this is not a poem

There are one hundred-and-one posts in this blog.  Every one of them is a poem.  Many poems I've never looked twice at.  Some I've hastily edited.  Some I chose for a more careful inspection, and some of those I put into a chapbook I recently made.  This has been an interesting experiment, and I am glad to have done it---it has served me as a writer.

For eight months I haven't had anything more to say.  I am operating a distillery of words.  I used to write the longest, most complicated sentences, and then I'd string them all together one after another.  Maybe it was to prove that I could---that I had the skill to use semi-colons properly, or something?---but this year I haven't wanted string out words like I used to.

This has been my entire life this year.  I have been drawing inward.  It has been a hibernation of self.  I want fewer things.  And by "things," I mean physical objects; I want less stuff.  I want to decrease my territory.  Places I used to drive to without thinking seem a strain, like the strings that tie me to my house are ever-tightening.  Less stuff, less distance, fewer friends.  I am growing insular.  My friends can surely see it, this ever-decreasing world of mine.  I am lucky to have them; I know that.  I will be lucky if they continue to come to me, if their spheres don't shrink too much as well.  I love the friends I have with all of my heart, and it hurts me to see how my insular world is affecting my relationships with them.

And I have fewer words.  Smaller ideas.  Epics are now vignettes, vignettes are tiny thoughts like "these are our things." That one sentence is really all I had to say.

This is me trying harder.  It's not that I will try harder to have more things---that's an aspect of my self-hibernation which I will embrace.  But I will try harder not to draw away from relationships, to continue to build my community, to be a better friend and sister and daughter and wife, when the day comes.  And I will try to write more than a ten-line poem.  I will try to stretch beyond single images, isolated thoughts.

This is me trying harder.  This is not a poem.  This is me trying.

our things

moving into the new house
our meagre possessions
won't fill it     not even close

it's not so much a matter
of amalgamating objects
as it is a matter

of filling empty space
by stretching everything
my coffee table     your desk

hand-me-downs     all of them
mine and yours were     theirs
before their houses got too full

to contain them
but we'll sweep them up
and put a name on them

a name that sounds less
like mine
less like yours

just ours     i suppose
we can look
at our mostly empty house

and say "these are our things"

later

this is all you remembered
afterwards
all you remembered was the sunlight
and how it marked a square
across the carpet
an odd fixation

scarcity

words are scarce

but i will keep looking
and i will find so many
eventually
i'm sure

halting

standing with toes on the edge
it's not the falling that matters
the weightlessness
or the stomach pressing up into your throat
that makes the difference really

it's the part at the end you can't count on
you can never really plan for
the part at the end that can't be stopped
except by its very nature

it halts everything

for ts eliot

thank you, ts eliot
for your grown-up sounding words
for hollow men and mornings
at the window and love songs
of poets mediocre
compared to you

a st. albert backyard -- october 24, 2010

it was the first snowfall and i made you come outside
you were in socked feet and a tee-shirt, didn't want to
but i stood just outside your door lit by the porch light
looking up at the sky and you just had to come outside
to kiss me for the first time this winter officially
while crystalline snowlight fell onto our faces.