Here are words, and the words that made them. I don't love the words, but I do love the process that stirs them up... and it isn't for me to love, anyway.
I left a bar tonight. As I left, the shades were being lowered - brown venetian blinds. Where the blinds were still raised I could see the bar, a woman, tall and pretty, there talking.
The sensation of it - standing in the cooling quiet street, unlocking my bicycle, ears still popping from the noise of the place... watching inside, a woman's mouth moving over words I couldn't hear. And even that mystery in turn hidden by the dropping blinds. Cut off and cut off again, and let loose on the streets alone, but knowing inside, it was happening.
Around the corner from the bar, a bright green light shone outside a door. All the associations of green came to me, the traffic signal, the joke about green blond women's lipstick, the green of a lawn, the child's game of green and red light, running...
but none of those associations fit. The green was an accident, the light lit a dark closed house. The signal was not for me, racing past. I thought of invitation, of open and closed spaces, I remembered what lay ahead... a rowhouse on Morris st, the second floor always lit, no shades ever drawn. Inside, an oversized stuffed bear, and a painting of the Virgin Mary, a halo round her heart, her hands open to the viewer... nothing concealed.
Again the invitation, but through a private home. An accident, a crossed signal.
The words swirling.
That window is the central theme. Glass, clear, showing and hiding, darkened, lit...
In the crowded pub her lips form words that shatter on
the glass that frames her face.
The dropping blinds obscure her.
The angel approaches.
What doors have blood?
Those children in their beds behind dark windows
cannot know he passes,
counting.
First house has a green bulb shining.
Door fast against the cooling night,
eyes closed, the invitation's cold.
The angel smells no copper:
He'll visit there.
And here? This house hides nothing, night or day.
The virgin holds her heart in light,
her words through the window
are always: "take".
She knows the angel
and the lamb.
Her tears, and the beer, and the spin of the bicycle, and all the revelry behind closed doors
won't stop the night from ending.
Thoughts on this. Your opening description, full of concrete detail, and what they provoked in you. No effort to make it a poem...
ReplyDelete... and when you did, something was gained... and something lost. There was a heightening of what the details provoked in you, giving less space for the reader. I wonder what would happen--where it would take you--if you played with the first background description, tightening the language, find words you could do without... and (without trying to eliminate your personal reactions), concentrate on heightening the concrete details, the objective surface-- rather than trying to harmonize or combine them.
The idea is that the subjective will find its way, but to make room for the reader to make a new poem of it, to enter the creative process in the reading--it sometimes works to concentrate of the objective even when it feels like it might be at the expense of the felt reality that provoked the poem, and is perhaps its real center.
Good eye. This one was forced. From the impressions of the night, which felt not enough, came the poem, which was to satisfy an oppressive expectation emanating from I know not where. Poetic positrons.
ReplyDeleteThe immediacy of this post was all in the prose.
I don't know that it's worth my revisiting, now, but something to remember in future writing. To extend that immediate impression, to resist the pull into forced affected structure, or de-structure.