Denial

Did I mention, if you stand on your head in the dark it is still dark?

Yes, this morning when the clock said six a.m. it was still dark outside.

But tomorrow when the clock says six a.m. old man sun will be up.

Howsomever, Earth didn’t change the time it takes to spin on its axis.

We push around the hands of a clock as if it mattered to the stars.

Meanwhile somewhere a star goes supernova, planets disappear.

We keep trying to squeeze more labor out of each sorry daylight hour.

Meanwhile a black hole swallows stars where once a massive star collapsed.

Did I mention, pear trees don’t wait for you to turn a calendar page?

After cold has cradled them, they blossom at the touch of the sun’s light.

Honeybee workers vibrate in the hive in winter to warm the queen.

Meanwhile somewhere an unpredicted frost lands heavy on the flowers.

Honey stored to last the winter gone, whole colonies of bees perish.

Meanwhile only the beekeeper will wonder, Where have their souls gone?

Recently I’ve noticed a trend in my poems to begin at a distance then move closer. That was true of Shrinking Bears and of Denial. Let’s begin out in the stars, in the hope that it will give us a timeless, expansive view of whatever is to follow. In this case, it felt right because the subject is time, the very human sense of time and our manipulations of it. It began as a complaint about the onset of Daylight Savings. Writing Denial altered my perspective on an inconvenience that results in much gnashing of teeth in the news and social media.  I hoped to become less reactive to the change. And yet, I heaved a mighty groan before getting out of bed this morning.

Denial also began as an exploration of the form Diane Suess discusses in her entry in Personal Best, Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most. She chose “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl.” This ekphrastic piece rooted its images in a Rembrandt painting and its narrative tradition in that of folk and fairy tales. It speaks strongly about socio-economic inequalities.

In the essay that follows, she introduced me to Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentence: a single sentence/line with seventeen syllables, an offshoot of the haiku which is closer to the Japanese form than that usually taught in English. It spoke to me as syllable counting worked to well in parts of Playing in the Field with Robert Duncan. She adopted it as a compression technique to see if she could keep her lines from reaching beyond the page. I tried it to eliminate my all-consuming attention to line breaks and keeping lisones about the same length through a poem.  For a similar reason, I decided to go with her model of fourteen lines, in relationship to the sonnet. I wanted to resist my effort to chunk a poem into stanzas with equal numbers of lines.

I have found pronouns and adverbs of place and time to be tools to be used with care, as they are especially malleable. With the choice of the pronoun you, I am trying to draw the reader in, while pointing a finger at the reader. The beekeeper’s they is meant to be the bees and unaware human beings. With the choice of the word howsomever I wanted to convey the jumbled logic and inconsistency behind our actions. How? Some? Sum? Ever?

While I was counting syllables, this poem insisted on taking unexpected turns and reaching an unexpected destination. In playing with our fragile understanding of time, we overlook the fragility of the nature around us. Overlooking that fragility hastens our separation from the natural world and may herald its end.