What Became Of What Never Was

In my last post of the second year of this blog (and the last day in the year of my surgery), I included a poem.  After I posted it, I had a feeling I would change it. 

When you think about it, three years (actually, almost three-and-a-half) isn’t really a lot of time in a poem’s life.  Horace recommended that a poem should be set aside for nine years after it was written.  If, after that time, the poem looks as if it’s transcended whatever the poet felt, thought or experienced at the time he or she wrote it, then it’s ready to see the light of day, according to Horace.

Now, he might not think the poem I mentioned would pass the test.  However, I’ve revised it a bit, so I’m going to post it here:

The End of What Never Was

(To My Parents)

I never could have been the boy

Who climbed trees and played football

Like the one in the photo:  the one

Whose father stood proud, whose mother

Pinned stars and bars to his dress grays.

No, I never could have been a soldier

And I never could have been a sailor.

That young girl standing on the bridge

Exchanging vows under crossed swords:

She could not have known she would never be

My wife, the mother of your grandchildren.

I never could have given her anything except

Your name, and a name that was never mine.

After that, I could only lie to her again.

No, I never could have been her man.

She will never see me; she has never seen this day

The way you never could have foreseen today.

None of us ever could have known

I never could have been your son.

Magnolia

Here is an old poem of mine, which I'm posting for no particular reason:


Magnolia

Buds throb red.

Cold raindrops cling
to bare branches
after the first
April storm.

My fingertips swelling,
my body pulses:

the center
of this old wound,
still fresh.

Still, I don’t
pull off my gloves--

There are no leaves
opening
from this tree.

A Poem: The End Of What Never Was

OK. So I said my previous post would probably be my last. The operative word was "probably."

Anyway...I thought this might be a good time to share a poem I wrote in September. In one of my entries that month, I mentioned that I was working on this poem. I'm still not sure that it's done. Jean Valentine, a wonderful poet and one of my teachers, once said that we never finish a poem, we only abandon it.

Well, if that's the case, I'll abandon it to you, dear reader:

The End Of What Never Was

I never could have been the boy

Who climbed trees and played football

While you waited for my letters of acceptance.

I only could have been that student

Who struggled with extra science classes

For a higher score on the SAT math

After I got the Academy's letter of rejection.

Even they knew I couldn't be that son

Like the one in the photo: the one

whose father stood proud, whose mother

Pinned stars and bars to his dress grays.

No, I never could have been a soldier

And I never could have been a sailor.

That young girl standing on the bridge

Exchanging vows under crossed swords

She could not have known she would never be

My wife, the mother of your grandchildren.

I never could have given her anything except

Your name, and a name that was never mine.

After that, I could only lie to her again.

No, I never could have been her man

I never could have even been her ally

Or on anyone's side, not even as a spy.

She will never see me; she has never seen this day

The way you never could have foreseen today.

None of us ever could have known

I never could have been your son.

A New Writing Process?

I've been writing a poem. I know it's dangerous to talk about a work in progress; sometimes you can talk it away. But I feel that the act of writing this poem may be teaching me something even more important than the poem itself, and learning it is probably more important (at least for me) than whether or not I finish the poem.

Then again, Jean Valentine once told me that we don't finish poems; we abandon them!

So far, the poem looks like a sort of epistle. I've always liked that genre of literature; in fact, my second published piece of writing after I started living full-time as a woman was a letter (actually, an e-mail) to a friend who suggested that I publish it. In case you're interested, here it is:

5 October 2003

H-e-e-y-y b-a-a-a-be (I can still do the butch voice, sort of!):

Always great to hear from you.

I’m so tired after doing the sort of bike ride I used to do before breakfast. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve ridden about a quarter as much this year as last.

It was nice, though. I pedalled the promenade under the Verrazano Bridge, out past Bath Beach, Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst. Men in long dark coats and women in loose-fitting dresses tossed bread into the sea. I have witnessed this ritual many times before: The followers of Moses symbolically cast their sins away as they begin anew on Rosh Hoshanna.

Somehow I identified with this spectacle even more than ever. The past few months have included many episodes of tossing away or leaving behind old parts of my life; this has been a time of starting again.

I continued down Cropsey Avenue, past a chrome and glass diner that elongated reflections of splintered houses and cindery garages, toward Coney Island. Kids, still in the light shirts and blouses and dark pants or skirts they wore to church, circled doorways, ran and skipped on concrete lots or darted across streets.

In front of Sea Gate, I turned left and grunted up the ramp to the boardwalk. Weatherbeaten slats clattered and thumped under my tires; wind whipped sand around my face and the only other person (who was pulled by a squat tan dog) I saw as I teetered to the pier in front of the Parachute Jump.

On a day much like this one--sun and wind pushing away summer haze and whipping the first October chill against my skin--I parked my bike by the boardwalk in Long Branch, New Jersey and shuffled through sand that seemed to stretch as far as the ocean. Further, really: At least I knew that if I could follow the ocean I’d end up in Portugal. I knew that the beach in Long Branch spilled into the ones in Deal, Belmar, Elberon, Asbury Park and Ocean Grove; beyond them lay more beaches, but for how far? To Key West? Beyond?

Just how far, I wondered, was it possible to walk where footsteps faded into shadows of the wind?

I was a senior in high school; I’d just begun the process of applying to colleges (among them, West Point and Annapolis). Although I’d had vague ideas of becoming a doctor or a marine biologist, I felt I was envisioning some person I would never meet, who existed only in the hopes of parents and guidance counselors. Those hopes were no more real to me than my father’s idea of my becoming a general or an admiral, no more plausible than any plan to grow up like him, my soccer or wrestling coaches, the parish priests, President Ford, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Bruce Springsteen. Or to become a man of any sort.

I couldn’t describe this dilemma to anyone I knew, in any language I knew at the time. It’d’ve been dismissed as a condition of my adolescence, or worse. I sought the answers in solitude; perhaps, like characters in stories I’d read or movies I’d seen, I’d find the answer echoed in wind and waves or shadowed in the sand. Or perhaps those people who stayed after Labor Day would know--about something. Somehow or another I was supposed to grow into a man, because I had that kind of body. Of course: There was no other choice, I thought.

Twenty-eight years later, I realize I was right. There was no choice, at least not for my male body as it shuffled through sand that echoed the receding sea foam. But as a woman in her mid-forties pedaling along weather-beaten planks, I could continue if I chose. Or I could make a turn. And, perhaps, let that seventeen-year-old boy know that he would be all right, that I would never leave him any more than he would ever lose me.

Oh well. It’s getting late. See you soon.

Love, Justine

I've always allowed the freedom of expression a letter like the one I've shown affords me. That comes about through the relationship I have with the recipient of my letter. And, because I feel the way I feel about whoever receives my letter, I want to write something that's moving and interesting.

And the poem I'm writing is pulling me in that direction: a sort of letter to my parents. It may show them something about me they never before understood, though that is not necessarily the purpose of what I'm writing.

Right now the conflict--which is where the lesson I may be learning lies--is between my "poetic" impulse of being highly metaphorical and imagistic, as many of my poems are and my impulse toward intimacy, which would make the language more direct but could strip it of its metaphors and imagery--or at least the ones that are in some lines of this poem.

Now I'm wondering whether this poem--whether or not comes to be--is going to teach me whether or how the ways I use language--or anything else, for that matter--will change. Will this poem--if it is indeed "born," if you will--be a departure from what I've done previously? Or will it be a modification, or continuation?

I just hope that whatever comes about, for the poem or for me, is more interesting than what I've written here!