After last week’s find, I decided to do a bit more digging to see what else I’d stashed away.
It’s overwhelming to me, almost, how many poems and how much time I apparently used to have.
Or maybe it’s overwhelming how much less time I seem to have now.
Still, reading old work actually puts me in mind of those days — I recall where I worked and what sort of head space I was in. I remember sitting on the floor — all of my work and stamps and submission envelopes spread out before me in some sort of hopeful order. I remember reading many of them aloud at coffee houses and galleries. I remember being jealous beyond measure of other people’s poems — deeper, more evocative, more surprising than my own.
And really, there are plenty of pieces I might oughta burn — I brought a naivete to the page that wasn’t always charming. Or graceful. Or true.
But there are few in there that I wouldn’t be horrified to share. In reflection. So on that note, I think last week started an informal series of, well, we’ll call ’em Poems from the ’90s. Old stuff. Dotage.
Here’s one:
March Birthday
The house in its dotage crumbles
in on itself
like cake, Friday’s storm
seeping through seams
of tape and sheetrock, the wide window
toward the lake drafty
as a silk blouse – it is winter
cold and stiff and everything
(the kettle, the mother, the boxes
of ill-fitting clothes) everything
wanting
to seem new
doesn’t
— Liz Garton Scanlon, 1999