On poetry. Agency in. Me and.

Do you like how I forgot to finish yesterday's post? I think there was supposed to be another sentence or two in there, and I forgot them.

The complainy part (it's short and there's pay-off): It's getting to the point when my days seems heavy--so much time to fill before I get to go to eat lunch, go to bed, etc. I should be filling days with, you know, putting together annotated bibliographies and charming professors into chairing my thesis. Or something. But instead, they drag. I'm avoiding. I hates it.

The (cryptic) resolve: a poem I wrote--

Grounds

I knew, when I closed the door,

(we’d just painted it the color of a hershey’s bar

and it stuck a little

and was built heavy anyway)

Turned the deadbolt,

Walked straight into the sun,

That the hummingbird I left in the shed

Wouldn’t last the weekend,

Not even the day, probably—

Panicked and shut up in the dark.

According to Wikipedia,

Hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death,

Which is a thing I kind of knew already

(but the internet puts it better than I could).

This morning, gathering sand

and grass clippings

from the corners with a push broom

I found and swept its body (it dried out like a moth,

To almost nothing)

Into a metal dustpan.

I wasn’t surprised. But was—

What?

Felt like I should mourn

A little.

Before I sifted the lot into the trashbin.

It got caught, was the thing.

Our shed’s facing rolling doors—

The springloaded ones,

With chain-pulleys—

Were open all day:

I was driving the mule in and out,

Loading and unloading trash,

Loading hoses, the leaf blower, the air compressor

(we kept our pavilions clean)

It must’ve flown in and up,

Toward fluorescent lights that weren’t the sun,

Buzzing up near the cinder block ceiling.

I tried shooing with a broom,

Tried bright orange sprinkler flags near the doors

(this works with bigger birds)

Even climbed up the ladder

And interfered till I worried for the poor fellow’s heart.

(My sister once scared baby quail to death with a plastic grocery bag).

But birds are dumb,

And my day was through.

So I put the flags and ladder away,

Left a half-dozen wildflowers on a wheelbarrow

And turned out the lights.

I don't love this poem. Later it will be richer, poetically, and shorter, and the tone will be consistent. But the thing is, the criticism that cut deepest because I know it's true and haven't the slightest idea how to fix it, is that the speaker isn't implicated. S/he isn't an agent in this poem, doesn't act. My classmates wished the speaker would've killed the bird outright or something.

And. I've been thinking about poetry and memory: about memory as a defense mechanism (children often accused of lying develop this, no? A preternatural capacity for detail? As if remembering that my mom was wearing her green silk jumpsuit on the day I tripped on a seam in our marble floor and chipped my tooth would prove that I didn't feed the dog purple crayon...). About poetry as a repository for detail/memory. About poetry, then, being a defense, an alibi. Closed and furtive. Passive.

So. I take "I" out of my poems? I look back toward nature (all of my best poems were nature poems. Some biography poems were also good), focus more on observation of detail?

Plan my day, find a project, do the hard thing?