In the grand writerly tradition of “I would have written less but I didn’t have time,” I’m posting two versions of a poem today. I’m not sure either is at all close to anything final, but there is enough of something there that I feel they’ll be worth coming back to later. These poems came out of the context of rereading yet again what’s probably my favorite poem, Barbara Guest’s “Red Lilies.” Her line “The tree is you” brought to mind a line from a kids’ yoga video I’ve done with my daughter innumerable times, which I quote at the beginning of this first version:
“So you really have to imagine that you are a tree.”
The branches are
hanging on, hanging on
to the top of the mind. How
do those tiny tips
stick or grab? No matter.
The cranium fills
with woodsy brush.
A girl hangs from a branch,
her arms straight down,
fingers clawing into bark.
Her arms could pull loose
and pop right out.
It’s then her torso becomes
deliberate, her legs swing
over, back and over the branch,
now holding herself up.
I was unsatisfied with this, and so I turned to a tool I like to use to literally shake things up, the Dada Poem Generator, which provides a digital shortcut for following Tristan Tzara’s infamous and likely satirical instructions for writing a poem (which are reproduced at the link above the generator). Here’s the result, edited from the tool’s output with lines reconfigured and some deleting and rephrasing here and there, but still preserving the overall reordering.
Imagine over.
Swing of over girl,
hangs on the no.
Branch pop on branches.
A tree pull and so her cranium.
It’s hanging: could you become now?
Fills fingers tiny with holding.
Down grab? Tips.
Woodsy legs, really on right branch
herself and how loose matter
straight top those you mind then.
Deliberate back into
brush up bark
to arms torso arms.
Hanging from clawing the or.
This kind of thing of course isn’t for everyone (probably not for the vast majority of people), but as usual for me it helps to change how I’m viewing the poem. Going forward, I’ll likely explore the middle ground between the two versions and add more material.