The Poem that Can’t Be Written
is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many
that are never finished—those boats
lost in the fog, adrift
in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.
In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,
no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this
is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,
not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.
So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.
A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.
-- Lawrence Raab
I like this nautical metaphor -- it makes me think of the poem I missed out on at the corner of 6th and Pine last month -- the boat that sailed without me, so to speak. And whether it was a leaky dinghy that wouldn't make it past the end of the dock, or a trim yacht embarking on a heavenly tour of the Aegean, or a Disney cruise ship with two thousand sunburnt tourists and a rotovirus aboard, it became an emblem too. Not of failure or loss (or even the impossible), but of all the world's small, unknown, easily-missed treasures.
Mr. Raab’s poem also prompted me to dig out an old file from the basement and revisit the scribbled beginnings of a poem I abandoned back in 1991. Back then it ran aground somehow, but in the intervening years the tides and currents and rocks have rearranged themselves, and a few pieces have floated to the surface again.
I may figure out how to share some of that flotsam at some point. But right now I'm looking out the window at the first sunny day in weeks, and thinking it's time to get out in it.
.
3 comments:
This one's got me confused. How can it be a poem if it can't be written (or, I assume, spoken, or sung)? If it's a vision or a feeling or a sense of a poem within the poet, then it's presumably one that isn't written, rather than one that can't be written. What am I missing?
--Dad
I don't know, Dad. He says it's about the impossible... things that can't happen, I guess... moments that can't even be expressed or envisioned.
Or maybe it's like that Carly Simon song where she says "I bet you think this song is about you," as if it isn't -- but of course it is. Maybe this IS the poem that can't be written...?
Or just a way for us to reach inside the impossible and see what's there?
xo
mik
Okay, I read it again. It seems to be about things (presumably inside the poet) that exist (like boats lost in the fog) but can't be expressed. But apparently it's that they can't be expressed until the circumstances change, like the wind comes up, and the sails (of expression) billow and the poem gets written. So maybe there are all these things inside us waiting for things to change so they can be expressed. Like your poem from so many years ago.
--Dad
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