Shadows Are Lengthening

and I’m sitting in my second story office with the window open, listening to the arguments of neighbor kids pour in with the slowly dimming afternoon light. When I was a child, I had a friend who lived at the local apartment complex several blocks up the street from my house, and going to spend the night there was like winning the lottery. There were always lots of other people walking around, and kids at the complex playground, and if my friend and I weren’t spying we were pressing our ears against the wall trying to hear the conversations in apartments beside us, or taking turns looking out the peephole. (Actually, all of that could probably be classified as "spying.") Strangers sharing a building really blew my mind. Looking back, it’s funny I used to be jealous of living at an apartment complex (not that I don’t enjoy it now—I do), but I suppose it was different than what I was used to—exotic, even. Same thing with riding a bus. At my school, you were a busser, a walker, or latchkey. I must have talked about the bus quite a bit, because my mother made an arrangement for the bus to pick me up at the corner when I was in kindergarten. It was thrilling. FYI, we lived about five minutes from the elementary school, but, the heart wants what the heart wants.

I wrote three new poems this week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, just sat down with no ideas and started working, which I found to be liberating. Too often I have a backlog of ideas that start to feel like a chore by the time I finally get to them. Spent afternoons revising old poems and essays. It’s been a productive, rejuvenating week. I’m continuing to work on a manuscript that’s going to begin with a sequence of surrealist poems placed in northern Michigan, and I like how this week’s additions are turning out. I’m going to send them out to journals this fall, but here’s a fragment (about half of Monday’s poem, I don’t know if posting them on this blog would count as “publishing”) to give you an idea of what I’m up to:

Rabbit fat hissed and popped
in grease. The ghost of old motions

fed a log to the iron woodstove, two more sat
stroking arrowheads against flint

and one slipped, spliced a finger
but felt nothing

and continued sharpening ‘til blood
puddled like pancake batter
                       below his hand.

I imagined the footsteps of shadows
creaking against floorboards

through those darkened panes, the glass stares
of expressionless deer, the black bear head mounted

on the wall, his snarling maw, two paws cradling
the rusted arrow pulled from his ruined heart

like an old grievance.

Soon, the lanterns of my father and grandfather
would begin bobbing at the edge of swamp

and their faces, smeared black and green
would be lit as they waded through ferns

like the ghosts of drowned men emerging
               from the hoarse whispers
of a returning tide.

Sections of it still very clumsy, and I'm worried the finished product won't hold up as a disparate poem outside the series. I haven't been doing many stand-alones lately, which is a problem since I want to submit new work to journals. Ah well. There are worse problems to have.

As for reading, this week I finished Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts, which I really liked, and Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography, which I thought was dull and often in poor taste. What would you rather write about? I know why I enjoyed Zapruder, but I’m still working through why Teague bothered me. I probably don't have time to write about either. Now I’m reading Alice Notley’s Culture of One and some nonfiction books. All enjoyable so far, and I’m 99.9% sure I’m going to add Culture of One to my developing essay on why the book of poetry is so important. It seems to be what I've been looking for.