To March

To March concludes This Charming Lab at Kelly Writers House, on March 27, 2004.  

It’s funny, how we can find ourselves playing into stereotypes and still persevere in cliched behavior. I don’t call myself a poet anymore, I rather think of myself as someone who sometimes writes poems. But I do sit in coffeehouses and write, like every two-bit, sub-beatnik, Ginsberg and Bukowski worshipping amateur you’ve ever seen. I often feel self-conscious about doing this, but I force myself to anyway, because if I didn’t, it would mean I care far too much about what the other schmucks in the coffeehouse think. Since the coolest thing in the world is not to give a fuck, somehow in the equation, as calculated by me, I wind up ahead by being resolutely uncool. Besides, there’s always a chance I’ll meet a poetry-imbibing female with a Shelley fixation, or something. Not likely, you say? It so happens I picked up a girl on a train to Manayunk, took her home and scored, all on account of a tee-shirt I was wearing that read, I am as wayward as Shelley.

Now, let’s go back to the poem you’re about to hear and let me explicate, to whatever extent I can. This to me is the ultimate coffeehouse poem, in the sense that it was conceived, written, revised, and completed at the Last Drop Coffeehouse on one day. There’s a certain stillness you get in March, when you’re in the plateau that glides just over winter and just below spring. When I think back to what it was like writing this, I remember that stillness, that I was alone, that it was a cloudy day, semi-sodden, that I was reading Middlemarch at the time, and that it all seemed to blend together in a sort of unforgettable fashion. A timeless moment. But that doesn’t mean the poem’s any good, and in fact the moments that feel timeless while we live them often turn out to be useless, while moments that seem useless are the ones that live on. Whatever. You’ll have to decide for yourselves. You own my work as much as I do, you may not even want it, and God knows I don’t a lot of the time either.

So, look for timelessness, trash, and that weird March mood of suspension, of hanging, of god-damned green-wearing Saint Patrick’s Day and spring training. The poem is called To March:

Tremulous time— rain-laden flowers

threatening to burst forth— sodden
branches quiver. Exhalations still
visible, people linger in watery streets,
hydroplaning tires glisten.

Blue patches line the sky—
droplets engorge terraces— cups
of coffee, especially poignant for
winter-weary souls in still cafes.

Nature at the end begins to forge
invisible buds— suppressed grass
dreams succulence. Clouds shroud
puddles. Lengthening days.

A correspondence exists in me
for this— hovering on fertility’s edges,
writing to find the entire note,
the perfect kiss, moments of grace after
longing, fighting. Every cloud echoes
my reaching. Wanderlust for forgotten forms,

skies abandoned by vapors fixed
to the earth. My mind is hung with sun
flowers springing, lands uncreated,
dim, unpupil’d eyes, needing deeper

roots for a sturdier birth. A trumpet call—
thought processions— friends, loves.
Hands molding, fretfully, with nascent
skill, permanent tapestries. Mud below,

shadows above. Planted seeds poised—
movement, chasms filled. Words
on a wing, where are they? Could I be
writing them now, this normal day, over

cigarettes, George Eliot, coffee, sadness?
Before the bud erupts, it issues a sigh for
the effort, like of priests or of lovers—
crafting the genuine, born out of gladness.