Sam Bell
Preamble
I have a habit of saving old poems. This would not seem to pose a problem except that, when I revisit them, I realize that they are sparse, anorexic paragraphs. I am a writer of prose with poetic moments – I love images, but this doesn’t make me a poet.
As winter settled in across Kansas, I decided to mine the poems I have been stockpiling. I converted them into paragraphs to see if this would illustrate the significance of poems and essays as two separate genres. I found that, when I made stanzas into paragraphs, the words and the events took on new meanings. There was context that needed explanation. It became a project: I wanted to convert my poems into the prose they were supposed to be.
Below are the false poems, now short essays, that I believe have found their rightful place in prose. Along the way, I contextualize spare moments – the poem left these moments alone, but the prose begged for exposition or detail. I am fully aware of the prose poem – that beautiful thing, a poetic or experiential moment that is flush with feeling, a mid-morning rose opening fully. But the short essay is a form unto itself; it is a thematic experience that pushes for additional, or even needed, context. Years can pass by in a short essay. In prose poems, moments happen. In a short essay, experiences compound and emerge to create a focused energy.
The most illuminating experience to arise from my experiment was to witness the need in prose for a certain contextualization that a poem resists – at least, that my narrative poems resist. I also witnessed my own family history emerge – from an abstract collection of images to a tangible, more concrete breakdown of my nuclear family that occurred a few years ago. That breakdown is what follows.
I. Before
Isolation, Spanning Time
It is night. My parents drink wine and laugh. Dinner is on the stove. I am pretending to drive a car that is a wooden stool. I coast into the tiled drive, look for all the faces in the windows of the houses on the hill behind our house. There is no one there. The green beans boil over and twilight creeps. After dinner, my parents put me in my nightgown. They drink more wine. I put my hair into a high ponytail because I want to feel glamorous. Nobody notices. All the windows are slightly open, like a fish’s mouth on a lure. In other houses, I hear the clinking of glasses, the lullabies of bedtime. In my bedroom, my bones feel lonely.
Home
The new lilac bush flourishes, its purple cones beaming next to the new brick chimney against the new white siding of our new first house. Grass seed seeps into the dank soil, nourishing what it can. My father leaves early for work, before my bus comes to take me to kindergarten, where I tell everyone that we live in a new house on a new block and one day we will get a new dog and I even have new yellow stretch stirrups on; they encase my tiny, lithe legs, the trembling, nervy muscles shaking from the weight of everyone here. At home, my parents fight at night underneath the new chandelier.
Dog Day
Our new velvet dog: tulip ears, four square paws, one low-hung tongue. Loose, low barking at night in the laundry room. Brown fur, big eyes. Commands from her male master: Sit, Stay. Out. In. Each day the same.
Early Death
I got off the bus early, didn’t feel like waiting, so I crossed through yards and over wire fencing until two German shepherds drooled awake to pen me in. The space of grass was sponge-wet, fresh with winter melt. Their fur was matted. One snarled and the other snarled harder. They inched toward me, twins. One lunged for me, its paws on my powder-blue ski jacket, the one I begged my father so hard to get. I crept against the wooden slats and jumped the fence at its lowest point. I ran down the hill toward home.
At the crest of our yard, bushes stood, un-pruned, and no lights were on in our small family room. When I began this day, the morning had been nothing, a day worn like old cotton. I wore a turtleneck that nobody noticed and Will sat with another girl. Bob tugged at my long braid but brushed past me to get to class. The tin light of the technology room burned in my eyes and the hallway sounds muffled into a dull roar in my ears. Had I died today, these are the things I would have known.
Carnival
When I look at my mother, there is hope in her eyes. Her nightgown swishes in its thin yellow cotton and her toes curl into the rug. Once, I thought of her as lilacs and topsoil, the split of a butterfly’s wings. Now she is a dull morning, a slight, unnoticeable rain. When she makes us dinner, she holds the broccoli like a giant green bulk in her hands. It flowers from her as if it is a firm yeast rising. The dots on her dress move in white circles. Her hair, untamed, is down. On her shin is a thin blue bruise. She reaches down absently to touch it. She presses it gently.
II. During
Bankruptcy
The money my father spent was wasted. At the end, before the foreclosure, he tells the teller at the local bank that his wife is dying of terminal cancer, that he needs to pay for her hospice care. Meanwhile, in the shiny aisles, she stands deciding between chicken and hamburger in the supermarket, writing a check that will bounce. My father bundles his new amount deep into his pocket, walks to the liquor store next door to the grocer. He strolls, picking fine Italian merlots, a Spanish Malbec, the Chablis my mother loves. Then, he patiently waits at the grocery’s main entrance, not asking if he can help my mother with such a full load. On the way home, the rain starts, their tire tracks visible all the way down their one-way street, the milk bouncing in its paper sack, the wipers working faster than they know how to, what with all this water.
Smoke
Down low in the deep armchair, my father blows cigarette smoke straight into my face. The cafe’s abuzz with people, errand-runners, and cakes are sliced and set on delicate plates, creamer going smoothly into ceramic mugs. His front teeth are cracked and dull, the same milky brown coffee color that sits in his cup, untouched, the heat wracking his nerves. His laugh is forced and simple; no one notices it. His hands shake, pocked and marked from the backyard roses he weeds, the deck half-coated with a cheap, slimy varnish, the above-ground pool he tore down with his midnight vodka hands.
Each time he takes a sip, his lips purse and buckle, the liquid slipping past all the thorns in his throat. He says his heel’s been hurting him, has been since mid-March, when he started running again. So much running, he tells me, you should see the dogs chase me down the street. He stands to leave, and he only half-smiles. I watch him walk to his car, check for dents, unlock it, slide into the beaten seat, look both ways. It is the last time I will see him. It is not, really, but you know what I mean.
Away
In the distance, everything looks right. Snow falls flat across the black slate drive, a light’s on in the front room, there’s a turkey in the oven. The glasses on my father’s face rest crookedly, subdued, on his bony nose. My mother’s cheeks blossom with burst vessels; long trails of histrionic purple stories. The house has sold. The bushes have been re-routed into other, happier yards. My mother leaves tomorrow, everything is packed. My father will go elsewhere, somewhere to start over. It is nearly Christmas. Ice crashes against the windows, the luggage an apparition of hope, jumbled as it is under the aching, bare fir tree.
Flight
Today is simple. We leave early, hurtling to the airport, the cloudless sky pronounced above my tiny black car, no one on the road, nobody to see inside the dusty windows, my mother dabbing her eyes with tissues. Our faces cover a whole future of missing, long days spun in front of us in rooms full of pictures, old furniture we both touched. On the banks of the highway, the wheat grass sways, leans forward, offering us its hands. In plain terms, I cannot stand her leaving, the curbside goodbye, her back to me to pass through the wide glass doors, her heavy luggage trailing. It’s all I can do to watch her go. The roads home merge into total humid loss. Back home, I look for her behind me, in the doorway, her scent cut straight into my skin.
Dear Dad
You must be tired, walking through these rough patches for miles, camping yards away from those strange bears that hunt you. In the evenings, do you worry about bills and what you owe? Do you eat with your bare hands, licking your fingers clean, hoping that loneliness is not the measure of a man?
The girl with you looks like me and she is just as scared as I would have been, and angry to be so close to a bear. In my youth, there were moments when I thought I would be devoured, pawed at, mauled. But I always had a hand on the door, a key in my mouth, a pocket knife.
The afternoon when you left was rainy, and I was filming with the cap on the lens. The audio caught your vainglorious mood, your tatters and paths and scraps. I want to know if there was any recognition, if you had anything human in your face; I want to know if you knew your last breath was a vision, a patch of fur, a fish.
III. After
Of My Father
In Minnesota there are lakes, some full of sewage, some freezing and icy, even before the first frost. Wild roses shoot up along the bank of the one my father drives to and walks along. Usually, the wind is too heavy and he has to put a hat on. His hair is longer now, the gray moving forward, marching tenaciously. He notices all the families picnicking in spirit, eating sliced turkey sandwiches. He puts his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t believe in lotion, so the skin cracks all the time. He puts a smile on for the black lab that sprints by, retrieving a slice of yellow cut through the air. He watches the waves. He looks at the birds above, the black crows that eat all the loose trash. The light carries him a little further, the lake water laps almost to his new brown shoes. He should get back to his apartment, though no one is there, waiting for him. He decides he will stay a little longer. When he gets home, he will think about calling me, telling me that he is sorry. Instead, he heats up a can of soup, turns his stereo up as loud as it goes, drowning all of me out, erasing himself from my shorelines.
Planting
I planted the squash in long flowerboxes one Sunday when it was raining and I had bought too much soil. I had to go back and see the same cashier with her plush pink lips and her apron snug around her breasts. She was so beautiful, I wondered how she gardened. With or without gloves, in any heat, with water, iced tea, or beer on the wooden step she probably kneeled down on. Her hair was curled near her face. She was the sister I never had, the best friend I left behind when I moved here. We would have great talks over midnight drives through the Flint Hills, somewhere I have never been before, somewhere that looks good on fire.
When I left, I pushed the heavy cart full of real topsoil, Midwestern earth, slippery and thick. It felt like oil between my hands on the small deck. I poured it all in the pots, and hoped for the best. The first morning here that summer, I was alone, and I watched people go to work from behind the glass. The leafy squash wandered in the wind, but it was sturdy, and packed in there. The night’s hail didn’t touch it. I missed my friends. I put on some music and stood there for hours. I wondered how different the wind was here, how my hair blew in different directions so far from home. How slight the heat was; how direct the clouds were about changing and moving all the time.
Evaluation
Today, I see my family as a disemboweled triangle – we all live in separate states across the country. In a way, I see this experiment of translating my poetry into short essays as a way to re-map the landscape of my family’s past. We have reformed into new geometry, and my work has been reformed into new space itself.
The space of a short essay and the space of a prose poem can be shared space. Each form involves precision, only these short essays involve sprawl where a prose poem turns inward and narrows more often. As an example, in the December 2009 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, authors Chad Davidson and Gregory Frasier note in their article “Out of the Margins: The Expanding Role of Creative Writing in Today’s College Curriculum” that Carolyn Forché’s prose poem “The Colonel,” widely considered one of America’s best examples of the intensity and precision in the form, was actually a collection of accidental notes about her visit to Argentina and not a poem at all. I love this. Her prose became a prose poem, and I would argue that it is, in fact, a very short essay. While her eyes don’t leave the space of the room she inhabits, the prose wanders enough, and with such vivid detail, that she widens the margins we’ve set for what a prose poem and what a short essay can be.
My intention here was to breathe life into my deflated narrative poems. I intend to continue, forcing old poems into new, short essay forms, to see if this transformation is worthwhile or even necessary. With the amount of experimental prose happening in the field of creative writing right now, the execution and trial and error of conversion – a narrative poem becoming a short essay with poetic or lyric images or undertones – might just encourage others to break some boundaries. At the very least, perhaps it can cause a writer to re-collect her notes and narrative experiments, reshape them, and reinvent a voice, a moment, or a life.
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Sam Bell is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review
