The Problem with Poems

 

The problem with poems

if you’re the kind of person who’s always anxious

until he pulls into the driveway

turns off the light locks the door

replaces the toothbrush in the toothbrush

holder, feeds the dog, kisses the wife

switches out the burned out bulb

greets the morning with a smile

opens the file

pulls the lever

lets out a singular sigh

 

The problem in short if you’re a person whose heart

cannot rest

until you are safely there

the problem with poems is not that you never arrive.

The problem is

 

you never arrive.

For the love of poetry in all people

 

 It sounds as though you're not particularly interested in exploring the experience a poem wants to give you. There's nothing wrong with that. Some people are not interested in what poems do. Some people are not interested in baseball, some are not interested in poems. If we go to a baseball game for the final score, there's no point in arriving before the ninth inning. And if we go to a poem just for the meaning, we can search the internet for a convenient paraphrase--which may or may not be there or accurate, but which is not the poem anymore than the box score is the baseball game. We have to learn to enjoy baseball or we can't enjoy it. The same again is true of poetry. I'm always concerned about the fact that we encounter poetry most often in school. School is where we learn about poems because we not yet at the place where we can experience the poetry of poems in the way a baseball fan experiences a game of baseball.

Because it's the poetry in baseball that makes it fun. And it's a lack of sensitivity to that poetry that makes it boring to the uninitiated. Learning what poems do is something that happens all in the head, in the same part of the brain that does math. (There's also a poetry to math, but you have to be pretty good at it before you can experience it.) That part of your brain where you learn without experiencing is always boring. With all these things: math, baseball, poems (also grammar, cars, sewing, pottery, cooking, rearing children or raising chickens) there is the poetry--where a part of your brain explodes with fireworks and orgasms--and there's the "what the hell does that mean? How on earth does that work?" “What in God’s name just happened?” part. Boring, frustrating. I hold out the hope that everyone loves poetry. But some people never experience it. And some people never experience it in poems. 

Weird

I think I must be odd.

Not odd, weird.

I think my friends think I am weird.

I think when I am not there they tell each other how weird I am.

I think they tell each other this, that I am weird, even when I am there, among them.

They look at each other and nod and roll their eyes, and their heads say, “That’s just Alan. He’s weird.”

I think they think they tell me I am weird.

I think they think if I would just stop doing these weird things and saying these weird things I wouldn’t be weird anymore. I think they would like it if I wasn’t weird.

I think they tell me directly and clearly right to my face in no uncertain terms that I am weird and also what it is that if I stopped doing it I would stop being weird, instantly. I think they think that that would be better. 

That would, of course, be better.

I think they think I hear them, they are so clear and so direct and so unequivocal.

The Line that Makes the Face

  

 

The line that makes the face

old is easily traced, but the one

that isn’t there, isn’t there

to be erased, that one’s, that one’s

 

Why do I feel the need to wear a hat

when I go outside? I’m not that bald

yet. Yet, voila, old man,

a hat.

 

Talk, make a numbly sound at least

when there’s clearly nothing to say

nothing you could say; the word that startles

the spring that releases

the drawer that hides the clue

doesn’t exist, has never existed

for you.