The poem I meant to write
Well it’s been a rough few days, weeks, months. Yesterday I came to my 12 pm writing group hanging on by a thread, and only a thread. And because I teach what I need to learn, I taught this poem by Catherine Pierce, but to be honest I didn’t “teach” this poem–we read it, we marveled at it, we used it to pick a lock inside ourselves, together. It was a beautiful space.
If/When by Catherine Pierce
The poem I planned to write
was about last week’s hurricane,
about how I live in Mississippi,
not that far from the storm’s rages,
and how even still we felt
nothing here, nothing at all.
That was going to be the ending,
because I wanted to make a point
about how easy it is to ignore
disaster when it’s not churning
directly over your town, and I was hoping
a reader might then extrapolate
a larger point about disturbance
and proximity, like how politicians
are always saying they used to oppose X
until some terrible Y happened
to their daughters, and it seems
to me we’re requiring an awful lot
from daughters these days. Sons, too.
This week a message from my kids’
school district included the phrase if/when
a lockdown is ever necessary. The reason
I’m writing this poem instead
of the one I’d planned is that I keep
thinking about that email and also
now the hurricane was a week ago
and there’s a new disturbance
forming near the Bahamas. And
last night Sioux Falls was tornado-
shredded and in Sterling, Colorado,
egg-size hail pummeled windshields,
and I guess what I’m saying is, why bother
with a poem about one hurricane,
one email? There will be more,
and there will be more,
and there will be more until
there is nothing left. The thing
about the poem I was going to write
is that it would have been a lie.
That nonsense about how we don’t
feel it here. We feel it everywhere,
don’t we? Dear daughter, dear son,
dear someone’s something, we’re well
past the if and into the when.
Talk about proximity—
some days I wear the world
like a skin. I am tired of waiting
for extrapolation. Let us all
be disturbances now.
Mine: The poem I wanted to write is crouched in the dark under the table, it crawled out of its skin and curled its fist around a pen. Yes, the poem I wanted to write wants to write a poem of its own. I moved a sofa into my study so I can lie down and cry between line breaks. And now you are worried, want to know if I’m okay. No, I am not. But neither are you.
I encountered my sleeping son, his long body turned sideways and folded under the comforter like a newborn baby. When I tell you he is beautiful when I tell you he is a blink of an eye, when I tell you that I love him so much it makes me want to curl beneath a table and never look at his face again, you know what I mean. I placed an enormous artificial daisy behind his ear and took a picture I can’t share. He is fourteen. Not that many years ago, on this very day, Emmett Till, was kidnapped I cannot end this sentence
Why bother writing this poem when you already know this, when I know that you love someone like this too, when I know there is nothing special about loving someone this way? There is a sharp pain in the middle of my back that comes and goes. I lie on the carpet and try to twist it out, the pain comes and goes as I know and forget, as I know and try carefully to un-know. There is always more to know and more to un-know until un-knowing eventually takes up more of my time than knowing.
Here is this same son, come downstairs upright and open eyed, dressed in a green t shirt he is outgrowing. Seeing me this way, he wraps his arms around my shoulders, his long trunk arching over my head. No idea what I have just written I never want to look at him again (which was not the poem I meant to write) and when he asks me what happened, I tell him it’s nothing personal and try to zip this poem back into a skin.
