passageways

i just read the last packet of my final semester. i will miss my mentor terribly. she saved the program for me. saved it. her critique is invaluable to me because she knows how to push me without damaging what i'm after. she has a very socratic method, which i find intensely appealing. i try to model myself after her in that regard now.

there is so much coming, but let me stay in this moment for a while. i realize how rushed and harried i've been, and i'm trying to change that. to learn to linger. i've always been a lingerer but now, there seem to be many more lingerworthy moments coming in rapid succession. the bath last night. pool side with my bestie yesterday. memorial day's long hot embrace. stay there, for a moment.

poetry intensive this weekend, see, i've already ventured out of that moment initial moment of my packet.

i don't know that poetry is meant to explicate everything for the reader. to lay down a linear thread, i think that is the job of prose. poetry is more jagged terrain and drop offs than that. though i understand, the reader must get some enjoyment out of it too, but i trust when the poem comes, it comes as it is meant to come. this is the premise of my process. it is hard for me then to clip a line, to alter a sequence to suit anyone. this is my limitation perhaps. but i can't understand poetry by committee. even the best committees around. poetry is utterly personal. intimate. the choices made there are not without some meaning. though not necessarily linear and progressive in terms of a narrative.

this perspective has always been my liability. it is why i entrust my works to no one. though i do believe the time is coming for me to publish, or, more exactly, to allow another to publish my works. that is a huge trust for me. it has to be someone to whom i'd willingly defer. those people simply aren't around every corner.

i will read the poems critiqued to the poets who have been writing with me, and hearing me for the past five years now. such time has passed. we have all changed. grown. there are conversations i have to have, that i know are coming, which will be difficult. i see it down the road coming my way, and i know i won't avoid it.

i'm looking forward to the long drive up, to clear my head. marion woodman speaking to me of the conscious feminine, understanding how far i've come. time has been gracious with me. it has brought me love, poems, life, health, and strength. and i am reminded of so many things she said to me before i was free. so many things i yearned for in that captivity i once called a marriage.

i'm not down on marriage per se, i'm down on my marriage. i am still trying to finalize that end, but in the meantime, i'm moving on. trusting. who can know what is to come until it has been.

you can't take your garbage with you,

woodman says.

and i remember when we moved out to new york, how i wanted to be done with it all, to let many of our possessions go, not tuck them away into a workshop. i knew the day would come when i would have to return to texas and bury the dead left rotting above ground.

that day is nearly upon us. this summer looks to be the time for my sojourn back. driving back through tennessee and remembering where i came from.