It had been slowly building up in my head all day, not the poem itself but the mood that would inspire it, and finally out of the mood came the inspiration, and with it a couplet which I knew would be the last two lines. But I was at a loss as much as anyone would be, trying to figure out how to write a poem backwards. I wrote the couplet on the bottom two lines of a page in my notebook, a plain notebook left over from the sale when Ames closed. Each year people give me beautiful journals to write in, but I can never bring myself to write lines in them which I know inevitably will be scratched out and moved around and essentially look like a piece of garbage at the end.

I wrote down the couplet and I looked at it. I determined that I was going to multitask and write during the game, but that plan mostly failed as the game was spent eating dinner, getting snacks and unhealthy amounts of iced tea from the kitchen, talking to my roommate, and intermittently putting the tv on mute during commercials in order to listen to Tracy Chapman on my stereo (“Why?” has been going through my head all day, but that is another story entirely.) I glanced at the notebook a few times during the game, trying to figure out what sequence of words could possibly lead to the conclusion I had set up. It is almost like a math problem composed entirely of variables. The answer could be anything. But not just any anything, a very specific anything. The simultaneous openness and exactness are overwhelming.

Writing a poem is frequently, for me anyway, like doing a puzzle. Sometimes you have pieces and you don’t know where they go. Sometimes you know they are edge pieces and you try to frame your work area with them. Sometimes you think you know what the puzzle is a picture of, only to find as you assemble it that it is something else entirely. And that’s all fine and dandy but you still want to do the puzzle pictured on the box, dammit, and where are the pieces to that one? Or worse, you find that all these pieces don’t even go to the same puzzle, and you have to toss them aside and hope you find the ones they go to later.

So anyway, I had no idea what puzzle I was looking at, besides these couple of edge pieces, and with a vague feeling of futility I kept turning back to the game and keeping track of strikes and outs instead, since NESN helped to thwart my multitasking by not showing the count and the score at the top of the screen for most of the game. But as I turned off the tv at the end of the game I realized that I had figured out something after all—the color of the poem was twilight.

(In high school I wrote a poem once that I was completely convinced was lavender in color. I cannot tell you why I felt—and still feel—this way, given that it did not have a particular setting and was entirely abstract and had nothing to do with color. I am fairly sure that if I had shown it to anyone else they would not have shared this impression.)

Twilight turned out to be the first word of the poem too, and with these edge pieces in place a central metaphor began to shape itself. I settled into my room, played with the gerbil for a bit, got in my pajamas, and began to hammer it out. Trying to let it flow, trying not to force a rhyme, writing down a line I knew was bad so that I could get to the next line which would tell me what the last line was supposed to be. Sudden inspiration, three lines quickly, then a lull—walking to the kitchen to make tea, still churning the sounds of the words in my mind—walking back again as it steeped to write down something new. And as I fussed with capitalization and stanza breaks I realized that I know how to do this, that I’m not just a kid scribbling down whatever pops into her head anymore, that this is a craft and I’ve learned it, am still learning it, but I have what it takes and I know it like I know nothing else.

Two cups of tea later it is done, to a point—there are a couple of phrasings I know need fixing, but most of all it needs to be aged. The distance of time will tell me things I can’t know today because I am still too in love with the idea of this poem and since I have put that idea into it I see it reflected back at me even if it is not really there. Today I am the poem’s writer but in a week or a month or a year I can be its reader and figure out if it says what I want it to say, or if it says something different, or if it says anything at all, or if it almost says something and I can do something to make it clearer. But for now it is done, and I can go to sleep knowing that at least something got written today, even if it wasn’t that paper I ought to have been writing. I can only hope that after the semester ends I can train myself to do this all the time, to focus ideas and hammer them out with some amount of diligence and make this my life, like it was always meant to be.

I am changing around the whole archives page. There will still be a section for weekly/monthly archives, but additionally there will be a section for song posts and a best-of section. So, anyone who’s been reading for a while, if you have any suggestions about what you have found particularly memorable during my blogging existence, let me know. Of course I am going to pick most of it out myself, but it sure is a lot to read through, and I am curious about what has been memorable to other people, since that may not be the same as what is memorable to me.

In other news, only one more paper to write this semester, then I can get down to the business of getting this site sorted out: fixing old links, making the archive pages not look scary, and yes writing more.

Sometimes I live so vividly in my head during the day that when I finally shake myself out of it I am confused and disoriented, trying to figure out what is real and how to deal with people and what on earth has been going on in my real life while I’ve been dreaming all this.

I feel like I lived half a lifetime today. If I could figure out how to write long fiction at least I’d have an outlet for all this, but unfortunately I’ve never seemed to have the attention span for it. Until I get that worked out I suppose these worlds will have to find a place to live in some corner of my head, hopefully someplace where they won’t overcome me too often.

I hadn’t planned on being excited about the first meeting of the Red Sox and the Yankees this season. Everyone was harping on about Johnny Damon’s return, and I didn’t really think he deserved to have that much attention paid him. Boston would really be a better place if all the people who were buying Traitor and Demon t-shirts went and bought Crisp shirts instead. Furthermore, for better or worse baseball is a business, and charming though it is when players are loyal, it doesn’t do them any good. Look what happened to Arroyo. No one can really be blamed for looking out for themselves.

But the point is I did turn out to be excited, because all of a sudden we had Mirabelli back! Everything the Red Sox do manages to be dramatic, and overnight they had managed to reacquire our old knuckleball catcher from the Padres despite alleged competition from the Yankees (whose only possible reason for wanting him could be to keep us from getting him), and planned to fly him into Boston in time to start the game. Apparently he received a police escort to Fenway and changed into his uniform in the car. He got there in time and caught a beautiful game despite not having seen a knuckleball for six months.

I didn’t have the good fortune to watch all this on TV since I was working this evening, but followed the game online between interlibrary loan work. The game was tied when I left for home, but I saw my bus drive away as I was approaching it, and decided that was reason enough to take the subway instead and stop off at Fenway on my way home. After all, back when I was in Hamilton didn’t I always wish I could do things like this? When I got there the game was still tied, and I watched the TVs through bar windows while listening to the roar of the crowd. Nowhere (that I know of) is it so normal to squint at televisions through windows, to huddle around the sausage vendor’s radio, to walk down the street figuring out which roars mean strikes and which mean outs, to yell “Sweet Caroline” up at the green green support beams and walls, as though we could project our voices up high enough that they, at least, might have a decent view. The final out—the streets flow with people—we love that dirty water—and good times have never seemed so good, even though my idea of a good time is probably incredibly bizarre by most people’s standards.