Process, and a Poem, and April’s Almost Over

For Wordlers:
This is a long post about how I wrote the poem you followed the Linky to read. You may want to skip it altogether. Because I like the resulting poem, I’m giving it one of those password-protected posts. It’s at the end of this link, and the password is:
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Don’t know if you’re interested in how poems come about, but I just finished one that I think has legs, and am feeling pretty good. If you’re up for a side trip, I’ll tell you how it developed.

Kate, the old cat–soft, sweet, persistent old cat–woke me at about 4:30, the time Jim’s alarm is set for on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Not recognizing Saturdays as sanctified, Kate wanted breakfast. I wanted sleep, and once I might have won, but sleep is less malleable than it used to be. It’s become an either/or proposition.

Pretending not to have been beaten by a cat, I opened my iPad and read today’s prompt at Poetic Asides (where Robert seems to have finally discovered that you can, indeed pre-set publication). Problem. That is the prompt, Problem. My problem is that I can’t sleep. I have others, too. I have a tiny scar on my brain that gives me small, irritating seizures. I have restless leg syndrome, I have eczema, thin hair, and carry enough flesh for an extra well-rounded individual. But the sleep thing…

I go to the bathroom, look out the window, no rabbits in the yard. Feed the cats. Start some water for tea. (We use the coffee maker now. I’ve let too many kettles boil dry and melt into the stove) Juggling three notebooks and the iPad, I try to find the list of Wordle words that came in last night’s email, and consider the nature of problems.

i imagined the aliens
would slurp me up
and, recognizing one
of their own, fix me.

is what I come up with for PA. It is the truth. I did fantasize that the space ship would hover over me, drawing me up through a beam of power/light. They would repair my damaged brain, and while they were at it, they would make me thin and gorgeous. I figured: If you’re going to dream, why not go for the works?

Really, though, I was considering the problem of sleep.

birds, their heads in their armpits, sleep.
cats and roly-poly bugs sleep as circles.
dogs circle and circle and sleep.

When I was young and depressed I slept (hours and hours)
on my back, hands gathered on my breast
like a dead painting, and I do not remember
dreaming, only going to sleep and waking
in that same effigy of repose. When
I smoked dope, I slept under coffee tables,
still listening to the music and voices
in the thick air, until someone moved me,
flowing like silly putty (slowly) to bed.
Those were the good old days

I liked that bit, and decided to try to work the wordle into it. So I have the notebook with that draft, a second that has the words, and a third to work in. It’s too late to become organized. The words are:
lane, alley, sea, eyes squander, accommodate, flocks, green, follow, pewter, beating, intractable

I tried a rewrite,
which includes “dogs circle and circle, beating down the intractable distance to sleep with dogged purpose” bletch
and “music and voices and the beating heart of the human sea” (a bit much)
but I did get “did not squander sleep on dreams“, which I rather liked, but not enough

This isn’t working. I make my tea. There is a crow the size of a wild turkey out in the alley. Birds in the morning are obnoxiously loud, as are trains. There is a marathon about to be run through town, and into and through Shelby Park, about a mile and a half from me, on the porch staring at birds and nothing. I wonder about sleep before an event like that, before exams, opening nights, battles, during war which goes on and on. You have to sleep or you die. Sometimes, though, the shortchanged brain becomes sly and sleeps while the body is awake.

I think about those birds and their feather armpits. There’s a portion of the brain called the rhinencephalon, the nose-brain. It is primitive, just above the brainstem, yet integrated into the thinking portion, too. Smell triggers memory. Molecules, individual molecules. That honeysuckle, dogshit, sheet that needs washing. Molecules are inhaled, and touch infinitesimal neuroreceptors, and change them, and the message only has millimeters to travel, and it alters the brain, tells it something. The brain is constantly being given rumors and making up stories to go with them.

And sight. The optic nerve is so integrated into the brain that the eyes really border on being extrusions. portholes.

Light flips on its head to get inside the eye,
in the process projecting green grass
onto the orbit ceiling, and flocks of clouds
onto its floor. It bores into the brain next door.

And I start thinking about movies with bank robbers renting the store beside the bank and digging through

I have never robbed a bank
or killed a man, though once
I ran over a cat. It was
on my way to work. I was on
my way to work and, so, I
suppose was the cat–going to
its cat-work in the gray, dewy
morning, where cars are just
like birds: one comes by
and then another. Who would
expect a moment’s inattention
to cost you your life should
a bird drop down onto your
shoulder?

That has some possibilities. But it is a little flat. That does make it a good candidate for wordle words, which can add unexpected things (okay, the bird on the shoulder bit was already a bit wild, but that’s not what I meant)

First I take myself out of the piece and see how it sounds

She could accommodate. She was not intractable.
She had never robbed a bank or killed a man, though
once she ran over a cat.

And I like the sound of it, but who is she? No idea.

The painting on the wall
was a woman. Now she is an alley
cluttered with trash cans at odd
cants and conjunctions, and
if she leads to the sea, we
will follow her with flocks
of pelicans and herds of
intractable children. When
she was a woman, she had green eyes
and hair that could accommodate a curl
She had never robbed a bank, or killed
a man, though once she ran over a cat
in the dewy, pewter morning, on
a one-lane bridge. her heart
kept beating with wings of remorse
she kept driving wings of remorse
beating in her chest felt like
preparations for death, a candle,
a prayer to squander on a boy.
Now she is a painting on a wall
and robs the light of the sun