A lonely poem on a scrap of paper

About six months into the life of this newsletter, I sent out a one-off Labor Day missive that was a kind of observational poem. I’d spent a chunk of the holiday afternoon sitting in a park and recording what I saw and heard there. “Just a list,” I called it.

It might not have been my most insightful or complex edition, but writing it had been a pleasure for me — meditative, relaxing, revelatory. I had a passing thought that I could create a whole series of such observational list-poems, if only for the excuse to turn the sitting and listening into a ritual. I have a thought like this almost any time I try something new and enjoy it. It’s not enough to just make something once and let it be. The thing wants to be part of a collection of things. There’s nothing to be done with a lone poem on a scrap of paper. A single doodle on your Instagram feed is just confusing. One episode of a podcast is just an mp3.

In a self-published creative economy, an idea is only a seed. Some folks are good at planting seeds, and some at watering. I tend to plant a lot and then drive myself to exhaustion attempting to keep them all germinating. Then, I’ll call myself a quitter on account of the few I leave dry and buried — buried, yet marked, so I don’t forget that HERE LIES AN ABANDONED PLAN.

I’m back in the park as a I write this, and if I were taking up my idea from 18 months ago and writing down a list of observations, it would include: a slender rabbit in a thicket behind a black cyclone fence; an impossibly blue bird; a fish kite strangled between a pair of trees; a mom on the phone, vouching for a client, while her toddler fiddles with a red wallet; a trainer ignoring his client’s performative moans of exhaustion; the smell of clover; threads of conversations between friends walking the path before my bench — “…Aperol spritzes the size of our heads…”; “There ARE no shows right now!”; a girl who claims to know the best club in L.A.

I find it easy to notice, easy to hear and see and smell it all. For me, it is easier to notice than not to notice. It’s the ease of it that makes it feel like cheating — like just a list, and not a poem. Poetry is personal, is earnest. It’s embarrassing. Somehow, I find it embarrassing to even think of myself as a poet, and so I do not, even though it’s an identity I know I could expand to fill. The distillation of emotion and experience into lyrical phrases feels self-evident to me — a worldview I wear, a frequency to which I am tuned. But still, I can only bear to dabble. Just a few scraps of paper, hidden away in disparate notebooks over decades.

But I have a real poem for you today. It’s a March poem, so it seemed like now or never. I wrote it in March of 2019, and every so often I seem to find it again, in a notebook where no other poems appear. Years have passed, and I don’t hate it yet, so I give it to you, embarrassingly earnest though it may be. File it wherever your own favorite scraps are filed.

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Tangerine

How peculiar that a citrus is a winter crop
The frigid swaths of the world count the weeks until promised spring ,
Desperate for portents — ANY SIGN! —
Of good, warm news to come

Peculiar that a winter fruit should smell of summer sun
Oranges and yellows and slaked thirst

Lemons, citrons, oblong Meyer monstrosities
Thick-rinded, waxy-skinned jewels
Overwhelm everyday backyard trees
In warmer climes (like mine)
And everyone says,
“What on EARTH will we DO with all this fruit?”

The treeless marvel at the absurd abundance,
Noting how green skin melts to louder shades
How fallen fruit rots already to brown

On a night walk to clear my head of early March
As I’m looking heavenward, whining to the moon
Some something SQUISHES under my sole

I’ve stepped on a small orange
Or possibly a tangerine
Fallen from a tree I never noticed
More fruit than leaves, this tree
It couldn’t keep this juiceripe orb
The slow trickle of nectar on the sidewalk
Now inches downhill

Oh tangerine (or small orange)
You didn’t live and die in vain
You stopped a human woman in her tracks
Made her gasp and laugh
And delight in being mistaken
And she marveled, as she passed
At the way your August scent
Dazzled the crisp March air.

Photo by Michele Blackwell on Unsplash