A bit about the bookend poems

The truth is, I make stuff up. Well, not really. Much of what I write about is real enough. I mean, I see people and places – moments happen near enough to my attention that the stuff of life is hard for me to miss if I am watching at all. But when I try to get some of all of that stuff down, well that’s when something else happens – a little selecting and shaping.

So here’s a bit about the bookends. I’ll assume this interests you, although the likelihood is that many of you would be more interested in a piano falling from a great height. But what do I know? I haven’t said what I want to say yet. Read on if you want to.

I wrote the first poem mostly because I was sitting on a bench making notes about something or other. It was a beautiful day as beautiful days go. The sun was in my line of sight. Buildings were their shapes and colors. People walked past on the sidewalk. And then a friend came out of the door in front of me. It had not occurred to me that that might happen, although I knew she worked up at the top of those stairs. But it was relatively early in the afternoon. And so on. And then, as it says in the poem, a couple of days later I made a poem out of some of my recollections.

Then, the evening after mostly finishing the first poem, I was walking downtown. Again the weather was a certain kind of perfection – a very mild mid-October. Two friends were having dinner outside on the patio of what is now Merchants. I got invited around for dessert and we were having a perfectly fine evening talking and laughing, when the realization that tomorrow would come crossed into our awareness. The young woman with the rosemary scented hair mentioned in the poem walked by. Somebody pointed out the crescent moon that was about to set behind the very buildings which only I had realized had been the very setting for the moment that occurred earlier in the week that had become important enough to me so that I had written something about it.

So now I hope some clarity comes of all this – assuming you have also read the two poems which have emerged into the universe with my help from within the space of a quarter block and  within the time of about three or four days. Why not say that they are bookend poems?

But here’s the question. How much of this meaning did I create and how much did I simply reveal? And here’s the big one: is there any meaning that emerges from these poems for any readers – for people who were not in those times and places? How does that work?

I recently finished a book by a writer named David George Haskell called ‘The Unseen Forest.’ He described his experiences and the thoughts that came out of his practice of going to the same spot in an old growth forest in Tennessee over the course of a year. He succeeding in putting what mattered to him into words and thereby he managed to transmit some of his meaning to me. Many, many writers have done that for me. Might I have done the same?

Woops, there comes my bus. Must leave these questions to dangle.

The bookend poems

are the two previous  posts,

if you missed the fb introductions.