Poems, that sound. We had to memorize a poem, I did that faster than anybody. Those stories, those picture books. Everything is a poem in kids’ books. Oh the things I could do if only I would I could I might I will look under all Bartholomew Cubbins’ hats. The Bible, the preacher, the poetry. In the same country, even so Amen.
Writing. How did I learn that, those shapes, those smiles and frowns? I don’t remember that part. I only remember being worried the night before my first day of first grade because I did not know how to write my name. Oh, and choking up on the fat pencil.
Books, thick ones. The Boxcar Children. I read two? three? of the ones in the series, all the way through to the end of the library shelf. That was it. Until I found out that there were more of the books on the next shelf, but I hadn’t known that and it was time for summer vacation. That was a tragedy, one of the regrets of my life.
But then more books, The Little House books. And still the picture books and the beginnings of growing up. My best friend Becky gave me a gift—a letter written out on a roll of toilet paper—I never read the whole thing. I had a diary, with lock and key. I wrote a story in it, about a girl who was growing up on a farm, about a girl like me and like Laura Ingles. I drew pictures to go with the story. Then The Animal Family and The Faun and the Woodcutter’s Daughter. I was pulled deep into books, deep into make-believe. Where the Red Fern Grows. “I’ve never been back to those mountains.”
Somewhere along the way before Cummings, I learned grammar. I learned to hate spelling and was bad at spelling, I remember that slim, yellow spelling book. I remember some awful diagramming of sentences and nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, prepositions. Gerunds. And then 7th grade and Cummings’ “In Just---” and Mrs. Gearheart and all the poems, the student magazine, The Seven-up Write Away. My poem “Fall” was published in there and was so good that Kelly Gaines memorized it as an assignment and Mrs. Gearheart said “you weren’t supposed to memorize one of the student poems” and then she said that my poem must have been one of the ones she’d edited and I was angry because she hadn’t changed a single word.
Then eight grade and settling into puberty, the explosion of my brain with words, with poems, with tragedy, with song and dark, the dark, the dark. The explosion of my body with the woman pushing out, the world opening, the unbearable world pushing itself into me. And the longing and loneliness and hiding, the shame in the whirl-swirl of the words, the words, like a heart-beat, a rhythm. My hand flew down page after page, volumes of pages full of poems, my hand moving to a song it heard, line breaks coming from magic, I knew it, I knew it. The thoughts of fame, how I would be remembered, how my words would make a difference, how people would study me and try to understand me, how my legacy would be in words. And Mrs. Eberly was there and understood, recognized me, heard my blue spark fire and encouraged me, encouraged me, encouraged me.
Then high school, a whole new world. More and more and more and more words. I gained a reputation for words, girlfriends read and marveled over my poems. I wrote some prose, too. One of my essays was so good that my English teacher kept it, and I wish I had it now, I should have never let go of it. It was my first piece about the fire. I’ve got stacks of notebooks from those years, some of them containing one long, winding poem, all one piece. Here’s an early one, blessedly:
1980--
The Scent of the Rose
I’m living a life full of mass indecision,
& my heart has been torn with
a bloody incision.
The strings of my being,
the romance, the passion,
are destroying my soul, in a
pleasurable fashion.
The light is beyond me, in
some far away fountain, & my love’s
flown away to some crystalline mountain.
My life is controlled, by some
mad puppeteer,
with strings & a knife,
& a sharp
pair of shears.
My reason is hazy,
if existing at all,
& it seems that my senses,
have taken a fall.
Past, moonlight & sunlight,
& darkest love shadows,
past the door for escape,
past the scent of
the rose.
Ah, I am amazed by and jealous of students who start writing in college and just start churning out GOOD poems. I wrote so much crap before I got to anything good. But there was a spark there, a belief in the magic.
And then? Life and a letting go, a bit, a bit, attending to a baby, a new world. But still reading and then a bit of writing, and then more darkness and more writing. And then happiness came with all its extra darkness and more and more writing, a new explosion, a saving of the life, the soul. How to heal what was so long broken. Words, words, words. A flinging and a dibble-dop, a smack and a whistling. And here, now, now the words do come, even so Amen.
-------------How annoying annoying because I have such difficulty just writing plainly, simply. The poetry will wander in and shadow, begin its distortion dance. And I’d intended to write about how the knowledge of writing came to me, over time, gradually. I wanted to write specifics, write that toolbox that King talks about. But here’s where I end up.
But there it is. Now I think I’ll go blow something out of the water, pull a new baby from a womb somewhere, let it breath and start its screaming. Perhaps it’s time to actually write something.
~r.
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