I
have been struggling to write for too many months now. I can just about manage
a few sentences, a list of observations, the odd scribble about last night's
dream, but the voice of poetry evades me.
I
did find it for a moment - the early hours of Saturday morning brought poetic
chorus through the darkness, as if morning was finally going to dawn. I wrote
the first nine words of a line and they felt like poetry, tasted like poetry.
Those nine words - which seemed to be just the right words, in the right order
- were like a fix. My boyfriend watched as my eyes lit and my fingers tapped
out rhythm on the air. My lips made the shapes of those nine words over and
over again, producing a whisper to coax my ear and mind into uncovering another
line.
On parts of the track the rain has
gathered,
clear and still and deep in the mud
dirt.
Lakes that give the forest to us again
as if it were a dream and we were giants
able to pluck ancient oaks firs
from the water like reeds.
Eventually
all gained momentum ceased as the stanza found its end. It had ended where I
hadn't anticipated or expected. This stanza, which had been thought of as an
opening, now felt more like a dead-end, like I had written myself into a corner
and couldn't quite figure out how to write myself back out.
I
left the poetry puzzle attached to the pad. Occasionally, throughout Saturday
afternoon, I glanced at the words to check if I still liked them.
As
night approached, my cat came fumbling in from the window, patrolled the perimeter
of the lounge before circling inwards and stepping his damp paws across the
laptop and then the paper pad.
I liked the way he caused a few of the words to have inky atmospheres -
as if each were a solitary planet within a universe I still fail to truly
comprehend.
* * *
There
is a turbulence between mind and creativity. At some point the poetry puzzle
was torn from the pad, squeezed between clenched hands until it was compact and
circular.
I
thought it had been taken by the bin men.
But it hadn't.
This
morning when I found the yellow paper orb tucked behind a bookend it made me
think how love will always try its hardest to preserve. I wondered how much
else might have been saved if love had been there longer - imagined a mountain
built from thrown away paper.
Over
time, something begins to accumulate - like mercury within the bodies of hat
makers - and the challenge is in remembering
who
am
I
Thank
you for reading,
Lara