What if I told you that I was writing poetry again?
Poems have emerged in bursts at particular times in my life. Feast or famine. I began writing poetry in my teens (as many do!), when my emotional life was overwhelming and huge with feelings. Poems gave me a voice for this underlying darkness and fear amidst disruption and change. I was also quite bored and restless. I wrote poetry in the margins while taking notes during many a class, through all my degrees. In my last year of undergrad, I wrote with extremely disciplined pleasure and relief almost every night before bed, in a stream of consciousness style that doubled as a journal. These poems were typed onto my primitive laptop with my eyes closed, and kept in files on discs now defunct. A few poems were published during this period.
Then I got a job and got married. My attention for poetry drifted. I was writing short stories, and novels (or attempting to).
I was in my late twenties, with two small children, when the poems returned. I told myself it was because there wasn’t time for much else. Maybe that was true, though maybe, too, the poetry paired with my boredom and restlessness, the tedium and repetition of pregnancies, nursing, the care of infants and toddlers, the minutiae of preoccupations. But my aspirations had changed from my teenaged years. I’d published a book of short stories. I wanted to publish more—why not a collection of poems? Over several years, I added and subtracted from a motherhood-themed manuscript, landing on the title “Famous Love Story.” While a few individual poems were published, the manuscript never found a home, which at that time I believed was an indication of failure. (As if seeking images, playing with language, searching for meaning, could ever be a failure!) But. That was where I was. I wanted, in my thirties, to find expression for my ambitions, I wanted to accomplish things, publicly, as a writer. I returned to stories and novels. I didn’t write poems for many years (except when responding to prompts along with my students, during the decade that I taught creative writing.)
Now, I am in my early fifties. Has poetry returned to me? It is quite a thrill, and I haven’t wanted to jinx it or break the spell—but these past few months, I’ve found myself writing poems, almost daily. It’s a quiet time, dormant, a late spring, and maybe I am again restless and a bit bored and filled with big feelings. News will come and time will shift the ground beneath my feet, but the now is what’s holding me, preoccupying my attention, and maybe that explains the appearance of poetry, again. The more I write, the more I loosen the rules for myself, invite what’s underneath to spill forth and speak for itself without guessing at or trying to control what it’s here to say. I write by hand in my notebook, using a prompt (often dreamed up on the spot), and afterward, after the free flow, I try to discover a shape or thematic thread in the words and phrases, like gleaning oats from the chaff, or holding out a divining stick.
Anyway … here’s today’s prompt—What if I told you?—and one of the poems that followed.
xo, Carrie
What if i told you?
What if i told you that this morning, when i was walking to the gym, i was hoping that the blossoms had not been blown off the crabapple tree in last night’s storm?
What if i told you that the sky was bright, between bouts of rain, shiny like polished pewter, and i happened to arrive at the intersection just before the train glided past on its quiet path and i waited to cross, knowing i was late, and still when i reached the crabapple tree, still with blossoms intact and deep pink and fragrant on the wind, i slowed and stopped beneath its canopy?
What if i told you it was like i knew that when i looked down to the wet grass there would be a particular small bloom on a stem, broken from its branch—just one—and i would bend to pick it up and breathe it in, as if unhurried, as if i had all the time, all the time?
What if i told you that i carried the bloom by its broken stem across the street, against the light, past the closed storefronts, and into the gym, and placed it on the laces of my running shoes, set with all the other pairs of shoes on the rack, to keep?
What if i told you that by the time i’d walked upstairs to my class i’d forgotten about it?
What if i told you that when i returned, awake and damp with sweat and endorphins, i both saw and remembered the bloom in the same moment, there on my laces, like a gift, a gesture, an honour, and i held it in my fingers with soft pride and delight, hoping others would see its delicate pink petals, and share in this accidental delight too?
What if i told you it was raining again, and cold, and that the wind came at me with such force that as i approached the tree again its fragrance rushed to me, and though the sidewalk was covered in individual petals, and though I looked in the grass, there were no more fallen blossoms on snapped twigs to be seen, just this one that i held to my nose to breathe its smell over and over till i couldn’t distinguish its scent?
What if i told you that i adore you?
What if i told you that my heart has spent its love on blossoms and that i wait each spring for this exact moment of brief dark pink bloom, so that when it comes i might be prepared to stand beneath its beauty?
What if i told you that all the months in between that fill a year are themselves quite marvelous or could be, yet this one tree is what i wait for, this one tree is itself my memory and all that i could ever hold, or bear to hold, or wish to hold, of my love for you?
What if i told you, what would it change?