2014 April PAD Challenge, Day 20: Write a family poem.
Donder’s Test
Since I knew about you I have wondered
when you – if you – would ever center
in my field of view or loiter
somewhere out in my periphery.
But now
since I know you are no longer,
I wonder–
did you ever wonder about me?
I don’t own a gun, I’m not a playwright, and I don’t know all that much about Chekhov. But I do know he supposedly said this:
Or, in my vacuum-shrunk version:
“Don’t bring up the gun if you ain’t gonna shoot it.”
Even when I’m not writing anything creative, even when there’s no story to tell or scene to write, I often put the rifle on the wall. And too often, it ends up not doing anything.
Instead of racing into something, I’d be much better off taking the time to work out where I’m headed—make myself look at every detail not as something to get done, but as part of a composite problem, something with a beginning, middle, and end. Something like a story.
Before I plod through a task (like, say, manually entering data on a 1000+ cell spreadsheet), I should figure out what exactly I want from it: what I want to accomplish, what this action is doing to get there. That way, I wouldn’t spend an hour finding out it wasn’t necessary. I’d only spend a minute.
I can have all the speed in the world to finish things, but the advantage gets neutralized the moment I use it to complete something extraneous.
I should figure out that rifles are no good when you don’t need to shoot anything.
Let’s play make believe.
Make believe that time could be an experiment – that if only we had the right recipes, we could plot the events of our lives, make plans without anyone laughing.
I have this pre-, self-made belief that I can make motion: that I can make anything.
But it’s based just as much on the understanding of my own limitations, on the reality that there are no instructions and that even if there were, not everything will always go according to plan. I’d do better to remind myself, too, that the always possible possibility of failure isn’t necessarily because of something I lack (unless we’re talking about luck. Anyone can severely lack that).
Sometimes (oftentimes), in anything anyone makes, there’s a contretemps: a hurdle; an inopportune, unforeseen circumstance; a happening of shit, or a “motion out of time.”
Take your pick of definition. But let me take this moment to invent an antonym.
We can try as hard as we want to make a “pourtemps”: to hedge our bets with as many opportune, advantageous, self-designed events we want; to make such good prophecies, it’s almost like we made them.
But when we most feel like we can counter one, what we’re more likely to end up with is a ‘contre.’
That or just a steaming pot of disappointment.
When you’re there, in the thick of it, it’s not that there’s no motion–
just constraint.
It’s not that you’re broken–
just stalled.
You’re not frozen, just stationary.
Not inanimate, just still.
I was, too, if only for today. Head bent, nose buried, feet leaden…rutted.
But however badly you’re stuck, all you need is an inch. And tonight it was a Facebook note, by a Friend I barely knew.
She wrote that she doesn’t have much time. She said, “In short, I want to tell you all I love you.”
I’ve read it twice and still can’t make them fit, still don’t know which should contain which–
this lament or this gratitude.
It was not a natural death.
That was the phrase she kept using, how she chose to index it in her memory. And how could I blame her?
Mom didn’t speak again for a long time, and not once did she look at me. Her thoughts were outside the passenger window, where she could watch them from a distance.
I’d never known anything to upset my mom to the point that she met it with silence. But still, I pressed.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Soft, almost animalistic, came a little noise of apprehension.
I was relentless. “Please?” Continue reading
Talking Leaves 