Russian Don't Get You Anywhere Faster

At the end of February, I took stock of my poetry manuscript and realized I may need another month. I was still unhappy with about 15 poems. Five were scrappable if they didn't shape up and become something soon and 10 more were sent to the Orphanage of Unrealized Thought. It's a sad place. Full of little bastards (literal) that talk in stuttering phrases about their parents Muse and Time and wonder who neglected them more.

So I've given myself another month. It means I missed a few poetry manuscript contests I wanted to send out for but as these things go, I may have another chance next year when this doesn't get picked up. So I keep slugging away at my naughty children, dressing them up in newer clothes (line breaks), comb their hair (smooth out the rhythmic snags), and try to cram them full of good manners (new phrases, words, lines, fancy stuff!) before shipping them off to their mean aunts and uncles (the wonderful judges of first book contests).

Here's something with lines reappropriated from another poem. The feeling is still the same. The ending and especially the beginning are different.

The Secrets That We Keep

Last night there was a dream in our bed,
either yours or mine, where the avenues
filled with water, all of New York suddenly
Venetian, and the cabs went gondola,
trolling the river roads with the posts of old signs.
And you and I were at the window, wondering
at our new world, if the city would validate us
our defunct subway passes, and I asked,
“Do we love each other better now?”
To which you oracled back: The moon is
only the sun’s, the waves the moon’s,
the sky the waves’. For all, to all, jealousy
is king. Be jealous for me and I’ll never
let the earth claim you, from bones to words.
And then you resheathed yourself in sheets
and I climbed in next to you, bought a ticket
for the same destination, a place we are
whole and parts. Singing back towards real
morning. Where one of us will share this
dream and both will believe it.

Editing Your Life

I was at a poetry/Russian translation reading last night. I asked friends who had published books to give me some advice on what to do here at the final touches of my manuscript. A friend of mine asked me to explain what my book is about. Not for him. But for myself. That I should be able to articulate what some of my reasons for writing it is.

So here it is:

There is a certain power in writing through your own life. It means you get say-so on history. I've never believed in non-fiction so I have no moral problem with pushing or pulling things to my liking. We do it anyway. A story is one way to one set of eyeballs. Memory is faulty. I have no allegiance to the past or anyone else's version of it.

So I keep rewriting and reinventing my life. A little here or there. Until it becomes less my story and a parallel universe cruising next to me. A looking glass of altered reality, better or worse with my telling. The Allen and Craig and Candace of my poems are not my siblings. But have echoes in them. The Mom is not my Mom. But is James's mom, the James of this place I create. He is angry at points when I'm not angry. He will not forgive where I have let go. The James in my created world is a man/boy looking for the sky to fall down on him. Is sure that doom is around the corner from him and he's right. I have doom coming for him.

The best thing about Parallel James is he gets insight where I did not. He synthesizes his life immediately within 20 to 40 lines (my average poem length). He is master of the past and present all at once. He is the recipient of all my hindsight and sometimes teaches me. Sometimes I try out an idea on James, see how it works. He is a camera I look through. I use him to focus on one moment of life at a time. Instead of living it again, I dissect it. Examine it like a god.

Here's another edited poem from this morning:

File This Under: Things You Should Have Seen Coming

What we left when we moved:
a button, the wheel and hose and nozzle,
the dirt in our treads, a wild side garden,
the holes of the nails, a watch battery, a lie,
stove and pipes and cabinetry,
the dust of our skin, and the sounds of us,
shoe scuffs and creaks we caused,
ideas of permanency, the anxious dream quit,
the skeletons of poisoned mice catacombed in walls,
the tire swing about to give, the tree we gentled into the earth,
friends, an address, a phone number, him—

We left a giant letter A painted on the garage,
not by us but a family previous,
for which we harbored a kids hope
it meant something nefarious like Assassins or A-Bomb,
but assumed it stood for Anderson or Adams
We know now. It meant what it always meant.
We learned the word foreshadowing long after we left.