I started to compose a poem in my mind as I walked down the city streets to the basement office where I volunteer every other week.  The idea seemed good, and I had the first two lines and the framework for several more.  I thought they would come quickly back when I could sit down and write them.  But at the office other things came up, and I didn’t get to think about the poem till I got home.  And then it was something like waking up from a dream that had seemed very profound but that I couldn’t make sense of at all.  I remembered a few words but not how they came together.  After I thought I would give up, it came together, though I think it’s quite different from what was in my mind earlier:

I walked, entreating the collective mind

Look: who you are is not defined

by what you buy, or tastes refined

through careful choice of things designed

to show your status and proclaim

alignment with some product’s name

I stepped into the crosswalk, feeling wise

to turn from all the billboards for the prize

of seeing how much better we are known

for what we’ve striven for, what we have honed

through stretching into what the day demands

through what we make with our own hands

I liked my words – I thought they would compel

except I didn’t know who I could tell.

Tomorrow begins National Poetry Month, and today I spent some time on poets.org, following links from their Poetry 101 page, looking at their list of poets who have defined the poetic landscape, hungrily pouring input into the cavernous gap of my ignorance. Later, while I was scrubbing the tub, I thought of two sentences: “It was so old, I was surprised to find it true;” and, “It was so true, I was surprised to find it old.”  They reflected a feeling I got while reading the poems – that our sense of literary time is different from our sense of current time, though both are real in their ways.  As a child, I mourned my lack of the landscape of stories, wishing to trade my suburban environment for the woods, the meadows, the villages that I found in books. Now these things are even further from current experience, but they seem to live on in our language of imagery.

One part of life moves through the surface day

the texting, facebook, groceries, price of gas

Another part moves half submerged

through caves and pools of leavings from the past

This memory, this story, this impression

from which we make our maps, decide our goals

was formed before today’s brash supercession

erased the landmarks, swept away the trails

The little house, the woods, the town – all gone

The farm, the friendly neighbors, wilderness

The landscapes we imagine can’t be found

within this GPS’d and fractured place

But still we walk these paths, in stories, dreams

Within our inner world their presence gleams.