by Fitz | Aug 25, 2014 | Journal
There is always a hard shift for me at the end of the summer, and today is that day for me. I miss the freedom of last week: I’d wake in the morning, come out to the deck to write poetry or work on my novel–but now today, I feel like I should be preparing for school, which looms around the corner next week. Wise thinking tells me to disregard my school thoughts and focus instead on the pile of wood that needs to be split, the back of the house that needs to be painted, and the yard work still unfinished.
After lying dormant for a few years, I started working again on Hallow’s Lake, a short story/novella/novel that shows more and more promise to me. The idea for the story (as opposed to having a plot) is to capture the truth about a certain place in a certain place in time. There is no antagonist aside from the cruel and unrelenting vagaries of fate. The characters deal with the common struggle to forge an identity and shape their lives as best they can. The common thread in all of there lives is the voice of a narrator–a voice who simply retells the sketches and scenes from the community that lives on Hallow’s Lake–a place loosely based on Stinson Lake in New Hampshire–which was so pivotal in my life as I grew up, and even after I “grew up.” The narrator is a young man who simply helps people out and, in a sense, is simply there to record the words, actions, and interactions of the characters.
If there is any strength in the writing, I think is in the sketches of ordinary people with ordinary demons consciously and unconsciously helping each other survive in a somewhat isolated community. Nobody’s life is anywhere near perfect and in the unfolding of the scenes, I am trying to imply that each character’s life is incredibly complex, deeply emotional, and surprisingly intellectual–with the implication being that there is no such thing as a minor character in life.
My big issue is–and has been–how to wrap up a story that does not have a linear plot or a easy to recognize conflict around which to focus my readers. My most recent thought is to simply call it poem, not a story–which would solve a lot of my uneasiness surrounding how to “release” this piece. In many ways, it is similar to Dylan Thomas’s approach to writing “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” though he at least had an abiding and enduring theme around which to hang the images, actions, and memories of a child’s Christmas–his Christmas, perhaps.
So, yes, I will put off school for at least another day…
by Fitz | Aug 24, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
At midnight I hear the cuckoo clock chiming
from it’s perch in a cluttered kitchen
locked in cadence with the tower bell
gonging this old mill town at midnight
to a deeper sleep,
like a call to prayer
reminding me that this new day,
starting in the dark of a hallowed night,
is more than just an ordinary day:
blessed by memories
stirring in palpable realness—
your soft breathing beside me
mixing with crickets and peepers
calling out into the darkness,
searching for a dream
fit to be called a true marriage—
our gift constantly opening,
revealing a mystery and a majesty
larger than the box itself—
stunning in the simplicity
of renewed, remembered,
and resplendent love.
by Fitz | Aug 19, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
The coyotes and fisher cats
seem intent on striking
some new deal
with each other
to toy with our fears
in this gentleman’s wilderness—
patches of dense woods
dotted with overgrown fields,
riven and intersected
by highways, powerlines
and quiet, suburban
neighborhoods.
Last night it was the coyotes
who edged closer
chattering and howling
in the scrub brush
below the power line
reminding me
in staccato yelps
of the precariousness
of evolution.
by Fitz | Aug 15, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
EJ wanted a banana tree for Christmas
so that early morning
brought a plastic bag,
a few meager roots
and no directions.
I bought some potting soil
and a square cedar box
EJ placed deliberately
by a westward window.
He gently splayed the roots,
pressed the soil,
and smiled and shrugged
with his calm and gentle
equanimity.
For years now
the tree has lived and died
in a cycle of births
and deaths
on meager rays
of a distant sun,
cups of water,
leftover Gatorade, cold tea
and the remaining milk
from bowls of Fruit Loops.
New England is not kind
or welcoming to anything
not from here, practicing
a stoic and mystic
indifference to all of us
transplanted bodisattva’s
who somehow persist
in spite of everything
and our tender shoots
harden into a pithy bark
and we manage to survive
on the mystery within.
by Fitz | Aug 14, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
There is something about coming home
to this empty house, yesterday’s
heavy downpours scouring
clean the already
weathered deck
where I sit
wishing for,
wanting,
you.
by Fitz | Aug 12, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
Trying to only see
what is in front of me
my eyes are continually drawn
away from this page
and the work left to be done—
my labored words etched
and scratched away
like fleeting mosaics
in dry sand.
I need a windowless cell
to work the alchemy
that shapes the palpable
from the ether of thought.
It is hard to imagine
any poem more important
than the massive bolts of ash
dry and brittled
in an overgrown field
waiting to be split and stacked
into a perfection of form
and preparedness.
