NO COUNTRY

I once believed that I remembered every word I ever wrote...

Then one day several years ago, I was going through some manila envelopes stuffed so full of papers that their seams were splitting.

The envelopes were filled with four or five years worth of my poems, some crammed onto found pieces of stationery, some written and rewritten on expansive lined paper.

I thumbed through all the old familiar files, the Xs and arrows on each page helping to reconstruct the essential DNA of all the old familiar words.

The final page that I found in one of the envelopes contained the following, with not an X or arrow in sight:

'Neath the bell tower sits a well,
Where colonies of uniform grass
Awakened, bend and draw to glance
Upward at her knell.
'Neath the bell tower sits a well.

'Neath the bell tower they converge--
Brassy children sprung out from mothers' side,
Agitated by restraining ties,
In her toll there are none to be heard.
'Neath the bell tower they converge.

'Neath the bell tower I stand,
A-cast in silent revelry,
Prizing the four winds' buoyancy,
And the clap of her simple hand.
'Neath the bell tower I stand.

It was instantly clear from the subject matter that I had written this, a remembrance of my boyhood churchgoing days.






















But that moment of clarity was clouded quickly by a betrayal of memory. This was the only poem in the reams of paper that I just did not recall.

I lost my equilibrium as I tried to bring back the experience of writing the poem, in an effort to place it in my personal timeline. But I was never able to elevate the experience much above the category of a light fever dream.

And as I made my peace with that fact, my dizziness was tinged with a bit of sadness. I thought back to that 21/22-year old with a formal 9th grade education, aspiring to be an impractical poet.

Who, with Hopkins and Yeats in his head, but without steady knowledge of sprung rhythm or scansion to get him through the night, wrote on through that night nonetheless.

Some of it is embarrassing for sure, but some of it has a luster partially borrowed, partially earned (“Colonies of uniform grass/Awakened, bend and draw to glance” and “Prizing the four winds’ buoyancy/And the clap of her simple hand”).

Welcome to poetry week on the Tongue...