Today’s challenge from napowrimo.net was to write a meta-poem: a poem about poetry. When I first read the prompt, I thought my well might be dried up because I’d already written two poems about poetry; see
https://apowrimo.home.blog/2019/04/25/day-24-ilegible-and-imaginable/
https://apowrimo.home.blog/2019/04/19/day-19-mystery-shapes/
I was wrong about that. I latched onto a weird idea late last night and barely slept as a result. Here is what I came up with:
The longer I spend in poetry—
the reading and the writing—
the more the rest of time
strikes me
as water
seeming stone,
from speed.
What I mean is,
have you ever sat at the back
of a motorboat and skidded
your fingers over water
gone solid as the shore?
Watched your fingers
strobe over lake
like the white line of a
highway lane
dashed under
your wrist, out
the window?
Treating water as
a freeway is just
one skim of what
water can do.
Poetry is slow, more like
steering a canoe through
the symmetry and asymmetry
of whirlpools. You drag water
towards its inner self on either side
with biceps getting stronger
from resistance of other water.
Sunlight scribbles its fibs on waves
too fast to be read. A solar language
spills its code over the surface
like a film reel’s 3, 2, 1.
The flashes jostle fast,
but poetry itself is slow.
Poetry is slow, more like
diving off the edge
of the canoe, fully clothed.
Poetry is kelp and grit lodged in
waterlogged wool—and the pull,
the pull, the pull, the pull.
Gradually you will smell
the brine in your bloodline.
If you widen your throat
by gliding increments,
you will survive.
You will breathe out
upward-fleeting crystal balls.
Peer into them now. Soon they will
burst gasping at the surface.
Crystals shatter fast,
but poetry itself is slow.
Poetry is slow, more like the
ages of open-palmed patience
it takes to gain intimacy
with water. Molecules are skittish,
so handle them only softly, and
show up when you say you will
each day. Wait. When you see
your fingers wrinkle with old age
and oversoak, that’s a sign
you are doing it right. Water
has ventured into you at
your very tips. Suddenly you start
to wonder who is waiting for whom:
are you the water part, greeting your
land companion? You have always been
mainly water, and now you feel it,
and now you greet with patience
and knowing the water
in others. And they in you.
The wondering dawns fast,
but poetry itself is slow.
Poetry is slow, so if you
sink for a time into
its underwater/one-with-water realm,
you may need to sprint for the bus
under stones of speeding rain,
40 minutes late for some land thing.
When you collapse into your seat,
be slow enough to notice
any riders with eyes
rising from books,
inner fish splashing
languid light from
their irises
into yours.
