landscapes as large as insomnia

A couple weeks ago several of us started a writer's group so we could get feedback on work in progress and talk about our craft. also including furious rounds of exquisite corpse and writing exercises as homework between meetings. this last week we decided to each write a poem of sixteen lines, edit it down to eight, then four then two lines, a process of, as i see it, learning to refine the essential or necessary metaphors of the piece.

the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).

finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.

so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.



16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)

call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences

this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage

i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world

8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose

i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world

4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world

2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time