because you’ll need to stop and listen eventually
May 7, 2008
Drive south on Highway 9
until you hit the only rest stop
with your name carved into the oak tree
just outside the women’s room,
then close your eyes and listen
with the hearing of that dog
you never wanted,
kept chained to a fence
until someone came along and stole it.
It was me, by the way.
The dog has a new owner now,
someone a lot like you
but without a life like a salvage yard.
A lot of things can go without water
for a long time and still survive.
You know how summer gets here,
ground cracked like hands in winter,
light through the windshield
that makes you think of the last days,
how the earth will be taken whole
into the sun, the way you were taken
whole into me, the way the tree
took the tip of the blade as I carved,
without a wince, without letting go
a single bead of sap.
* * *
I need to fix part of this. I’ll work on it later. Bear with me, people, I am just trying to write some stuff.
Comments
9 Responses to “because you’ll need to stop and listen eventually”
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons.
If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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Love it, especially the beginning that hooked me and the end brining it back to the tree: “the way the tree took your name as I carved it, without a wince, without letting go a single bead of sap.”
Breathtaking….even as an early draft.
Hi Summer, thanks for your comment. I appreciate the feedback.
Clare, thank you. I feel like it’s a mess, but I think there’s something in it. If not, at least it’s writing practice, right?
I agree with Clare. It’s writing from the gut. The part about the narrator taking the dog, then leading into the parched land is very powerful.
Write, write, write. We like, like, like.
Thanks Christine, I think I want to work in more stuff you would see on the side of the highway in Oklahoma. I don’t know how that would work with the dog, who’s clearly not on the side of the road. I feel like I need to read something by Sharon Olds to get me into the tone of this poem.
Rethabile, I am trying. We’ll see if I can keep it up.
I think you are brilliant. Just sayin’