Rebecca Brock

Rebecca Brock on Porches, an Insistent Donkey and Upkeep 

I wrote the poem “I Am, You Are” because somebody told me to write it.

In Norwood, Virginia, a spring or two ago, I spent four days at The Porches, a writing retreat, run by the inimitable Trudy Hale. My last writing residency had been in 2005, before either of my children, now teenagers, were born. Porches is only a couple of hours from where I live in Virginia, but I trembled when I left my house, my little life, to drive there. That who-do-you-think-you-are chorus strummed through me as Google maps sent me over hill and dale and through several small hollows between mountains. I passed a small farm with a donkey, close to the road, another homestead with a big Newfoundland and, once, I even glimpsed my destination: a house whose entire front was two wide porches.  Eventually, I found my way through a latched gate that opened to a bumble of bees and their wildflowers, a brick path meant to be followed. The lower porch creaked as I stepped to open the screen door. My nervousness—about leaving my family, about what I might do with these days—shifted to calm, to purpose.

I was there to piece a poetry manuscript together and, true to its name, my room had a wide second story porch. I often took myself and my poems out there to breathe, to settle my eyes on the greening spring and let birdsong surround me. I sifted through work that ranged over years, searching for a cohesive whole. I was alone in a way I hadn’t been for a very long time and I could sense the shape and space of the hours before and behind me.

I’m telling you all of this to explain the place in this poem. It’s tangible, yes, it can be found on a map. But for me, at that time and instance of my life, it was a turn and return. To myself, maybe, to writing, certainly.

One afternoon, my old marked up poems on my lap, I’d just started to feel some small pride in what I’d managed to collate, when the donkey interrupted the entire valley with his bray: brass, brutal, loud. The sound over those low hills was startling—not so much echo as amplification. Think of how a she-fox screams in the night. That first reckoning doesn’t change, even if, right away, someone tells you, or you realize, it’s a fox. Similarly, I knew, eventually, I was hearing a donkey—but I’d never quite imagined such a sound.

I began looking forward to hearing the donkey throughout the days. I admired his boldness, his is-ness, his certainty, out loud to the other writers staying there, even to Trudy, who said, on my last night at Porches, “I think you need to write about that donkey.” I laughed. But I woke early that last morning and wrote my first draft.

The deep secret in this poem? Anita Darcel Taylor, a brilliant writer and beloved friend I hadn’t seen in person for nearly two decades, was also staying at Porches. She delightfully hosted me in her studio, separate from the house, for tea and catching up. I knew she hadn’t been well, but I hadn’t realized the extent of her condition—how her heart was the very thing she couldn’t trust to keep her here. Writing in the early and late hours, I loved thinking of her, just across the way, writing her own way through—and that heart of hers doing its “own work…of insistence and upkeep.”

Barbara Westwood Diehl

Barbara Westwood Diehl on “Why I Waited This Long to Tend the Garden”

Why. So many poems are an attempt to answer why. We poke and prod at possible answers to see which ones hold up under scrutiny. We throw handfuls of practical and ridiculous possibilities at the wall to see which ones will stick. We scatter reasons like seeds to see which will take root. Some never sprout. Some send out sprawling vines. Some produce fruit. For the writers among us, the answers may not be as interesting as all that conjecturing. All that experimenting.

My why question for this poem: Why I procrastinate—or sometimes don’t do what I’m supposed to do at all—and the effects of my neglect. Though neglect has a negative connotation, and the consequences of my not tending the garden—standing back to observe its wildness deeply—may not have been so bad after all.

Waiting sounds so much better.

Although the poem appears to have a tidy structure with its two-line stanzas (like furrows made with a hoe!), I let the line lengths sprawl. I varied sentence structure and mixed complete sentences with fragments. Although the poem moves naturally from April through September, the moods are varied, erratic. Love and longing and sorrowing and acceptance. But not in any tidy trajectory. Life and gardens tend to ramble, to grow in fits and starts. At least for me.

So my because answers may not have provided a simple and precise response to my why—but I liked that imaginative meandering. That good long walk through wild memory.

Patricia Rockwood

Patricia Rockwood on “Abecedarian: To the Possum Who Visited Me One Night”

Unlike most of my poetry, which usually starts with an image or feeling and unfolds from there, this poem, “Abecedarian: To the Possum Who Visited Me One Night,” clearly needed to tell a story. The abecedarian – also called abecedary – offers an interesting way to advance a narrative, with the strict alphabetical progression of initial starting letters within 26 lines. I’ve always been fascinated by poetic forms and enjoy experimenting with them. I think it’s partly because I love puzzles, and poetic forms feel a bit like puzzles to me: I find myself asking, Can I express this feeling or image or idea in the form of a villanelle, sestina, or sonnet, for instance, without it sounding contrived? If it doesn’t work, then I might try something else, or go back to simple free verse. Usually, the context suggests the form, and I take off from there. With my students, I often suggest that they try writing a poem using an unfamiliar form as a way to break out of a rut, or to expand their means of expression – or simply to have a little fun. 

Every story has a setting, and mine is Sarasota, Florida, where I live on a postage stamp-sized suburban parcel that I keep as wild as I dare. I have no grass, just mulch paths, perennial plants, shrubs, vines, and small trees that I try to trim now and then (mostly “then”). When I bought the house, twenty-five years ago this fall, the only vegetation on the property was a couple of magnificent oaks and a scraggly orange tree (since departed). I was younger and a lot stronger then and hauled dirt and manure around like a farmhand. I planted gardens and laid out paths. I planted mostly perennials, which was a wiser move than I knew at the time, because now, when I can’t move around like I used to, my yard is a visual representation of Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest: The strongest plants have thrived, they pretty much take care of themselves, and all I have to do is trim them back once in a while, when I can. I am in Zone 10, and my semitropical plants grow like, well, weeds.

Some parts of the yard I have left largely untouched – that is to say, as beautifully chaotic as nature wants to be. My side yard, for example, is now a largely impassable riot of flowering vines and shrubs – but the blossoms attract butterflies and hummingbirds, so I can’t bear to cut things back very much. The undergrowth provides habitat and hiding places for all manner of fauna as well, from insects and lizards to larger critters. When I’m sitting on my lanai at dusk, a raccoon or possum – preceded by discreet rustlings in the undergrowth – might pass by on its way to the water sources in the backyard: the raccoon to the birdbath, the possum to the ground-level water dish. It makes me happy that they can find shelter of sorts near my home. The suburbs, after all, are not their natural habitat, and they must survive as best they can. It’s a hard life. I have to stop myself from feeding them, though if they dig up the kitchen scraps I bury in the back garden, no one will know, and besides, everybody’s got to eat, right?

Like most children, I felt a kinship with small animals and always secretly wished they would make friends with me; come to my hand; allow me to pet them like my dog and cat. I must admit I’ve never really outgrown that wistful desire. But, also like most children, I grew up and learned that there was an invisible barrier between our world and theirs. I would never learn to speak their language, and they would never speak mine (Alex the Parrot notwithstanding). Our Venn diagram always had and always would have an extremely thin overlap. Perhaps the reason wild creatures so enchant us – while at the same time causing an undercurrent of free-floating anxiety – has to do in part with this mysterious remove; that no matter how much time we spend in their company, we can never really know them.

And yet, we can never stop loving them. The natural world fills up my pages, as it does so many other poets. Writers are often advised to “Write what you know.” I would add, “Write what you love.”

The little possum that I wrote about could have mistaken the small hole in my lanai screen for the hole in the shrubbery that led to his burrow. Or maybe he was just following his nose, as I suggest in the poem. Or perhaps he just went exploring, like kids do, and got into trouble. Whatever the happenstance, I was glad to play host for a little while. And though he would never know it, I was especially glad to confer a bit of immortality on him by making him the star of my poem. 

A few years after the incident I wrote about, I opened my back door one morning and found an adult possum, dead, lying next to the screen. Digging a grave to return him to the earth, feeling a tiny bit weepy, I had to wonder whether he was the same one that had visited me that night.

Heidi Seaborn

Heidi Seaborn on “Of King Tides”

It was Christmas Eve day, and we were out of sync in so many ways. Our grown children were elsewhere for the holiday, off with their partners’ families. And we were elsewhere too, my husband, our dog and me. We’d driven down the coast from Seattle to San Diego to escape the winter storms bringing king tides that wash up and over the seawall on to the street in front of our house and lash at our windows, to evade the brutal north winds, the ice. We’d found a funky little cottage to rent in a rundown area, but near the beach.

After a couple weeks, we’d fallen into a routine of long morning and afternoon beach walks, stopping to watch the surfers pop up, ride then disappear in the wave’s curl. We knew to navigate the vicissitudes of the tides, the eager way the Pacific carved out the sand, leaving strands of kelp like hair across a pillow.

But this morning, even from a block away, we could see the rising sea. The pier had become a dock, its posts buried with each successive wave. And the waves heaved up into a vast wall of water before smashing onto the shore. I thought I knew king tides, but this was something else, a near-tsunami in the making. Massive, monstrous, yet beautiful. Standing on the beach, the waves seemed to consume the oxygen as if they hungered to obliterate the sky and everything beneath it.

Thinking of safety, we climbed up on a sand berm. From there, I felt the Pacific’s magnetism, its dangerous urge like the Sirens call. Time eclipsed as I stood transfixed while the ocean delivered wave after magnificent wave coming nearer and nearer to the berm. Finally, it turned and began its slow retreat. And we did too.

When I returned later in the day, the Pacific had yielded back the beaches, withdrawing well beyond the long pier, exposing the seabed teeming with the miniature life usually obscured by the ocean’s depths. I crouched amongst the tidal pools, watching sea urchin, crab and the flitting schools of sculpin swimming through seaweed. And sea stars that appeared to be sunning themselves like the people who now spread out on towels across the beach. Yet I felt the sea’s presence beckoning from beyond, as if this too was part of a power play—“see what life force I have within me.” Tempting us humans into complacency for the moment before it rose once again to bury everything in its path.

Throughout the day as the ocean rose and fell to extraordinary highs and lows, I could feel a poem beginning to write itself. First in my head as I watched entranced from the sand berm—words tingling out of the surf. The words quickly became lines as another king tide formed that late afternoon. By early evening, I was deep in drafting the poem.

A quick search informed that this was a semidiurnal king tide brought on by a supermoon. And this information came with the warning that these king tides are a harbinger of the future: "a glimpse of what our coast may look like as sea-level rises. The water level reached by an extreme high tide today will be the same water level of more frequent moderate tides in the future” according to scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. I had the poem’s epigraph and more importantly, its ending.

On Christmas morning, I woke to the gift of a new rough poem and the sense of what shape it needed to take on the page. I made a quick cup of coffee and began to find the pacing, pauses, line breaks, punctuation to make the reader feel the sense of power in those tides, the loss of self in their presence and the imminent and future danger.

I usually struggle with titles. But in this case, the title “Of King Tides” presented itself immediately. To start with the preposition ‘of’ captured my feeling of being in the middle of something beyond my control, and hinted at the relationship the speaker establishes with the king tides. I hope that relationship extends to the reader—that the poem pulls the reader into the sweep of a powerful angry sea and awakens understanding and hopefully, an impulse to act. (consider a donation to Ocean Conservancy).