A Poem Never Written

Maybe you will be the most beautiful poem I never write,

      a sketched outline on a pristine canvas of two lives

   tinted only by suggestion, not experience;

        raw in your power to become ...anything. Or nothing. 

 

If I dipped quill to well, and drafted the results,

       perhaps you would emerge in haiku-

     nothing tangible having passed, only the abstract;

            air meeting water, a heron wading close to shore

                          deeper waters unmuddied.

 

Would I be surpised to see you in Heroic couplet,

   courage found in moments summed of other hand than mine,

          divided by the remainder of steps,

    carrying us through fickle terrains of fidelity?

 

But, really, how would a sonnet with you read?

     Could the constraints of form, the forced rhythm

         accommodate two lands worth of learning

within stanzas as short as human lives and hearts?

 

So then, perhaps we but repeat those ageless stories,

  dictates the imagined villanelle of you;

     every mistake I ever made in love, each truth and lie I told:

making you either another chance, or the final straw.

 

And if you break me, am I free?

  Can even free verse possibly explain how this empty longing space

        was filled by your words and warmth

for a moment so short I wonder if I conjured you from a dream?

 

Am I left at last only with the memory,

     your arm at my waist, guiding me through waterlogged streets

like a child

          always remembering your laughter, a hug and kiss goodbye

in that most perfect poetic form; the driving, damning rain?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Blending time and space and imaginings; remembering someone who might not have ever existed

Spanish version can be found here:

http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/zorra_encantada/766818/

Reviews

[Georgia Gypsy]

This was like watching the movie 'Out of Africa'....a tale told, that feels like a dream, too horrible in parts, too surreal to have happened at all, too beautiful to hope the good parts could happen to you at all....
A very good blending of all things in this...

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you, my dear friend... I always go back to what Kahlil Gibran said and joy and sorrow; how the things that bring you sorrow are the same things that once brought you greatest joy; and the deeper that sorrow carves into your life, the more joy it can hold. When you remember even a single moment of the most exquisite joy and fullness and happiness... all that happens aterward will be a "fall from Eden" of sorts; yet if we are strong, we still praise the one who brought us that joy in the first place. Our most powerful experiences and relationships are all like that, I think.

[Tree]

Just back tracking and discovering some more of your work. I like that you have placed for us here a virtual anthology of your poems, always nice to know I have a place to go when I need to get my fix. This is a moving poem of recollection, and time; and how she after some distance can warp our perception. Tiny events in our life can become mountains of signifigance to us with the passage of time. Important things can last only seconds but later in order to never forget WE MUST elongate the memory, stretch it out. I think about a grainy important photograph that we continue to zoom into looking for more detail Anything that we might have missed, before. Then, because we have nowhere else to go We choose to live between those tiny grains, between the pixels. I have done this. I still do. I think all artists who honor remembrance do this. They have to, in order to survive.

Raquelita I also took a look at your spanish version, and that was even more beautiful.

[Marie Anzalone]

Always a treasure to receive one of your reviews. I am actually trying to get the anthology published, but who knows really if I will be successful. Everyone I've talekd to so far has been a ripoff artist. One critique I have of this site is that the ONLY way to organize work is to put it into a book as chapters, which makes them no longer present as poems. But I digress.

You hit the nail on the head in your review- those moments. Wow. At the time I wrote this, I was still naive enough to believe we could leave life-changing moments behind us, hold them only in memory. Nope. When the creator wants to send a message, s/he will whisper first, then apply heavier handed tactics steadily increasing until you are hit by the proverbial spiritual freight train. This poem, and several to this same individual that followed it, was an attempt to apply order to chaos, to proclaim in my mighty Yawp that I could hold myself to some rational standard of morality when faced with overwhelming circumstancial evidence that it was all going to be a disaster if I went there. But...we are poets. We DO go there- sometimes I think just to see what it is like. But no the moments I describe in here... and attempt to file away as, "already finished business" (ha ha was there ever a greater joke the Universe can play on us, seriously?): they are, as you correctly point out, the things that sustain us. We do go back to them, try to analyze them, try to explain why a rainy night wandering aimlessly through mud puddles the size of lagoons and eating bad tacos in a foreign country with a friend really WAS the happiest night of your night? It's not the rain it's not the tacos... so you are left with an answer that is very uncomfortable sometimes. I like what you say about elongating the memory. I have taken these ones and wrapped them around myself many times on many nights when it was cold. Tahnk you for givign me that permission to continue doing so without guilt.

[Mark]

To view a person, and your relationship with him, in the same space as that unrealized, amorphous space where lovely, or deep, or frightening thoughts reside uninked is truly a stroke of genius. "Can I allow him to flow where he will, or must I impose on him some long-proven and unquestionable design, in order to allow him to express his fulness?" And: "Am I artist enough to effect that design, whichever it is, and if allowed?" You, my friend are unquestionably artist enough. Write on!
For a parallel version of this same question, see my verse,
"A Tattered Tatting".

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you for your insights, Mark. This situation indeed forced me to examine everything I thought I knew, anew, with fresh eyes and a different perspective. I wil most certainly look into your recommended write.

[Alysa]

I have to say, that this is one of my favorite's I've read on here. You're an amazing writer. I can't even take my computer off this page. Ecxellent work.

[masqued_muse]

"But....someone did exist; and once again, I'm forced to remember..."
thank you, creature of transparency...
masqued_muse^^

[Andrew White's Thoughts]

I enjoyed the line, "the imagined villanelle of you."


very poetic...

[Ed Hart]

this is brilliant, and infinitely sad

[bob, small b. aka invs]

i really like the concept of someone being like a poem that was never written. so much potential, but never fulfilled. this was wonderfully written.

[Larry Dyson]

Actually I would be the tadpole just turned into frog...running like all getout to keep away from you the heron...and catching may flys as best I can...cunning little trappers those frogs....Sapos facinate Me..