BEWARE: POET AT WORK
Writing poetry can be hazardous to your health, and perhaps to others as well. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent some years writing poems rather than articles, and I can testify that doing so can put the creator in an altered state of mind where he (and possibly she, though I think of women as being more sensible than this) bumps into things, drops things, forgets appointments, and makes all sorts of bizarre mistakes.
A case in point: this morning I was looking out our back window at the Havahart trap, which we had set to catch whatever was stealing the sunflower seeds from our bird feeders, and which had finally caught something the day before.
“Honey, we got something in the trap.”
“What was it?”
“Well, it was gray, and white, and it had two wings.”
“A grosbeak.”
“I saw it at lunchtime, frantically flitting and hopping, so I threw on some clothes and went out and opened the trap, and it flew out. It made a beeline for the woods. Didn’t seem too much the worse for wear.”
“Remember the time we caught the neighbor’s cat?”
This morning, I was making my breakfast, and those two words “hopping” and “flitting” set off a poem—which turned into something about us complicated people wanting the birds to have a simple happiness—which the grosbeak certainly got, because it was damned happy to get out. Meanwhile, I realized, I had poured 10 too many artificial sweeteners into my cereal, acting out of habit as if I were making a full pot of coffee.
Let me reassure you, when this sort of thing happens while I’m driving, I pull over. The Leicester River turnoff, for instance, has seen a LOT of short poems written in its lifetime, and I told the people at the Leicester general store this was among the many public services they had provided the community.
At my alma mater’s graduate school, there’s a lady who first succeeded in slowing light to something like 38 miles per hour, then for an encore managed to stop it entirely before sending it on its way (probably not grateful like the grosbeak, but certainly making a beeline in a different direction). Poets do something like that with their subjects, slowing the stream of life to the point where everyone can perceive it more clearly, then releasing again.
Meanwhile, as a handful of lines get written, hours go by—not to mention whatever was on the calendar for such periods. If there were more people in the household, I’d put up a sign, “Beware: poet at work.”
Comments