Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Composing a Poem
Our ninety two year old mother broke her hip last spring. She is a modest woman, but one day she wanted to show me her scar. Why would she do that? And how could I describe it? How much history should I include - for instance, should I let the reader know she has Alzheimer's? I decided to open with the moment itself:
I'm taking everything off/ she announces, clawing at her clothes/
The verbs point to her loosened inhibitions and the quality of her thinking. This is no stripper. There is no playfulness in it.
Moving to a description (a new scar gleams on her mended hip) that is stark and unsparing, the poem finds its identity in this line: Where did this come from, where is it going?
I needed to make clear the loss of memory here, the shock that recurs each time a patient is confronted with what she has already grieved over.
The reader's attention now focuses on the scar, described with the brusque-sounding "cross-hatched" and its location on the ruins of the body.
A cross-hatched seam
in the center of a body's landslide.
A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing.
We follow as the old woman touches her scar, and when the cross-hatch pattern of the scar is likened to "A railroad crossing pocked with stop signs./A fire escape going down.// the poem demands that the reader not flinch from the images of exit.
Ninety
I'm taking everything off
she announces, clawing at her clothes.
A new scar gleams on her mended hip.
Where did this come from, where is it going?
A cross-hatched seam
in the center of a body's landslide.
A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing.
She begins brailing her fingertip down
the red raised tracks. It's not what she expected.
A railroad crossing pocked with stop signs.
A fire escape going down.
(poem published in THIS literary journal)
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2 comments:
IM INTO BRAQUE RIGHT NOW and can see (hear) the change of spaces. the adjacent background touching something in its own world.
Cool observation. Tell us more!
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