The Geography Project: Finding the Baseline
I thought I wrote this poem,
but looking for it, all the spirals
all the folds and stitches, all the scraps are filled
with other things and empty lines, and this
poem of memory and
geography is nowhere.
It must have been written in bed, where pens hide
between cotton quilt and cheap red acrylic which is
always warm (for the cat). and on dream paper.
In the motel of memory, there is always paper in the drawer,
a phone book too skinny to believe, and the same same bible.
And even when the whole family stays in ajoining rooms
we never unlock the doors and have a party, drifting from
suitcase to suitcase with plastic cups and crushed ice,
we never get to bounce, trying for the ceiling from other beds.
Of course, all the beds are alike, but we don’t know that then.
Someone draws simple line cartoons like this:
There is a world. A globe. A sketchy beachball
ottoman-like circle world. And a man: a sketchy
little thurber-man, standing at about the one o’clock angle.
As we all stand, whatever o’clock our home is.
He has to look toward his feet to see the horizon: it’s small
and all his events are squashed into the energy
entering through his iris, which turns them upside down.
But if he were enough of a speck to fit easily under the desk drawer
or inside the arching dome of a leafless forsythia; and content to sit
for hours on a step of back stairs turned closet, making ladders
of old hose and step-ins, that same horizon is enormously invisible.
Stand on the world, a seal on a beachball,
or crawl, printing crinoids on your knees;
the views differ, but the result is always inexact
cartography.
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This isn’t what Margo had in mind, but I had odd difficulties with the prompt. Maybe I’m not quite getting the concept, and it’s just something I’ve been doing already. I write my grandmother’s farm quite a bit. (It’s much easier to explore than our own house, which was small and uninteresting. Also, there is the matter of my mother’s anger, which was less likely on more neutral territory.) The house and the farm contain most of my personal myths, but there’s no telling it in a single poem.
I’m a bit bumfuzzled.
I love this poem, Barb. Each stanza stands on its own with a wealth of imagery.
Pamela
I also wonder if I approached this prompt correctly. hmm?
Well crafted with great images.
Okay. Before I read your comment, I read the poem and, as I read, I thought, Barb is avoiding the prompt [or your brain is]. So, it was interesting to read what you had to say.
Let me say what I think my own prompt is asking and see if it matches in any way the way you read it. The prompt asks for a description of the earliest place that had an effect on you that you carry with you, your baseline landscape against which all other places are measured, or from which they evolve in their affect on you. Then present it in such a way that you place us there. Make any sense?
It does not have to be positive and from what you say yours isn’t. However, your grandmother’s sounds like it may twin your home, as a baseline landscape. I understand your comment that there is no telling it in a single poem. I have never been able to capture Hong Kong, never mind my childhood and Hong Kong.
You may want to put this behind you as a prompt, but is there a single spot at your grandmother’s that you carry with you? Maybe, a moment with her you keep in your memory? On the other hand, in some ways this poem reflects your baseline landscape…
margo
Ooh, Margo, I now realse that I missed the point entirely with my response to your prompt!
Barbara, given Margo’s parameters as explained here, I reckon your poem is absolutely spot on. You’ve reproduced an atmosphere entirely believable to the reader, with fascinating memories interwoven. I loved your poem.
First of all, I love the Thurber-man.
Second of all, it reminds me of the film Adaptation; this is a poem about the difficulties in writing another poem, and it turns out the two were the same all along. But you managed to hide it (and the conceptual geography) inside itself, somehow. And so I’m still trying to work that out.
barbara, in my world, “bumfuzzled” IS a place, and a familiar one. Somehow in feeling like you didn’t write about place, for me, you so.very.did. I love this. Have loved your work for awhile now. You’re right, this is a bit different for you…but still so very you, and so very wonderful.
Your place is both physical and metaphysical. There’s a touch of surrealism, like
inside the arching dome of a leafless forsythia
It comes across as experimental which fits the theme I suppose.