Hurricane


Dear Eugene,

Here I am, writing at an hour when I don't usually write, with tons of stuff I want to write about but not the heart and energy to sift through the rubble and find a gift meaningful to you.

I can never be a poet; I know that already.  You've published a book of poetry and said it took you, what, 55 years(?), to come up with those 100 pages.  That's very prolific, compared to whatever output I am yielding so far--if I should be so shameless to take liberties with the word "output."

Life has its way to drain poetry out of everything.

Now I am not blaming life.  When there is no life there is no poetry. But it is also true that much of life's circumstance is not conducive to giving the light of day to the dark corners of heart.

Am I suggesting poetry should only be about the melancholy?  I hope I am not; though I must say it often feels like so to me.  Maybe the word is not sadness, but thoughtfulness.

Yet so often the birth of a poem feels like a hurricane sweeping through...I don't even know which part of my body, for it appears to have bypassed what I would usually understand as "thinking" and oozed out of whichever pore on me it happened upon.  I could have choked on Scrabble pieces to cough out that bloody poem.  (I am sure Homer didn't work with a perpetual sore throat; so this is totally about the narrow me speaking narrower thing.)

Just now I felt the grease on my forehead.  It's sticky.  And just for that I would rather go take a shower now then to continue writing.  It's pathetic.  It's not a hot day; I don't even know why the grease.  Yes of course I was shooting bees again (and the fun wears thin pretty quickly), I was walking my dog, brushing her teeth, vacuuming for the second time today (I should wrap her up in duct-tape to prevent any further shedding), being stopped by my neighbor when taking out the trash to engage me in a long, futile, convoluted conversation for the umpteenth time about her malfunctioning cable box.  But these are routines, stuffs you do everyday to put order to things.  I am all for order and discipline and good habits.

And what if a hurricane is to come along?  You might not believe this but you can actually ignore her and she will actually just go away quietly.  It's totally crazy, I know.  A hurricane, leaving with her head down, knowing her place is not to be found in this--Alex's--ordered life.  When you have done this snubbing often enough very soon she won't even bother to show up.

 What's the point? she said.  This guy has not a grain of poetry in him.

Yours, Alex

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