On the second day
We hiked from the Praetschli at 1908 meters to the summit of the Weisshorn at 2653 meters through alpine meadows holding on to the latest blooms of summer, bees search for every last golden dusting of pollen.
Butterflies, two dragonflies dancing over a grassy alpine pond. Weather out of a post card, unbelievable summer weather even though autumn is making her entrance through the reddening leaves of the Alpenrosen, the dried thistle starbursts.
The last hundred meters – in altitude, not distance – is a blasted granite landscape, the aftermath of a rock slide or simple geology. At 2600 meters I am suddenly walking on a dried out riverbed, the rocks sliding and rolling under my feet, not a plant to be seen. This is what it looks like when a glacier recedes, the wasted ground-up trail I do not, cannot, stop to get the camera out of my backpack.
I am at my end these last 30 minutes winding up around the summit, the rocks shifting beneath my each foot fall. Regina, 62 year-old Regina two years out from a hip operation, shames me with her steady methodical pace. She finds her rhythm and never needs a break, never stops to put her hands on the small of her back to widen her ribcage and so expand her lungs and take in deep gulps of fresh cool delicious air. Her friend Isabelle, too, marches on. At the top we slump into the restaurant, order big bowls of hearty Bündnergerstesuppe and glasses of Rivella Rot and take in the view from the picture windows, this view that we earned today. I have been here before, at the peak of the Weisshorn. I have come up with the gondola and skied back down. Today I climbed up on foot, through alpine meadows with tiny treasures and across a wasted moonscape.
And the view, it was more beautiful than I remembered.
On the first day
Certain places speak to me. Over years, over decades, a small handful of places continue to lay claim to my heart. The list of places I want to see is as long as the atlas itself, but for all my wanderlust I find myself returning, like a salmon to its spawning grounds, to the places that speak to my heart.
I am in Arosa for the week, my favorite place - mein Lieblingsort - in Switzerland. I have been coming to Arosa since 1996 and I never tire of it. My heart has put down roots here. This place has become part of the story of my life. My husband wrote his first letter to me – a scant days after we met – sitting at a hotel bar in Arosa. I have come here as his girlfriend, his lover, his fiancé, his wife. I have come here as the mother of a son, as the mother of two. There are so many places in the world to see, but my heart calls me here. Here, where I spent my first Swiss New Year. Here, where I can walk past the restaurant where my older son tasted his first black olive. Here, where I can sit in my favorite café and in the moment before my cup of cappuccino with whipped cream reaches my lips the taste of it comes flooding back to me.
Here, where I’ve been coming since 1996 and yet today hiked to this waterfall for the first time.
We passed cairns at whose existence I never guessed
and ate lunch in a village I’ve passed through scores of times without stopping. I could come here the rest of my life and never reach the end of it. I hope to. Come here the rest of my life. And never be full of it.
Lather, rinse, repeat
Revision. For me, revision is the difference between journaling and writing. If the sudden rush of words in a first draft are all heat and fire, then revision is about shaping and forming like a glass-blower. As a much younger writer I resisted revising my poetry, so in love with the first words was I. I have always been a ruthless editor of my prose, but it took time to come around to editing poetry. I’m not sure why. Perhaps, as a younger writer, I bought into the romantic imagery of poems arriving in toto on the page, deposited there by some generous muse. Now and then a poem still comes to me that way, but they’re rare. These days I revise everything.
My initial drafts are almost always written in my notebook. I carry it everywhere, either tucked into the undercarriage of the stroller or slipped into my bag; I no longer buy purses or shoulder bags I can’t fit my notebook into. I might start off by jotting notes on an image or a memory or an idea I’ve been toying with. I make some false starts. There is much crossing out; circling of lines or entire sections and drawing of arrows to the place they really belong; insertion of little asterics and fresh lines jotted at the bottom of the page. I wish I could scan a page from my notebook to show you what a mess the first round is. Eventually it becomes so chaotic that I have to copy it out again; at this point I generally type it up and print it out. The next round of revisions is also done by hand, on the printed page. When that page becomes too cramped to continue I type up the revised poem and print it out again. I do this as many times as I need to. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I’ll spare you all the intermediary iterations of this poem - I’m not sure I could reconstruct them anyway - and just show you the first full draft and the current one. The first draft isn’t even really the first draft, as my notebook shows several false starts on this; some lines from those attempts did survive, though, and the moment behind the poem was there from the start. As for the current draft, I don’t think it’s the last draft but I do think it’s almost the last draft. For now.
Draft One: (I have four alternate titles on the first draft) Leaping? Swift Current Lake? Exaltation? Bound? (I have taken the liberty of fixing all the misspelled words I scattered along the way)
The only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock
where the canoes tied up
and close my eyes
when the air brushed the soles of my feet.
You’d gone ahead
(you always did)
shouting in blue lipped exaltation
and surfaced to shake your hair like a sheep dog
(you wore it long that year
like the boys did back then
with a courduroy jacket for school picture day)
I was the girl who eased into even indorr swimming pools
little toe top shin knobby knee skinny thigh
breaking out in goose flesh and rattling teeth
while you bounded off the board
getting it over with
and I took little steps, bound foot steps
tasting every degree.
But even I knew that there
under a feeble late summer Montana sun
the only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock
where the canoes tied up
and to close my eyes when the air brushed the soles of my feet.
Here’s the current draft:
Bound
The only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock where the canoes tied up
and to close my eyes
when the air licked the soles of my feet.
You’d taken flight ahead of me
(you always did),
surfaced to shake your hair like the stray dog
who’d claimed us the day before
and to shout in blue-lipped exaltation.
I was the girl who eased into indoor swimming pools
toe shin knee thigh
breaking out in goose flesh and rattling teeth.
You got it over with,
bounding off the high board.
But even I knew that here,
Montana in the fall,
the only way to do it was to run
one two three four
and then to surface shouting in blue-lipped exaltation.
#
Peek at more revisions here.
Filed under From my notebook, Poetry | Comments (7)
Poetic transformation
I wrote this poem about a year ago, in the Poetry Thursday days (I was writing on a different blog then) and have been trying to turn it into a villanelle (there’s a good discussion of the form here). I almost always write in free verse; when I write to a form it seems to me that it’s pretty obvious that I’m not comfortable with the structure. My sonnets feel like diddys, my villanelles come out sing-songy. It takes a truly light hand to use forms to enhance the content rather than allow the content become slave to the form. I don’t think I have that touch.
With that in mind, this weeks’ ReadWritePoem prompt - to rewrite a formal poem in another form - was a perfect time to return to work on my villanelle; I’d set it aside a long time ago. Technically, I’m not quite responding to the prompt; we’re supposed to take a formal poem and transform it to another form and I’m taking free verse (but with a structure) and turning it into a formal poem. Still, it does demonstrate how changing the form transforms the poem.
Here’s the orignal free verse poem:
Fresh water fugue
My father was a fisherman.
The rivers he fished echo through the summers of my childhood like a fugue.
Their names are smooth and round in my mouth
like the river rocks I rolled in my hands as a child:
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
My father was a fisherman.
I grew up bathed in the light of his long love affair
with the waters of the American west.
Trained by an angling eye, I learned to worship
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
My father was a fisherman.
He lived many miles from the headwaters of his heart
but summer after summer he fished those rivers
and summer after summer those rivers restored him:
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
My father was a fisherman.
From him I learned the rhythms of happiness,
rhythms of happiness that flow at the pace of trout streams.
Like a cygnet I imprinted on the river valleys of
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
My father was a fisherman.
He gave me gifts that glistened like the scales of a brook trout,
gifts I used hard and fierce without thought to value
the way children use gifts, their measure taken only years later:
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
My father was a fisherman.
Though I have watched the sun rise over the Grand Canyon
and seen it set on the Swiss Alps
at night when I dream my heart dreams of
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
For my father was fisherman.
And perhaps there is river water in my blood
or some gene my father handed down.
Or perhaps it is simply that we love best those things that we loved first:
the Yellowstone and the Firehole,
the Snake and the Missouri,
the Big Lost and the Big Wood.
The Madison.
#
Now here’s the villanelle:
Fresh water fugue
My father was a fisherman.
His heart began to beat
in autumn when the brook trout ran
churning river rocks and sand.
At the headwaters of his heart
my father was a fisherman.
His river home, the Madison
and river water in his blood
in autumn when the brook trout ran
pulled my father off the land.
At the headwaters of his heart
my father was a fisherman
all the years I knew the man.
He hatched his most honest self
in autumn when the brook trout ran.
It’s the single truth I know.
If but one memory holds:
my father was a fisherman
in autumn when the brook trout ran.
#
The orignal free verse poem is actually a cannibalized essay. I like that I’ve gone from 3000 words to 56 lines to 19 lines. I think by the time I get it right, by the time I say the one true thing about my father I’ve been trying to say since he died almost 20 years ago, it will be a haiku. It would satisfy the fly-fisherman in him for me to tell the greatest truth with the fewest words. He knew the pleasures of landing a big trout with a light touch.
You can read more transformations here.
Filed under From my notebook, My process, Poetry | Comments (4)Saturday morning poetry
Whatever else happens during the week, Saturday mornings are mine. My husband is in charge of the boys and I have two or three uninterrupted hours of my own. I usually head for a coffee shop and I usually work on my poetry. I only have a few hours because my baby will not take a bottle, not a bottle of breast milk and not a bottle of formula and it’s completely frustrating and we’re working on it. The hours are precious; I feel the minutes acutely as they pass and it’s time I can’t let slip away. One Saturday I was having trouble working, the words weren’t coming and when they did they were as graceful as a three-year old on ice skates. But because time alone is such a premium I can’t let it slide by unused. Here’s my journal entry from that morning:
“Having trouble working. Jumping around. Do some Goldberg 3 lines in 3 minutes.
[I looked out the window for inspiration]
The flag outside
waves goodbye
To winter
Blue sky tricked me.
I have my sunglasses
but it’s started to rain.
[I looked out the window again and noticed a stall at the market strung with Dream-Catchers and dangling crystals.]
She sells rainbows at the market
hanging from fishing line
and dancing to the wind.
[I liked that and thought I could keep going]
She sells rainbows at the market
hanging from fishing line
next to the wool socks
and dancing to the wind.
They are always in season
but sometimes hard to find
during the long March days.
She knows the secret places,
the hollow under the tree
on the north slope
and the thick mud of the river bottom.
You’d be surprised
the places she finds them:
the second floor of the sandstone building
next to the clock tower,
and her brother-in-law’s cellar.
She collects them all week
and sells them on Saturdays
rain or shine
setting up her stall next to the man with the spices and herbs
and across from the well-made wooden playthings from Germany.
She does a good business
in all kinds of weather.
People always want rainbows
with their steaming cup of coffee from the couple selling cobbler
and heady homemade cream.
It’s a sideline, selling rainbows,
Her real work is the greasy brown of dirty dishes
and ketchup stains
and people who seem to be tipping less these days.
The rainbows keep her in the black.
[at this point I can feel the poem is really breaking down and I think I have enough of an idea there to come back to and tear apart and revise later and maybe turn it into something. I stop the free-flow of writing and go back to read it over once and make the following minor changes. The real work of revision will come days or weeks later when I come back to it.]
She sells rainbows at the market
hanging from fishing line
next to the wool socks
and dancing to the wind.
They are always in season
but sometimes hard to find
during on the long grey March days.
She knows the secret places,
the hollow under the tree
on the north slope
and the thick mud of the river bottom.
You’d be surprised
the places she finds them:
the second floor of the sandstone building
next to the clock tower,
and her brother-in-law’s cellar.
She collects them all week
and sells them on Saturdays
rain or shine
setting up her stall next to the man with the spices and herbs
and across from the well-made wooden playthings from Germany.
She does a good brisk business
in all kinds of weather.
People always want rainbows
with their steaming cup of coffee from the couple selling cobbler
and with heady homemade cream.
It’s a sideline, selling rainbows,
Her real work is week days are the greasy brown of dirty dishes
and ketchup gravy stains
and people who seem to be tipping less these days.
The rainbows keep her in the black.
At the line “she collects them all week” I’ve jotted “stumbles here” in the margin and starting at “It’s a sideline, selling rainbows” I’ve written “Breaks down here. Move this idea up top (and reworked)? Drop altogether?” At the bottom of the page I’ve noted “Cute but doesn’t go anywhere.”
I type up the drafts from my notebook and keep editing them; this draft is sitting on my desk, still cute, still not going anywhere, but still with a few good lines in there that might have a future.
Filed under From my notebook, My process, Poetry | Comment (1)