It's a foggy Monday morning. My cat is sleeping on my computer monitor. I'm listening to How To Save a Life by The Fray. I'm thinking about my manuscript, I imagine leaving it on someone's doorstep like a baby in a basket. I imagine someone finding it and saying, "Well, what do we have here." Or "Oh, honey." I imagine them naming it. I imagine the name being better than anything I could think of. And with that name, poems fall away, the face is more recognizable. Then I ask myself why can't I be the one to name it?
Until it named, it can't be completely formed. Without the title, the poems are a bouquet without a home-- a funeral or a graduation, on the kitchen counter in a beer bottle or in a crystal vase at the museum. I could name it How to Save a Life; I could name it Fiasco in Blue; I could name it Frank. I have stopped revising until the name is clear to me. It makes no sense to move poems, put in, take out poems, when the halo of the angel is out of focus.
I've been reading Frannie Lindsay's poems this morning from her new book, Lamb. Not many poems can make me cry. Not many people write from such a sincere place.
The Ewe Lamb
- 2 Samuel 12: 3
I raised my one ewe lamb
as a daughter, fed her
red clover, the last hearts
of my cabbage, offered
her inky lips my cup.
She rested her chin
on my neck at night,
her hoofs on my cloak,
her breathing
the wind on the waves
of sleep’s pure waters.
Sleep: an animal’s word
for bless: hoof of her heart
to the hoof of my heart.
The dusk before her slaughter
we walked together, pauper
and kin, over the meadow.
I sang to her, then
I unstrung the rusted bell
from her collar.
