Poetry Friday: Joining the Life Poetic

Be warned: this post is a commercial for the weekly online poetry book club run by Laura Purdie Salas and Susan Taylor Brown. It's not too late to be hooked. Each Wednesday, she and Susan are reading a short chapter from Sage Cohen's Writing the Life Poetic and inviting us to read along with them and write a draft of a poem to share with each other. It began here, with Laura's post about why we write and read poetry. This week, Susan hosts the conversation which flows from Wallace Stevens' 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (a poem I love, and yet poked at until it bled one Poetry Friday, see here. )

I haven't responded to this week's chapter yet because I was fiddling with last week's assignment, which was to observe someone you only know in passing. In my head, I called this assignment "Imagining a Life." And it lead me to what I'm sharing today, which is not a life imagined, but a poem that ran away with itself and became something else---perhaps a call for you to join us in writing poetry.


I used to know her name

She moved out;

her possessions---divans, taped rugs, 

lamps as long as lances---exiting

in stately procession from the maw

of her garage, whose walls thinned 

under the beat of the monster drum set

caged there when a family with a black-haired 

son moved in. His mates bumped up

in a van with scraped doors to whoop 

him out of bed at ten in the morning, 

sunny profanities pricking

holes in the bird song until he squared

his ass and backpack in the middle seat

for a gig twelve hours away.

Then, one morning, she's back,

parked boldly in the midline

of her driveway, renters gone, her dog arched 

over the front seat, paws on a lamp. 

Dark ovals shade her eyes as she emerges;

I lift my hand; Why, Burger, I could say 

to her dog, you've grown! But to her, 

who moved to Potomac Landing, 

I have nothing to shout; we fade;

I should've hopped in the battered 

van with the hooligans, tossed

my name out the busted window,

grafted it to the thigh of a song.

                     

                         ---Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

Poetry Friday is hosted today by the always wonderful Mary Lee at A Year of Reading.