Elephant: Part 2

I don’t think I’ll ever talk about what any of my poems are directly about, partially because it’s usually obvious and partially because when I’m writing them I feel like I’m on Safari pointing your attention to something outside of our vehicle rather than trying to teach a lesson or tell a personal story as we drive. I want more than anything to be David Lynch which is why I never will be, and so I want to head off any of my proclivities towards fetishizing being cryptic about my work by just saying out loud, right now, that every single one of my poems is simply me saying to you “look, there’s a Zebra” when there is a Zebra in view.

“Elephant” started out as a very bad poem, and if the first version hadn’t been destroyed because of my editing process I would post it here for you. I don’t think that any poem is ever really finished, and I’ve watched some of my favorite writers edit their own poems on stage with a pencil while they’re giving a reading so I know that opinion is an inherited one. But, it does feel like a poem arrives at its general destination at some point and that it’s best to release it once it does so it can roam. This one got to that point during a flight towards the end of last October, and I’m excited for it to be in the wild now.

I mentioned that I would talk about the small, strange door that I find at the bottom of each of my drafts, so I will do my best though I think I’m about to be confusing. It’s a weird thing to say that at the bottom of my Google Docs pages, or Notes pages, or whatever I’m using to write, a little doorknob appears after I’ve let the draft sit for a month or two, and that to finish it I just open it and walk through and write down what I see. Maybe it’s like this: the more I read or write, the more I learn to admit when something I’ve written feels like I’ve just pulled on to one of my own highways. And that if I have anything honest or interesting to say about something I’ve felt or observed, I’ll have to pull over and get back out into my own wilderness again on foot. From there, I only sometimes feel like I’ve managed something worth sharing and very often find that I should just leave that piece alone completely. As an example, I’ve had a line in my Notes app for 3 years that’s just “We do not love the way we say we do”, and for all of our sakes I’m locking it away in the tall tower.

Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I’m following Wendell Berry’s thing about practicing resurrection, but most likely it’s a little bit of both. I think writing is the opposite of the fear so many tribes and civilizations have (very understandably) had about photographs stealing your soul. It’s a process of creating the reproduction of the thing, and then stepping through the image into the thing itself. Which is why I feel that if a piece isn’t very good, it’s because I haven’t spent enough time looking at what I am trying to describe and turning it over in my hands.

Anyway, if you don’t feel like reading a poem right now, or don’t feel like reading my poem “Elephant” specifically, now is a good time to look away from your screen.