The View from the Bottom

Sorry for the half post earlier–I uploaded the picture and then meant to hit save but ended up publishing, which then sent subscribers an email with a broken link.  Thanks for looking out.  This picture, by the way, is of a young fellow who keeps taking the book I’m reading to read for himself.  He has even had the audacity to get his own bookmark and put it in.

This past week I woke up in the early hours midway through drafting a blog post about a time five years ago, when I felt the most desperate and heartbroken and lost.  I had another post planned.  I had three other posts half-written.  But the groups I had this week were extraordinary.  I couldn’t have planned them better (and twice some crazy admin mix-ups caused me to have not had the opportunity to plan them at all).  The people who populated these groups were earnest and thoughtful and generous and honest.  And I think that’s why my brain woke me to tell you this:

I had spent the day writing in a coffee shop walking-distance from where I lived at the time, working on a sestina called “Strangers, Dreams, and My Father” (a sestina is a form poem of six line stanzas with the ending words alternating in  a specific pattern).  I added the element of a repeating opening phrase that went in order.  I wrote and wrote and wrote–six hours at least–wrote the whole entire poem from start to finish in one long sitting.  It turned out a lot heavier than I expected.  I finished the poem just as my friend Din came to meet me for coffee, which we had arranged the day before.  We walked in circles around a little park in Rockville and I don’t know what I said or what he said, only that I felt glad to have him there and simultaneously embarrassed that I was such a mess. I could hear myself sort of being weird but couldn’t stop it.  Then I walked the six blocks home in the dark, to where I shared space with my soon-to-be-ex, my greatest love turned worst enemy but still roommate.  My batteries died–on my phone, my laptop, my iPad–all the batteries, completely drained.  And by the time I reached home, the battery that had somehow kept me moving forward and making plans and jokes and acting like a badass in spite of how scary and directionless and grief-filled life was at the time was drained too.  I remember standing under the deck we’d had built a few summers before, in the red dirt, looking at the back fence and leaning against a post and feeling that the fabric of my reality–the wooden fences and the dark green of the suburbs–had unzipped and I could see that behind it lay nothing but black.  I would never see my father again.  Never. I hadn’t understood ‘never’ before that night, and I’ve not grasped it quite like that since. My heart did not stop but I wished it would.  I felt a deep regret over all the ways I’d fucked up and was fucking up.  All the pain I had caused and all the hurt that had been leveled at me was crowding me.  I’d had a few panic attacks, but this was different.  If a panic attack is an eruption, like your insides have turned to steam and are trying to escape your body, this was an implosion, a surplus of gravity, a heavy, slow, undeniable falling.  When I think of that night, I am faintly surprised that I came back from it–that I didn’t turn into some shell-person, that I ever laughed again after that.  I was way down at the bottom–in a place I hadn’t seen before, but had been slowly navigating to for months–maybe years– prior.   Eventually I went to sleep, woke up and felt a little better.  I didn’t make sweeping life changes the next day–I just kept plugging.  Just as I’d been navigating to that dark place of full bottom, I’d been navigating to the next chapter in my life. The road led straight through the bottom.  It had to, I guess.

When I woke up at 3:30 am with this memory, the line that kept repeating in my head was, The bottom is a really powerful place to be. 

I know it doesn’t always feel like that.

I have submitted the sestina to a couple of places and it would be rude to publish the whole thing here on a whim after I’ve asked other kind, busy people to consider it, but here’s a stanza:

I go mad wondering whether he was always a stranger

I open a box and find it full of his stray dreams

My father is disappearing, will I forget his hands?

I wake my children in the night to remind myself of life

I give them kisses and sing and rock them to sleep again

I write this into their memories, will it into their ears and eyes

So the repeating end words are: stranger, dreams, hands, life, again, eyes

Use them in whatever order you like in your first stanza, then use this explanation of sestinas to write the rest of it.  I know.  Two form poem prompts back to back.  What am I doing?  I promise there won’t be a form poem prompt next week.  I promise I promise I promise.  Plus, WTF?  You can write whatever you want.  No one said you had to write what I said to write.  Well, I might have said that.  But grow a pair.  Stand up to the bully.  Write something completely different.  Just be sure to send it to me.  Can’t stick it to me if I don’t have the proof.

Also–there’s an Open Mic at Workhouse Arts Center next Friday, January 15th at 7 pm.  9601 Ox Road, Lorton VA.  Please come and read a poem.  Particularly you, NG.  You know who you are.  You just got an official Internet invite.  Get your ass there and bring my girl L.  So mysterious, now the rest of you have to come and find out who these characters are.  The intrigue!