That’s something we know. And yet when we create we do our best to try for something new anyway, against the damned odds.
I’m always slightly amused/horrified when I belch up something (that’s always how it feels when I write, really: Like a force of nature, something to be gotten out of me and once it’s out, I feel better and lighter) and then later find something in this world that already existed for some time, something shiny and succinct in its own right that I might as well have pointed to as an obvious influence. An homage, on good days. There are things around me that I absorb and internalize to a degree that I don’t realize. When I unwittingly retrace my steps and stumble upon those things every now and again, I get quite a start. I feel confident that this isn’t just my problem; everyone who tries to make things has to run into this fact occasionally, right?
I’m rambling. It’s 4 a.m., so that’s expected. The point is this:
I wrote a poem-ish thing. The Great and Secret Thing was kind enough to publish it. I wrote it months and months ago. September. Maybe October. I sat on it for a while, as I sometimes do with intensely personal things. Had to psych myself up to put it out there in the ether a few weeks ago.
And then it just happened that this past Thursday night, as I was combing through my bookshelves in hunt of a (bacon-themed!) book for Agitatrix, I happened upon a Sharon Olds collection I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years. I plucked it out and set it aside. And then, after I had found the bacon book and stuck it in my bag to take to work the following day, I leafed through Blood, Tin, Straw. And I lost words as I read “The Factors.”
Sharon Olds planted a seed in me the first time I read that poem years ago, and I didn’t realize it until just now. “Humbling” isn’t even an adequate word.
On The Clock
(Mine)
That last half of August
the part of me I don’t admit to
the tyrant I didn’t even know was in there
set up shop
(I worked on commission)
and I think it’s fair to call it a shop
of sweat
and tears
and blood
eventually
after I had put my handprints in the dust
everywhere
and spent you
again and again
at ridiculous hours
ferocious
without shame
the clang of metal echoing
my brain sure of bad ideas
my body ready for science experiments
those stifling August days
we just shut out the sun
and worked in the dark
The Factors
(Sharon Olds)
Sometimes we seem almost to be working,
as if making something, wrapped tight
around my body from either side as it is
pouring off our gleaming pieces of work, which could be
nearly seen, for a moment, in the air, and we can
hear them, the clear note of their molecular
structure stuck—
sometimes you and I are like a factory
minting invisible artifacts,
hot shuddering that floats in air,
more of it is continuously needed,
and more, and more, sometimes we wring
the whole factory like a shimmering rag,
harder each time, the cloth-cries go higher and
higher, from within comes pulsing a lambent
wobbling vessel, off the wheel it
whirls, indented with the muscles’ bright thumbs,
transparent with kiln-fire; another is needed,
and another, we don’t know who orders it, we are
workers in a doting frenzy of making.
And where is love? This is its room,
where this is done; it is the bed,
the air; and the glowing not-things
wrenched from the body, rushing from it
as though they are being born, those
are acts of love. One could not call it
patience, the hour you kneel, turn,
rise, drawing the, pressing the, made
love out; inside each one
a half-god, calling to the other
half-one, in the other one,
come, come, yes, my darling, my
sweetheart, come.