ash

It's rainy and gray and I've written the worst poem ever

and it's due tomorrow -- or not, if I can't

wrestle it into some kind of shape, so here I am after a long

time away and with no readers here (thankfully I hope, although

if there is anyone out there that's okay too) to read this.

I think the problem with the poem is I'm stuffing

too many ideas into it because I want it to contain some big

ideas but really I'm not much good with big ideas. Today

I'd rather write about the photograph of an entire beach

of sea glass, a dump really, but the tumbledness of salt water

turned the sharp fragments into these amazingly beautiful

lozenges of color.

However, there's this poem and it's in response to an Anselm Kiefer

painting/photograph collage and if you know Kiefer you know

his subject matter is big -- as in the holocaust and war and

German memory via landscape.

The work is titled Alexandria -- another biggy,

one of the most important libraries in the world, destroyed several times

over, all those papyri up in flames, though Kiefer is also referencing

other book burnings, and how collected information can be a threat.

Then I just finished Susan Sontag's book, Regarding the Pain

of Others. About war photography primarily, especially how war

has been depicted and how those depictions shape our understandings.

And so war is a topic I've been thinking about since my son

enlisted in the Army two years ago.

Being the mother of a warrior - well, that's a whole manuscript indeed.

So along comes this painting -- collage really -- and all of its

stuff. And my readings. And my son. And then there's his buddy

who nearly died, who I don't know but somehow that doesn't matter

because it feels close, even though my son hasn't yet deployed.

The poem or me wants all of this in the mix. What a stewy mess.

(I like stew.) I'm not usually intimidated by the messy

wanderings of the associative mind, by working with disparate threads.

But I don't know. What I've written -- draft number blah/blah -- sucks

for real. I know, there's suck and then there's SUCKS. This is the latter.

It's the sounds for one. There are hardly any. Maybe the ideas

have gotten in the way of sound. Also, I now see the enumeration

of the stanzas bugs me. And then there's the assignment, which

calls for several voices -- or at least the sense of that. My attempts

there seem artificial, forced. Which in turns impacts the sounds.

See what's happening is that although now I'm feeling

a bit better as I sort the poem out -- the sucky draft is right here

staring at me -- a beautiful mess. Embrace the suck.