Your gloved hands are slow and unfathomable as they cut through spider webs stitched between the bones of a nude blueberry bush. The boy, barely two, levels ant hills with his feet, stirring bedlam that is not as brief as it seems.
These things weigh more than we think. So he mourns the spiders and the ants before they disappear into the odd domain of dreams and memory. Your hands move like backhoes, digging up the moon. You say what happens in the universe happens in a blueberry bush.
He needs a bath, and won't want to go to bed. He'll take our questions for god instead. The webs and the hills will be rebuilt and removed, and rebuilt and removed again.
2 comments:
so are they playing, or working, do you think?
Assigned to write poem that is one long sentence. Considered appropriate subjects, and most obvious was something related to the vast, endless nature of the universe. Had read a bit about "dark matter," one of the great confounding mysteries of the universe. Worried that someone might figure out what dark matter really is and render poem meaningless, but shrugged it off. Watched science special on dark matter and read certain chapters of book Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. Jotted down relevant phrases, etc. from both. Didn't really have a point, and realized soon on that I do not know enough about subject to offer any meaningful insight, so considered bookending the poem with something more domestic. Found an old haiku from years ago -- "Unfathomable, / I tore down the spider web. / It’ll come again." Nothing special, but like the idea of smaller creatures not comprehending the actions of larger creatures, and doing the same thing over and over again in the face of death, etc. Also too attached to word "unfathomable," can be an unwieldy word; sticking with it for now since it says so much. Took elements of helping my sister clear out her garden this past spring. Nephew was there, though he kicked no ant hills and didn't cry or do anything like in poem. Wrote poem as one long sentence, which worked pretty well I thought, but was just too long, too many words, too little white space, etc. Took notes from class, deleted some crappy phrases, etc. Got good response to final lines, so plan to keep them. (Closing well can paper over a lot of garbage.) Then just started writing it over again. A second draft was restricted by X syllables per line, and made an effort to rhyme. Began rewriting again from that, with no regard for syllables per line. Fell for line "some composer's great staff" as a description or dark matter, but decided against it because it wasn't secular enough. Beating self up for noun to denote scientists in "xxx hunt for dark matter." Man hunts? Mankind hunts? Too gender-specific; I've read too much Simone de Beauvoir to do that. Science hunts? Others hunt? Maybe others, since it might imply a kinship between the gardeners and scientist. Keep breaking it down into 3 7-line stanzas, but I think it might work better as one, which would emphasize that all these things are sort of connected on some level—trying to understand forces larger than ourselves. Switched again to 3 stanzas, but 4 lines each. Changed "the child" to "the boy" for extra b sounds, plus it seems more intimate to have the poem directed at someone. ("a man's dusty hand" evolved into "your hands" after trying "a dusty hand," "dusty hands," "these hands." Like the second-person (I think) intimacy. I'm starting to think the whole "dark matter" thing needs to go. May be much better without it. Cut it out and added a brief line to link the first and third parts.
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