Usually, when I write a poem, even when I don’t know what it’s “about” (which is often) I recognize that it emerged from some seed in my own memory or imagination. The Visitor (previous post) is not like that. The voice, the house, the room, the ornaments – none of it seems to be mine. It unspooled on the page like a dream.
Who is The Visitor? If I look at it as though it were a dream, I suspect that she is aging and illness, visiting the page as she has visited me in the past two years. This dream, or poem, or monologue warns that the visitor will soon be a boarder, then a tenant, and finally the Lady of the house.
“. . . An old woman. What’s to fear?” In this American culture, old women are mostly invisible. When seen, they (we) are often viewed as fragile, feeble, vulnerable; targets of palsy, arthritis, purse snatchers and falls. Slow and burdensome, annoying when noticed.
But there is a deeper archetype. Wise woman. Matriarch. Grandmother, dispenser of love and judgement. Keeper of secrets. Witch, caster of spells and curses, brewer of potions and blessings. Crone, and as such, warning of the ugly truth of death.
Poems, at least the seeds of poems, often seem to descend from the ether. The more pragmatic of us guess that they ascend from the unconscious. Perhaps this one is my long-resisted acknowledgement of how much illness sometimes restricts my life, and where it inevitably ends. But also, for a time at least, the very ability to write it signals a period of relief, an ability to step back and look.
So for me, this not-so-good poem is far better than none.
Leave a Reply