Boxes

It seems that each time I sit to actually write something cohesive my head numbs a little. Why just then? I allot the time, fumble with a pen, peek at Craig to see that he's preoccupied with something that makes him happy (nap, television, reading). But just then, when I've cleared my schedule for language, my mind sprawls the length of an open plain - very empty of word. During the daytime I make fairly real and conscious efforts to mentally write as I walk around this life. A constant drum of words is happening quietly to me, like a soft beat, and this is a good thing. I prefer it this way, and I can hardly imagine any other way. Not a steady rhythm of To Do Lists, or Constant Self Reminder Lists: I get those, too. I get those when I shuffle papers around, or when I'm glancing at my reflection in a window. I think it's fairly common for people to wander around with words happening to them. Not that everyone does not do this, for who am I to claim to know what someone else's mind harvests, but I concentrate on composing the words, forming them into happy little paragraphs where I hope they will settle and stay for a while, until I can make it home to the notebook to jot them down. But I'm going to go on a limb and guess that a higher percentage of people are like this than not, those of us who invent things mentally and then get to the place to make the inventions tangible and we just can't. Call it a block, call it procrastination combined with lack of motivation: whatever the case may be, it so also breeds frustration. So I bring a few lines of Sylvia Plath to this post. I have never been the most passionate fan of her work, haven't even read a vast majority of her inventions (and for a girl who studied poetry as critically as she did in college, that is somewhat embarrassing to admit). But I do love the grace with which she seemingly walked around her life making mental notes of things, pasting words together to prove things. This brief dance of words is from her poem, "The Arrival of the Bee Box". And despite its neurotic simplicity, I feel this poem's posture is doubly complicated, the way she portrays the danger of the containment of these maniacs in a box. Plath borrowed bees as a metaphor several times for other poems from this collection, as well. It's most tempting for me to parallel the buzzing sound of these insects and the steady buzz of words through a messy mind, despite the fact that her metaphor and further analyzation thereof jointly parallels other worldly, political and female ramifications than I wish to mention here. This particular poem suggests she owns, however briefly, this box of bees, yet (later in the poem) she wonders if they would "turn on her" if set free (for she is no source of honey). I've tried to imagine the pleasure with which Plath wrote, in her own handwriting, a line as resounding and powerful as "I lay my ear to furious Latin." Where was she when this line first came to mind? Did "I am not a Caesar" follow immediately, or did pages of re-write produce such a heavy declaration following the line of "furious Latin"? I am not (a leader) of my own mind (the angry mob). Was she on the bank of a river with her eyes gazing at something far off, or was she taking a train to see her husband and it just hit her like that? Was she combing her hair? I lay my ear to furious Latin. Sometimes when I'm reading poems now, so much later than when I was a daydreaming 18-year old, it's more difficult for me to breathe it in and hold it as long as I used to. There is a disconnect between the actual poets and their poems now, to me. Poets do regular things: they go to the grocery store for frozen convenience foods. They put gas in their cars. They balance checkbooks, wipe their kids' mouths of chocolate cake. And I guess for me, once long ago (a decade!) I believed deep inside that poets were exempt from normal life. Inventors like Plath wandered, only (didn't they?) They dreamed of fantastic combinations of words that actually sucked in a breath and held it, a long one, and would explicitly describe the buzzing in their heads (and they didn't participate in normal activities?) This quite possibly is what obstructs my mind from traveling to such metaphorical places as it used to: the long pause for real life, taking out the trash, stuffing clothes into the washer. I wonder if I didn't develop an interest in the short story as an effort to normalize the box of maniacs, my own mind's steady flow of words crashing into each other to get out. But since I have tried in vain, I haven't been able to contain them. I can't make a short story work. And I think I need to spend some time easing myself back into the poem, how lovely it can feel to get one out, how peaceful. For many years that I've been out of school now I've rationalized that poetry isn't normal, isn't real, and isn't wanted. Who writes poems now? We've got computers, luxurious large televisions, employment with fine-paying salaries. Who am I going to hand my poem to, slide under someone's door anonymously, let it go to work on its own merit, its merit that it is simply a pageful of words acting together to cry out for attention, look at how powerful I can be when I'm placed amidst so much punctuation? And what am I (a poem) trying to reveal about the human condition, a regular day, that you couldn't see before I showed you? Stronger than the 11 o'clock news, more powerful than an embrace? These are questions I've let go. I need to ask them again, of myself. I need to do this.*Part of the thing about being with Craig, a part I hold so close in my heart, is that he doesn't let me wander too far away. He calms me down, he rationalizes when I cannot. Today, he had to be my voice of pragmatism. He had to insist how positively (not negatively) significant it is that my parents don't call me frequently not because they don't love me, but because they don't have to worry about me: I take care of myself. He had to express that I overthink things because I simply wasn't seeing it from that perspective, as my tears kept welling and falling for no obvious reason. Now, I'm closer to 30 than I was before (though I get to shield myself with 29 first!) and I want to remind myself that there can exist an even balance between my normalcy with Craig and my childlike anxiousness to pen a poem. It isn't immature to write a poem. It isn't even not normal. I can be my own Plath, one who doesn't ultimately perish because of the maniacs buzzing in her head, one who doesn't just wander, but who combines the everyday with something a little heavier on the side: language, and its inevitable unending ability to brilliantly say.*