Writing Prose Poetry Again

I've taken to writing prose poems again. It has been a while. The last few years haven't felt poetic, though I know everything can be and ought to be poetic. Comedy and tragedy, love and death, happiness and depression. It's all fodder for writing and anything fits inside a poem if done right, but that's the sticky part, doing it right. I often feel insufficient to the task. One day of not writing poetry becomes two becomes a month, a year, and I get thinking maybe I've forgotten how to do the thing at all.

This reminds me of a scene from a terrible Christmas movie The Perfect Christmas List. (It's so terrible I've watched it three years in a row. One can only watch a movie ironically so many times before having to admit liking it.) In that terrible movie, which I readily admit to liking, a woman on an ice-skating date, wobbles as though she has never been on skates. Moments later she is revealed to have been a figure skater in her youth good enough to merit a plaque at the rink. Terrible Christmas movies are renowned for inconsistencies, but this one bugged me. No one forgets their skills so thoroughly.

So it is with writing poetry. (I mean it's tough to forget how to do it, not that poetry should be anything at all like The Perfect Christmas List.) I know how to write prose poetry. I can't forget. That I haven't written much of it this year is beside the point. A year isn't time enough to develop much rust. Going back to it is as simple as lacing up the skates and glide across the page.

This afternoon before therapy, I drafted a prose poem about an imitation Arts and Crafts table in the waiting room. A week ago, I wrote two other prose poems that have proven a bit tougher to put out in the world. One is someone else's story they graciously gave me the okay to share. The other, about death, might upset the living, but maybe a little disturbance is good for the soul.

Still, after drafting, I held them back, revising for days and days. It was an odd pleasure to create something and hold onto it rather than send it into the world. Reminded me to write for myself first. Having an audience helps me become a better writer and gives another purpose to the writing, but the first purpose is just to write and that's often enough. Who needs to publish? Then again, you're reading this thing that I've published, so I may be full of crap.

I've taken to writing prose poems again. It feels good flaking off the rust, turning the gears of this machine, and cranking out the work I've built it to do.

Dying A Little

After shoveling inches of heavy, wet snow from the driveway and sidewalk, I lie down in the driveway and die a little. A light flurry falls through the grey air onto my bare face, my eyes open. I feel the cold driveway leach heat from my body. I keep careful track of how much dying I'm doing. It's a balance, dying a little, dying just the right amount. Go too far and that's it. Ask Dad. He lay down in his driveway five cold winters ago. You pushed it too far, old man. The medics couldn't bring you back. You needed the lazy finger of God, a spark of lightning. The kind of lightning that came in a snow storm three days too late. I doubt it was God, wherever the hell he was hiding. I doubt too it could have brought you back. You died too much. You were gone. Back in my driveway, I thing I know right where you are. There. Down by the street. A cigarette held lightly in your hand as you say your old line. Telling me, stand up, we've got money on you. I get up slowly. Brush myself off. You stubs out your cigarette in the street. A plow roars around the corner, a wave of snow rolling in front of it. That wave crashes down across the driveway, wipes you right away. Gone again. Gone too far. I hang the shovel in the garage. Push the button to close the door. The mouth of the driveway is plowed in. The falling snow has already dusted most of the rest. I look out there. At the assembled dead looking down at the spot where I laid down. A space left clear, black as night, a reverse angel slowly fading away.

Imitations

At my therapist's office stands a desk made to look like fine furniture. Gustav Stickley's ghost is big around these parts. His factory still stands in a suburb nearby. Over a hundred years later, it houses a library instead of furniture and woodworkers. I'm carrying a book borrowed from that library. A slim collection of poetry I'm too anxious right now to read. The book is pure craft and rhythm. I am something else entirely. Stickley furniture is beautiful. Form, function, artistry, grace. Stickley pieces weren't made to look like anything else. They were exactly what they were built to be. Originals. The desk at my therapist's office, well, that's a pale imitation in every sense. A disappointment. I set the book of poems on its surface and open the top drawer. Inside, I find the Allen wrench and instruction booklet used to assemble it from whatever cardboard box in which it shipped. The instructions in English, Spanish, and maybe Japanese. I close the drawer, a flimsy thing, and consider a peek beneath the desktop where crude hardware and Phillips head screws have surely replaced craft. Instead, I go into the bathroom and close the door. A mirror shows my reflection, a flat imitation of a face crafted over half a century, resolved now in doubt. I stare, resisting the urge to reach into the reflection and comfort the man there, knowing I'll come up short, my hand pressed against cold glass, the distance between what I look like and what I wish terribly confirmed. Outside the bathroom door, the imitation desk, the poems I can't read, the appointment with my therapist perhaps to discuss what is and is not real.

So Much

All morning I've felt it's too much. The cold beyond the blankets, the dark morning outside the window. The alarm clock's ring. Too much to open my eyes. Out of bed it was too much to boil water for coffee though the gas range does the work. No rubbing sticks or stirring the embers. No wood to carry in from the shed I don't own. Fill the kettle, turn the knob. It's so much. So much. Then the writing. My eyes darting toward the clock ticking down. Three pages, too much this morning. The snow in the driveway demanded shoveling. The shower demanded my presence. The hair on my face screamed for the razor. And then, walking to work, snow shifting with each step, I thought, this is too much. Lifting each boot, again and again, too much and too much. At work I sighed at the thought of plugging in the laptop. There were no tissues for my running nose and email was stacked higher than I could endure. My shoulders fell. I took a deep breath. Held it until it really was too much, then let it out and clicked on an email. The daily poem. David Kirby. "Poking Stuff With Sticks." Not too long, not too much. I read through to the end: "So much stuff out there, just waiting." I looked out the window at snow drifting down and felt my breathing in and out. So much stuff, I thought, but maybe I'm just enough.