Line Breaks

Feb 16 2015

You didn’t know they were last words

the day you left.

There was always tomorrow

and the next, the next.

Which is what you’ve said

most of your life,

drifting from year to year

waiting to start.

Like the line break

over which poets obsess

last words matter.

They linger

in that silent pause

with the weight of sound,

like a heavy bell

that resonates after it’s struck.

But it’s absence

that truly counts.

The stuff of regret

is like the blank page

at which you stared, and stared,

what you wished you’d written

was left unsaid.

So profess your love

confess you dark desire;

leave correctness

to the politicians

do not bite your tongue.

Because what you’ll have left undone

will burden you more

than all of your failures

and disappointments.

Even you are unsure

why you never returned

that day.

But those anodyne words

still hurt,

the squandered chance

feels like torture.

So in the dark despair

of 4 am

the cold still air is shattered

by your animal shout.

You send it out into the world

where it lurks, hovering

hungry to be heard.

And somewhere, someone starts,

dreams disturbed

breath caught.

Then turns, exhales deeply,

sinking back

to fitful sleep.

I was reading a book review (by someone named Emma Healey) in today's Globe and Mail: a collection of the love letters by Canadian poets. Even as one (although hardly collected!) the conflation of love letters and anything Canadian sounds as oxymoronic to me as it probably does to you!

Anyway, it wasn't a great review. But it included this phrase, which stuck with me: " ...nobody does details like people who obsess over line breaks for a living." It reminded me of something I wrote in a comment that followed one of my recent poems (my so-called "blurbs"): about end emphasis, the power conferred on a word simply by giving it the privileged place at the end of a line. And it reminded me of something Billy Collins (I think it was him) once said: that the only difference between prose and poetry is that in poetry the lines don't go to the end of the page. In other words, almost everything depends on line breaks. And it's true: the sound, the rhythm, and the meaning (end emphasis), as well as clever misdirection,  all reside in where you choose to stop a line.

So that was the beginning of this poem. Which turned into the idea of "last words": not just the literal end of a line, of course, but also the allusion to separation and to death. (Like the guy who dies in a car accident on his way to work, whose last thoughts are of that last ho-hum morning when, in a sour mood, he pecked his wife on the cheek, kicked the dog, and yelled at the kids. Do we ever know when it's last words?)

And then the corollary of last words: the words that were never said. (I think in the poem, recrimination and regret at a romantic break-up that ended badly.)

Which also works with actions. That is, you regret more what you didn't do in life than what you did. (Which comes in these lines: Because what you'll have left undone/ will burden you more/ than all of your failures/ and disappointments. And also comes in the opening stanza, the reference to drift. Which is especially personal, since I've been guilty of endlessly deferring, of living like I'd live forever, and so very much missing out.) I think this comes about because we naturally idealize the outcome of all the paths not taken, the forks in the road where we demurred; while the outcome of what we did choose is never perfect, never quite as envisioned. And also because you can only do so much, while the possible things not done are infinite. The lesson, of course, is to take risks, err on the side of doing. (He earnestly said, like some hypocritical guru of positivity and self-actualization!)

The final stanza dramatizes this regret over things unsaid: his (her?) agonized shout in the dead of night; too little too late. Like the tree that falls in the forest, do words that go unheard even exist? His lasts words finally given voice, but still effectively unsaid.

This is also a bit of an "inside baseball" poem about writing poetry. Which, as something that occupies a big part of my life, is naturally something I'm inclined to write about. Unfortunately, no one wants to read about the writer's angst, or his craft. So I'm very pleased that this one was able to say something about the writing life that isn't all self-referential and obscure: about end emphasis and line breaks; about being blocked (the blank page/ at which you stared, and stared); and about my own frustration of sending words out into the world that I fear will never be read or heard.

I have to admit, I was incredibly self-conscious (more than usual, that is) about my line breaks here. Obsess indeed! Hope they work.