freshness breeds creation, then they have it all, eyes simply not mine. Shall I search them out, call them to this work, ask them to peer at fossils and recreate the animal they should have been or could be, with certainty, no animal I could ever conceive? My task is too difficult, forming animals from dead bones, but they never saw bones in the first place, but living matter, fruit, ripe for harvest, grains to be kneaded. The best part of it all will be feasting my eyes upon the new made from old. The threadbare, worn garment, transformed into a resplendent raiment. At that moment I will know we are both parent, birthing a magnificent child. I primary, whomever, secondary and perhaps still tertiary and so on, an ecosystem of creation, freshness born from freshness, life continually born from death, a cycle that perhaps, creation called for in the beginning. Creation’s nature and structure having been constructed such that an ecosystem was only natural forming as the biological ecosystems form on their own. Nature’s natural extension. Perhaps all creation has been like so, the vicissitudes of musical eras, complemented and counterpointed by painters’ and poets’ seasons of style. Always, though, the ages pushing forth a new child, sometimes strenuously, birthing a new form, a new sound, a new image, a new sensibility, unseen by their predecessors and impossible to not be seen by their successors.
I’ve often noted my favorite seasons are the ones in between. The transition, the edge from fall to winter, winter to spring, spring to summer, and best of all, summer to fall. The hints, the subtle nudges from the wind, the taste of another air, the sound of another music, delicious and infinitely livable. The prophesy of another kind coming so much like the gentle tension of impressionism. Those are my favorite moments, and I imagine the euphoria of being one of those transitory figures in those ages of creation. To us now towering figures, but then, simply a shift between seasons. Another rung in the ecosystem, but melded with the old, and suffused with the new. Figures who smelled the freshness, sought it, even hungered for it, prayed for and preyed on it, chasing it, a voracity insatiable for newness. Creation drives us, resets our minds, gives us visions, prepares us, destroys us, births us, effuses us, is us. Creation arcs through the ages, a dynamic ecosystem, simply working out its own nature, forming us, killing us, resurrecting us. It is us through and through and yet always unreachable, the oasis at the desert, evading us as smoke in the wind, calling itself onward, asking, demanding to be reborn again as us, but always a new us. And the old, petrified stars, reign irradiant in the night sky.