I see my face
dropping into buckets
from a faucet
I can’t shut off
Or in a jar that lies
beside me
trembling
as I drive home
It is April and
the rains darken the sky
each afternoon
along the road
Until I hear
in the finger-like sound
my animal body
shedding
Like an uncontrollable
dream
Like a soul narrowing
into every day
People are dying
with nowhere to lie
So I empty my body
and try to dig out the river
inside
But the digging only
widens the river
And now there is no you
no I
I no longer know
what is dark and
what is light
At dusk the moon rises
and briefly kisses
the shore
Click here to read Peter Grandbois on the origin of the poem.
Image by A. C. on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Peter Grandbois:
When it comes to poetry, the creative process is often a mystery to me. In this instance, I sat down to write knowing I wanted water to figure prominently in the poem. I had notions of the way it changes shape and volume to fit into whatever container or the way it flows to fit whatever space. Of course, notions of surface and depth also seemed important. The more I thought about water, the more it seemed the perfect metaphor to talk about identity, the shifting nature of the self. And that’s what I thought the poem would be about.
My poetry writing process is a painful one. I often spend the first couple hours writing down words and phrases that seem to go together. I usually don’t even know what they mean…but I’m listening on an intuitive level for connections between words and phrases — either sound connections or connections on connotative levels of meaning. It’s only when the pressure cooker of time kicks in, that the poem either starts to coalesce or scatters into the air. In this case, I felt the poem coalesce when it surprised me with the phrase “People are dying/ with nowhere to lie.” At that point, I knew the poem was about more than the shifting nature of self. It was about community…and the pain I often feel watching the news to see the horrors our government seems to continually inflict on others….and I knew the poem had become bigger, more inclusive, pushing toward the way in which water contains all things, the way in which we contain each other. How in suffering we are all one.
Peter Grandbois is the author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is the novel/novella pairing, Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
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