Susan Cohen on “Omens Being Bad“
“Omens Being Bad” began with snakes. In Northern California, we have both the Northern Pacific Rattlesnake and the Pacific Gopher Snake that can resemble rattlers in color, length, and blotchy back. People kill Gopher Snakes sometimes, not realizing they’re harmless.
Spotting two large snakes stalled directly across my path in one week would have entered my notebook at any time. They seemed to deserve to be the poem, so, in the earliest versions, I described their patterning, where I saw them, and how each slid away—one over a wall, the other into dry grass. It seemed noteworthy that both waited before departing, as if wondering whether I intended harm. In other cultures, surely a two-snake-week would be seen as omen.
But something about seeing them now, when the political and natural world are simultaneously endangered and dangerous, made them even more insistent as an image. The world has never felt more threatening. I’ve found it almost impossible to write this year because almost every attempt brings me back to the pandemic, as if the virus also infects my work. Over and over, I’ve abandoned the poems I started.
One sure escape has been nature, which has nourished my spirit, just as it has always nourished my writing. I walk to get away from my too-familiar walls and to find material to write about. Luckily for me, Berkeley offers both a large regional park in the hills and paved trails along the edge of San Francisco Bay. I find plenty to see and hear besides other humans.
A very short poem like this still can require months of revising. Maybe especially a short poem, because each word bears so much weight. I’m one of those who tend to pare down rather than to expand as I discover where the heat lies for me over weeks or, in some cases, months. Even as I began thinking the snakes offered me a concrete way to grapple with something I was feeling, the actual details about how they looked and where they went became less and less important. What remained essential in every version was the encounter
I had to acknowledge to myself that this was a pandemic poem, after all. One of the worst aspects of this terrible virus is the way it’s made us stop, jerk back, or step aside when a fellow human being comes too close, even on a narrow hiking trail. We look to see if he is wearing a mask. We wonder whether she is the person who will infect us. Every encounter is a potential threat.
Once I knew what the poem was about, the coincidence of my teapot giving up its whistle had to go in there as an omen, because I see everything now through the lens of the pandemic. In went the incomprehensible number of deaths at that time. The final line came to me last: So far, no one I know. It just popped up, the way a line can, from some voice in my mind that had been whispering too softly for me to hear. As each month goes by, the possibilities of infection and death creep nearer, even as people stand farther apart.
Bless those snakes who offered me a way express everything I just spent paragraphs discussing, without saying it all. Or did I? Saying and not saying at the same time. Isn’t that what poetry does?