I Wrote That? Reflections on an Old Poem
Roads: Review
I recently stumbled across something wild. My younger self.
I was with Ole, and we were talking about some of the hidden work I’ve done, this time moderating sessions with the Boston Book Festival in the fall of 2020.
She sent me this random link one day when I was especially struggling with confidence. This link was one of the sessions I moderated while volunteering with them during the online version of the festival.
I was moderating a session with Jim Windolf from the New York Times and Andrew Curran, the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. In that role, I opened up the conversation, let the interviewer and the author do their thing and then came back in to filter questions from the audience.
The joke: that Q&A was bizarre. In the recording, you will see me shifting eyes from the conversation to something off screen. I had a secondary device connected to the audience feed from which I would read questions. The questions you’ll hear me ask are all my own. Why?
The only question that came in during that talk was someone asking if Diderot and his main patron had physical relations several different times in several different ways asking, “did they ever have physical relations?” “were they ever intimate with each other?” “Did they hook up?” “Did they screw?” “Did they fuck?” all in this increasing order.
So there I was, the conduit to this interesting conversation and these gnarly anonymous in the chat re-submitting this raunchy question. Good times.
SEO
We were talking about this experience and that I was surprised she found the recording before me. I had never seen these sessions yet.
Curious, we searched my name and an old headshot came up. I had to laugh. This headshot was taken eight years ago and was the SEO image that came up with a poem of mine published in The Indianapolis Review.
This poem is a distinct moment for me in my creative career. Firstly, it was a poem that took several, several, several drafts to make. I reworked this in thorough ways, taking lines and phrases that worked from one draft and cutting them into a fresh page then building off those fragments and workshopping it with friends many times. I remember the work.
Secondly, this poem was published while I was abroad. I was in Macerata, Italy when I got word of the magazine’s interest to publish the piece. I was ecstatic and could not wait to tell my dear friend whom I was visiting there about the news. At that moment, writing what would become the two books Comets and Something You Protect, receiving that publication was a great boost of encouragement and energy. It was a sign I was on the right path.
Thirdly, it would be a poem I would perform many times while soft launching a collection of poetry I never ended up publishing. Oftentimes, after reading that poem at a show, I would have audience members the same age as the voice in the poem ask me more about it, want to read the full book, or tell me they loved it (“it was an orchestra finish,” someone once said).
So, let’s read this thing already.
Reading this piece, I return to a much younger Trevor, and I visit myself after years of being apart.
Perhaps you should read it before finishing this letter, but here it is in pieces for the sake of conversation:
First stanza:
It’s my first time driving to LA.
I haven’t slept much
in three days, and my friend tells me
a story about helicopters. I wonder
about the word philosophy as I x-ray
the buildings. The wires and pipes.
They are not skeletons.
What do I see here? Immediately, I see many signs of what therapy has helped me to see: I intellectualize things. I see this when I look at the words in the first stanza here. I am trying to move from pain by moving to the thought of things. I preoccupy myself with the structure of things and by giving myself the thought experiment to x-ray the buildings. I am in my quest for depth and meaning.
What is next?
Second Stanza:
I imagine the traffic
as a hyper-slow version of time
travel. I could reach out and pick
light like a fruit from the tunnel. I hope
it’s like pear. But more realistically,
it’s ash before rain.
Here, I might say I am confessing I want something but I would now state as my search for closeness. I’m trying to move from an intellectualized experience, a big imagination of the world around me into something tangible like the sensation of taste. In some sense, my idea of thinking so much is a way to slow things down such that I can finally touch and feels things closely. Yet, being a brooding type, it is fruitless. There is no trust realized, and my confidence in the disappointment is deeper than my capacity for hope: I am still certain it will not be how I think it is and arrive tasteless. (It’s maybe a little corny that I used “ash,” but, hey, it is what it is and I meant it then.)
Then the third stanza:
My friends in the back are lovely and in love.
They sit together, talking with me, touching
each other. The light in the traffic tunnel
sheds itself and becomes orange.
It would still taste like pear, I’m sure.
Beyond the normal desire for my own closeness and affection, I am in the element of someone else’s. My friends are in the back having the thing I’m trying to conjure up in my mind. It is the classic awkwardness of witnessing someone else’s intimacy combined with the expected immaturity of not holding off while in front of others. I’m hopeful nonetheless.
Finally, the fourth:
When we arrive at our friend’s,
she will walk out to meet me first.
With a hug, she will ask me
about the minotaur. I will ask,
“what maze?” because I am damaged, etc.
I look to my younger self with compassion reading this. Here, I was imagining finally getting the thing I was looking for, but it is in the mutated form of pity. Pity is often the form of asking for love for those who have not discovered how to ask for love. And here I am trying to ask but ultimately rejecting it. The essential thing to know of this moment is that I am lightly calling on the mythology of the minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, the beast at the core of the puzzle. In my version, the minotaur is fierce for its wounds and the puzzle (intellectualization) is the barrier between addressing the wounds and letting someone in. It is also the expectation that someone will solve my puzzle such that I could be seen and released. My friend asks me with a tender moment how I am doing, but I am walled off such that I would deny there is anything going on at all.
Again, I look to myself with compassion with this. I have struggled with a yearning for love for a long time.
We can laugh: even my headshot is jaded. I am turned away from the camera, dashing but disengaged, pensive.
The distance this publication signifies is interesting. It is a time capsule. The bio there is deep from a time before so many things. It references my time of 1888 Center as an employee. This was before preparing to become the Executive Director then changing that title to Co-founder as compensation while our funding imploded, and it is before I would enter one of the most dismantling moments of my life: unemployment.
Cheers to deep memories and their mementos.
Trevor
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