Value.

When I start poems I don’t know where they are going. I want to try to be truthful, but I also want the song to emerge. I can still hear the sound of the Southern Pacific train go by like it was progress. I can hear Ella Jenkins singing on the record player in the background. My brother and I would sit and watch for the caboose, thinking maybe it wouldn’t come. I’d get anxious because I wanted the satisfying feeling of the train being complete. Being finished. As if the ending is also an answer. (Although it rarely is; things end unsolved all the time.) Some trains were so long, almost as long as life it seemed, as they went by and by and by. I could stand on that canyon and yell to the train, and when the caboose finally came I’d swear it would be enough just to have seen it, to have been there as a witness.

And it was. A train poured into me years ago, and just now it poured out. What I mean is, there are times poems do not come and life is too heavy to be placed on the page, or life is so deliciously light and joyful you must suck it down before anyone notices. That is okay. You are still the writer watching that train, doing laundry, getting lost in this massive mess of minutes. There is value in this silent observing. There is value in the soul finding even the smallest moment of peace in its mouth.

CONNECT