Wait, What Am I Saying?

Poems that mean things you maybe didn't mean them to mean. If you see what I mean.

Photo by Jimmy Yang on Unsplash

Isn’t the whole point of a poem to mean more than what’s being said? Some poems, certainly, are written with a subtext in mind. Others are descriptions, pure and simple. Then there’s the poem you write as a description, only to re-read it later and discover that you described more than you meant to.

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THIS WOULD BE A GOOD TIME


This would be a good time
for a change in the weather

for bitter winds to slow and draw some deep moist breaths
for arid frosts to melt and dream of mercy

This would be a good time
for a season of night-long rains

endless and soft from sundown to dawn
silently tapping stone-hard earth to loam

rinsing ash and dust from weary air
to compost in the soil like tears.

This would be a good time
for mild days swelling warm around noon

for long still days when soil can catch its breath
and welcome the night’s rainfall, welcome seed

for days whose noon heat quickens root and leaf
then eases cool again – no sear, no spark.

Not to say there is any forecast
for a change in the weather

not to say we would agree on how to change it
if the change was ours to make, only to say

this would be a good time.

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THE LIGHT WHEN THINGS ARE CHANGING


There must be a word that painters know for the light
when things are changing – the way the sun’s rays, 
at certain times and angles, seem to mix with just a drop 
of indigo darkness, just enough to deepen 
every shadow, large and small, to trace the outlines
of every leaf and roof-tile and banner, every field of sky,
their colors concentrated, poignant as inlays in ebony; just enough,
that single unseen indigo drop, to change daylight into a reminder
that night is coming.
                                      Autumn, long ago, when I noticed, 
for the first time, this shadowed clarity – earth and sun, I thought,
angling toward winter, and for years I watched for it,
a sign of the season’s turning; but now, in springtime,
I see these softer, newer colors dappled, defined
by their own coming midnight. Will it be true 
in summer, too, I wonder? Is the sun changing, 
slowly, the way it touches earth? Or have my eyes,
over years, grown like a painter’s in one way
at least, more able to discern, in every season,
every changing moment, how color and darkness 
mix and hold each other, outline and deepen
the truth of light in shadow, shadow in light?

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poems using the little widget above the photograph. Extra audio-popcorn this time, sorry about that.]

I wrote “This Would Be a Good Time” over May and June in 2022, and I knew exactly how many things I was trying to talk about in one poem. After years of drought and several horrific wildfire seasons, my state was heading into another hot, dry summer. Nationally, campaigns for the midterm elections were heating up, and the leak of the Dobbs decision had added fuel to an apparently unquenchable fire that threatened to consume the well-being and lives of millions of women. I was, in all ways, parched for some different weather; not expecting it any time soon, just wishing it would come.

“The Light When…” was written in 2013, and I could have sworn I was writing nothing but a description of what happens when the seasons change and the sun’s beams hit the earth at a different angle. When I read it again a couple of years ago, it finally occurred to me: You goof, this is a poem about mortality. How did you miss that while you were writing it? Well, I did miss that. I was busy describing what I could see, as clearly as I was able; in the process I ended up describing something else that was there to be seen even though I hadn’t seen it yet. If that seems odd to you, I promise it seems odder to me.

What I mean to say is: Sometimes a poem knows more than the poet does. And some of the best poems happen when the poet forgets what she thinks she knows and just pays attention.