Decided to start posting things here again! 'tis a bit quiet, but I never let that stop me before.
Here's another poem that I wrote in the midst of an epic three-day rainfall in the spring of 2007. My poetry teacher, deciding that MFA-level crit was the best form of encouragement, told me upon reading it that it was "sloppy," I "couldn't expect a professional to slog through it," and my poetry was "short fiction with line breaks." It was through this that I discovered my poetry teacher's bias against narrative poetry. XD
Despite all this, though, I actually do like this one, because it's one of the most personal poems I've ever written. I normally don't explain myself, but since this one is kind of obscure, I thought I'd offer a little explanation: the poem takes place during three different time periods in my life, and the parenthetical stanzas mark a change in the time period. The "I" lines take place in the present, and the "she" lines take place in the past.
I hope you enjoy!
Life Underwater
Somewhere
between the time of her two dislocations,
she lost count of the days when she
did not speak to outsiders,
only remembered that
she was told once she only
had a limited number of words
in her lifetime, and could not waste them.
It was that summer in the apartment
because the new house was growing mold
and making everyone sick.
The new house was all dark greens and blues
(the hungover owners couldn't stomach pastels),
but the apartment was cirrus white
as the day it was painted.
She slept on a bed with a quilt
that stole its pattern from the Hilton,
and blinds broken by the sunrise,
so she lay in the hallway,
that windowless hallway that could be closed off
from the living room, and lay next
to the washing machine in the comfortable chill
of the air conditioner, (I'm always told
that my room is too cold.)
She makes long distance calls with saved words
and complains that the South is encased
in a cumulonimbus, always crackling with lightning
in the afternoons and into the night,
that there's always a tornado living in the sky,
always a hurricane lurking in the Caribbean,
(the morning after Frances, she walked out
in her bare feet and pajamas to see how much
the canal had flooded, surveying the downed
trees as the wind whipped at her.)
The complex had a pool, toxic blue
that drenched the air with chlorine,
and to pass the time between speaking,
they made an understood contract,
if just for the summer.
So she made the commitment,
she walked across the complex in the bubbling heat
and heavy humidity,
past the little cat who had an owner
but followed her anyway,
and she drifted from shallow to deep,
never venturing underwater until buying
goggles from the nearby sports store, because
it's frustrating, being blind.
She laid across the bottom as long as her
lungs allowed her and watched
the rainfall ripple across the
shivering surface, courting electrocution
as the sky grew darker and thunder
ripped the air, but she was
as deaf as the water. (While Frances
raged outside, she learned that
hurricane winds are so strong, thunder
and lightning do not exist inside them.)
August. While contractors beat
at the mold, she went to a high school
wrapped in orange and yellow tape,
(construction follows me,
digging meaningless ditches,)
and she wondered if it would be a betrayal
to exist there, (she exists, but not as long
as she'd like.) She doesn't have enough
saved words left to make long distance calls
or complain about the empty green of a
Southern autumn. The downpour had stopped,
but she didn't notice until she
looked up one morning and was blinded
by the sun's afterglow.
(Today is the third day of rain, and I
don't hear voices, or laughter, or
the sound of feet across the ground.
All I hear is that rhythmic splash
and patter against the windows,
the sound that swallows everything.)
