Acorns and Brambles

This is from a kind of how-to-write-poetry book called "Writing the Life Poetic." It's mostly lame and seems chiefly designed to inspire middle-aged non-literary types to produce uninspired work. But there are some acorns among the brambles. Here's one.

Watching my Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea

Rebecca McClanahan

Needing them still, I come
when I can, this time to the sea
where we share a room: their double bed,
my single. Morning fog paints the pale
scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing,
the chenille spread folded back,
my father's feet white sails furled
at the edge of blue pajamas.
Every child's dream, a parent
in each hand, though this child is fifty.
Their bodies fit easily, with room
to spare. When did they grow
so small? Grow so small—
as if it were possible to swell
backwards into an earlier self.
On the bureau, their toys 
and trinkets. His shaving brush
and pink heart pills, her gardenia
sachet. The tiny spindle that pricks
the daily bubble of blood, her sweet
chemistry. Above our heads
a smoke alarm pulses, its red eye beating.
One more year, I ask the silence.
Last night to launch myself
into sleep I counted their breaths, the tidal
rise and fall I now put my ear to,
the coiled shell of their lives.




Her imagery is so precise and yet so evocative, the pictures very clear while they seem to open up into a vast expanse. I love the descriptions of her father's feet, the curtains, the blood sugar tester. It could all be very trite in less talented hands but she manages to really give us something meaningful and worthy out of these small moments of life.


And if there's anything I can say poetry has done for me, it's forced me to take what's meaningless or tedious or difficult and turn it into something worthwhile. I hope that I no longer write because I long for the laurels of poets from the past, or because I find it an escape into immortality. I'm trying to write because it's the product of a life worth going through.