SLAP (St. Lawrence Area Poets) monthly meeting in a few minutes. So once again my inspiration is peer pressure. Can’t show up empty-handed. This comes from my rare solo forays away from the North Country, usually to attend a conference in an unfamiliar city. I am, I confess, a streetwalker of sorts–the insomniac sort. Dale Hobson
The hotel room is sterile, quiet–too quiet
for your head to be a-buzz—so you go
down the elevator to the lobby, out past
the bar, too jet-lagged to endure the chatter
of strangers, past the doorman and away
from the avenue brawling with late traffic,
onto the side streets, where no one is walking,
where cats gaze out windows in meditation
at pigeons on ledges, head beneath wing.
You leave behind the phone and car keys
as you left behind home and village, work
and kin, the lights and traffic, seeking—
who can say? Wishing that the night would
swallow all this thinking, the way it swallowed
the light from over the western ocean, the way
it swallows the mutter of a television after
you pass beneath an open window.
Block after block, you try to walk out
of yourself, to reach some place where
sleep could beckon like an open door.
Just you and your shadow, that lengthens
and shortens like the slow beat of a candle
as you pass beneath the endless streetlights.
Just you and the brick echo, clicking back
like an afterthought every wakeful step.
Notes on Just Before the Fall and How it Slipped way
How it Slipped Away was written in a single session shortly after waking from the dream described. I see it as not only about the specific occasion, but about all those times when a notion comes along that could make for a solid poem, but that slip away before the effort is made. Memo to self: Keep notebook (or iPad) handy. It is also about those poems that are simply beyond one’s scope–the vision is there, but the work just falls short. This is most poems, to a greater or lesser extent. Be reconciled to disappointment; but don’t become reconciled to less than your best attempt.
This poem taught me something new, in that the visual elements of dreams remain to me pretty much intact, but the sound and sense, in this case the song, I rarely retain. This tells me something about my brain. I’ve talked with musicians who have had the opposite experience–no visual recollection of a dream, but a perfect recollection of melody.
Just Before the Fall was heavily revised to make the version seen here. Two ending stanzas were removed, and replaced by the last one presented here. I had had this image, while surveying my home domain, of an emperor looking out upon his realm. That this particular realm was looking decidedly down at heels took me to the notion of the rise and fall of empires. My intent was to be a little light-hearted and self deprecating, but Gibbon is pretty dismal stuff.
The first version took the Gibbon progression to its logical conclusion, total ruination. Terry, my life mate and best first reader, said the poem was pretty good but a real bummer. This is an example of a time when following a poetic strategy leads far from one’s intent. Sometimes the result is a better poem, so I wouldn’t recommend against following the poem’s lead. But in this case, the result was not better (or worse for that matter), but it didn’t do the work I intended, and I could see an equally good turn that would. I may not have improved the poem in revision, but I did it no harm either, and brought it back in line with what I wanted.
It occurs to me that I may have abandoned imposing my will on vast tracts of real estate, but I have not given up on trying to enforcing my will upon the page. A subject, perhaps, for a future effort.