~This poem first appeared in International Poetry Review (2011).
Be ribbon. Be bone.
Be lace. Be stone.
Make a bow of
yourself—no,
make of yourself a
bear.
Furl fur, steer
windward.
Make of yourself
a byre. Shimmer. Ray,
then bow: ends
unravel, ravel,
unfurl. Make of
yourself
a curl, a funnel. Bay.
Whine. Say
soon, daffodils
will, miracle
gone before we know.
And that is how time.
And that is how.
Be still. Steal in.
Stare.
Make of yourself
a string unwinding
forever, fire,
make of yourself
a halo of obstacles,
make
inroads, make a
solution
of sunshine, be seed.
Cede. Be siloed.
Cease for a while, be
quilted; in creases,
fall seaward. From
hulls,
rise, riled up,
increase, raise up
sounds of your name
in water, make
yourself
golden, yield.
*****
THE STORY
BEHIND THE POEM
I am
a maker of lists. I have grand and broad intentions, and in the skinny
particular, these become depressing, because it’s hard to change, because
checking things off takes time, because there is always another list to make,
another set of obligations and ideas being written behind my eyes.
This poem
is a new year’s resolution and a to-do list, but one that will not chastise you
for not accomplishing what’s on it. I made it in early 2010. I had gone to
India, to a place in Maharashtra State that has been a home to me but to which
I hadn’t been for nearly seven years. I sat mornings in a dining hall with varnished
wood tables and whitewashed walls and big windows, and I drank chai and wrote,
using an ancient IBM ThinkPad that I’d gotten off Freecycle so I could take a
computer along without worrying about breaking my Mac. It was a Linux machine, so
no Microsoft Word. I was outside of my life; I was more in it than I’d been in
a long time.
I sat
at one of those wooden tables, thinking to myself, this is what I want you to
do, and this, now this, this. Thinking of the sounds I wanted, of what fell
from the sound before, like eating my way through a series of diverse little
treats, like colors, like the colors of words.
I was
thinking also of the field where I first learned to drive, a field up the road
from my parents’ house in upstate South Carolina that was made into hay each
year. When I reread the poem now, this is clear, but I didn’t notice it was part
of the poem until much later: the pale-gold grass of that place. I’m lucky that
it’s still a field, that I can still go back there. Other friends, who grew up
near different fields and woods, have not been so lucky.
This
is how it always happens for me: In India, writing a poem and thinking, without
even realizing it, of the hay field near my parents’ in South Carolina; in the
Carolinas, missing and missing the dusty sweet air of the Deccan plateau.
The list hasn’t worn out for me yet, but when
it does, I’ll make a new one.
*****
ABOUT ANNA LENA PHILLIPS
Anna
Lena Phillips teaches in the department of creative writing at UNC Wilmington
and is editor of Ecotone and of
Lookout Books. She is the author of A
Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized guide to poetic forms, and the maker
of Forces of Attention, a series of printed objects designed to help people
modulate their use of the Internet and screened devices to their liking. Her
projects and pursuits are documented here.
This is tremendous. Thank you for sharing it.
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