Look around, look around...
A poem about a moment! That's not about you! And is wonderful!
My Substack’s tag-line is “Poems that greet you with ‘Hey, look at that.’ ” Here are two poems which understand their assignment … one I’ve published here before, one that will be new to most of you.
LATE NIGHT ON THE #5 BUS 2013
The dark-haired young man
in a seat facing the aisle
holds open on his lap
a folio-size genetics textbook,
line after line highlighted in purple.
It is May, university finals season.
The young man’s eyes are rumpled as his shirt.
It’s a day or two since he shaved.
He cradles his heavy text the way a monk
would tend his Book of Hours.
As the bus crosses Dellamonica,
he angles his body up and flat to reach
into the pocket of his jeans
and pulls out a handful of lavender,
fresh this morning, crumpled now.
Then he settles back into his seat
and his purple-stained devotions,
while in the margin his tired fingers curve
around the pungent wilted petals, as if around
a candle, or the relic of a saint.ON FENTON STREET 2001
Old man, thin face folded like bark,
hands a green tennis ball
to the strollered child with cheeks like the moon.
Mother singsongs thank-you and delight,
moon-cheeked child stares moon-eyed,
old man totters up the sidewalk.
Brown bark, golden moon,
globe greener than apples or leaves,
loving chorus of wonder
for the gift a stranger gives for no reason.There are lots of ways for a poem to say “Hey, look at that.” All of those ways start with a moment … a this right here that the poet feels compelled to describe and share. How much the poet chooses to wrap around the moment — detail, narrative, pronouncements about What It All Means — depends on the poet, and on the moment itself.
TMI from this poet: I’m working lately on a longish narrative poem, 500-plus words. It’s a kind of poem I’ve written before, based on a personal memory, and the heart of it is a moment that could be described in fifty words or less; all those other words are intended to set a scene, tell a story, reveal a set of characters, so that The Moment, when it arrives, has some of the same resonance for the reader that it had/has for me. As I said, I write such poems sometimes, but I don’t specialize in them; for me, they’re work. (This new one, especially, is being a hell of a lot of work.) Bringing in enough detail to clarify the story without bogging it down, the effort of turning the prose of memory into poetry, trying to be honest but not self-indulgent in describing the me-character, deciding how to talk about what I took away from The Moment in a way that lets the reader find their own take-aways … it’s work I’m glad to do, and it’s a lot.
Which is one reason I’m always delighted when I get to write a poem like these two, describing somebody else’s moment — context-free, just the exhausted student on the bus reaching for his handful of lavender, just a gift offered and received in the middle of a busy sidewalk. Are those moments also embedded in longer, more elaborate narratives? Undoubtedly. But even detached from those narratives, observed on the fly as moments, they’re quietly wondrous. And I don’t need to excavate my past in order to write them. I just need to keep my eyes open.
I really enjoy your character studies as they take me there, then.
You have the gift of capturing moments, and “unpacking” them. Thank you 🙏🏻🪻