Today, I took the first step in a new project and while it feels good, it also feels fragile, like a set of planks laid across scaffolding that shakes a little when you walk across it. Like maybe you shouldn't be building here after so short of time when the ground is still shaky, which makes sense since it's a series about death and memory and houses. Amid the news about the terrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria, I read the news and close my eyes and thank god for the mostly solid ground of the midwest. I say mostly because it's still possible to rumble every once in a while and scare the shit out of us. When I was a kid, a small quake hit mid-evening when I was outside and I felt nothing. A decade or more ago in the middle of the night I think one may have woken me with a slight banging noise, but I went promptly back to sleep oblivious. When I was in the Fine Arts, a huge construction project behind us regularly had things migrating across my worktable from the vibrations as they readied a skyscraper foundation. Yesterday, they were jackhammering in the basement of this building for a repair and even though I was working with headphones on, I could feel the trembling in my fingertips.
And of course, this new thing all comes back to birds and ghosts, as everything does. I cannot stop it any more than I can the weather. I'd been waffling for the past couple weeks after finishing the thing I was working on last summer before I took a break, uncertain of which little project listed in my planner to begin or continue working on. As I rolled out of bed and rearranged the cats to not disturb them as I got up, a first line came to me, and after quickly making coffee, I opened a shiny new word doc and typed it down. One thing about writing for so long, having penned poems for three decades now, is that once you take that step--that first fledgling terror of a line, the others follow swiftly as long as you don't pause to look down. Rather than piecing together poems from bits of string and cotton, the tiny machine of them begins to roll and suddenly you have something like a song. It may not be great or good or even sound, but its something, and once there is something beyond the blinking cursor on a field of white, you can work with it, mold it. Cut away the parts that aren't working.
And, of course, this girl cannot write about birds. In the year before my dad was hospitalized, beginning in the fall of 2021, three different times, three different birds (as in different kinds) got into the house, two through open doors, and one completely without explanation my dad found rattling against a window. He had had occasional problems with field mice, and once, we had a chipmunk somehow in the basement, but birds were not usually just getting in, and yet they suddenly were. The two that came in the door, one at night, no less, seemed to be waiting outside to get in. I try not to think of these as omens, and yet, how can I not? I was thinking about those incidences I wrote this morning--a piece that was full of psychopomps and decaying houses. The very first and uncertain step.
