Writing with Julia, Part 2

While Julia was poeming away across from me, looking up occasionally to say things like "I just wrote a poem--it was easy!" and then "I did five revisions just now" I was trying to write about snakes, from a line "a man playing with snakes." Nothing. So I went back to what I remembered of the lines Julia had sent me, something about windows, and glass falling out... Here are the lines I didn't bring with me:

Working on the 40th floor

You look up Third Avenue
at the tiny cabs and busses,
the specks of people join and turn to clouds
moving across intersections, dispersing,
re-collecting, moving again, tidal.
At night lines of red tail lights
spread through the city's body,
the long wide avenue--an artery
taking the light away.
You are watching from the window
your forehead pressed to the glass.
If the glass fell out you would fall
but the glass won't fall.

And here's what I'm working on. It's awfully naked to post something truly in process, but the point is, everything starts somewhere. We have these verse-y conversations, and we keep working on them and eventually--or sooner--poems happen.

The vertigo of waiting rooms

If the window broke it would fall in rough,
blunt pieces, walls gone, cells blasted open
and something escaping, DNA
in blastospheres twisting apart, their
alphabets now spelling out the name
of a plague, a loss, your dis-ease. How
fleeting it felt, just a twinge, flashes
of a headache--a temblor, almost
imperceptible, tethered to the
fault line unzipping the other side
of the world. You take a breath, deep, slow,
trying not to think of this. The ground's
still steady under your feet. No one's
yet noticed the cracks in the tinted panes.

Comments

[Julia Cole]

Oh jeez, what I said was, "isn't it nice when it's easy?" Which happens SO rarely. Didn't mean to rub it in!

[Donna Frazier]

O, I know! But you know how it is--the other guy's magic seems just so *magical.* You look up and the other kid is gliding on their skates while you're holding on for dear life at the side of the rink. I was truly amazed. Ease happens. Wow.