30/30: Golden Shovel #9

Source: Breaking the Bonds of Mere Language

Suppressed words invade my dreams to the breaking

Point. I drown in mystery, obscurity, the

Enigmatic, cryptic, garbled, murky, until ripped bonds

Of intention, of significance, of

Meaning reduce rationality to mere

Surface, questioning the existence of language.

Here is how I am using Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

30/30: First of My 30 Poems in 30 Day

Last Sunday I learned about the Golden Shovel format for a poem: take a line from another poem or any text and write a poem in which each line ends with a word from the text, with last words being in order. Example: take this line from a poem: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”; the first line must end with “two”; the second line with “roads”; the third line with “diverged”; etc. I’m going to try to write a poem a day in April, for National Poetry Month, following the New York Times’s “At Home” project to start with a headline from the day’s papers. Here’s my first attempt.

 

In search of meaning I am finding

there is little in the common

lore to explain the ground

on which we stand, likely

because our different lives tend to

hide our similar desires to be

living, loving beings. It is an uphill

struggle, but I will continue to fight.

#AtoZChallenge: D Is for Death

            Yes, that death. That thing that comes at the end of life. That thing that causes a person to stop breathing, to stop being alive, to end up buried in the ground or turned into ashes. That thing that modern Americans, at least, barely talk about, let alone think about.

            If you’re religious, maybe doesn’t feel quite so final. If you believe your dead loved one is in heaven, still thinking about you and caring for you, in some ethereal way, and that you will see each other again once you die yourself, perhaps death doesn’t feel so final. So like a thick wall banging down between you and the person you loved and lived with for 50+ years.

            My husband, Jack, died last year, on January 5. He had recently been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He’d been in the hospital for a month, disabled for the previous two years after a fall, in moderately ill health for the 16 years before that from a clotting disorder and multiple complications. For years, he continued to say, “I can live with this.” On the last day of 2015, he said, “I can’t live with this.” Hospice, then death.

            Those are the facts. But what do they mean? How do they feel? How do I accept the finality of Jack’s being gone, forever? I have no religion, I don’t believe there’s some nonmaterial existence where he might still be. I can only hold onto the Jewish belief that dead people live on in the memories of those still alive. But my memory is weak where my memories of Jack are.

            I feel like I wasn’t paying enough attention. It feels like I need his physical presence to remember. I miss his body, his differentness, his unique thoughts and feelings. I don’t miss the fights we had over my saving things – or maybe I do miss them. In one of my few dreams about him, I was showing off the bookcases I’d emptied, and he laughed because I’d waited until after he died to do that.

            Why haven’t I dreamed of him more? Why is he dying out of my dreams as well as my life? As he lay dying, I told him, “From now on, your story will be my story. Is that okay?” And he nodded. But it’s not okay.