First Impression
April 24 2015


If I could return
to the first impression
I would forgive my haste.
How quick we are
to make, and be made.

The many iterations
of old relationships
move from draft, to manuscript, to print.

An impression, in permanent ink
bound, and fixed.

I have always written in pen.

My many corrections, crossed-out and x'd,

incremental steps

left to posterity.

So, should I use pencil instead?

Where erasures smear the page
and nothing remains
of trial and error

and early mistakes?

But forensic memory retains
each minute deformation
and pressure-point.

Like the tell-tale marks
on the legal pad

I write upon,

the table-top's

soft scuffed wood.

A few neurons, loosely connected
in the hippocampus'

inaccessible depths

are my rough first-drafts,

in the back of cabinets

stuffed into drawers.

The mind writes over
like reel-to-reel tape.
Where each tiny magnetic deflection
of second guesses

and lasting regrets,

of love, and friendship

impressions left,
persists
in static noise.


The poem is mostly about first impressions: how quickly we make them; how faulty they often are; and how they persist, at least subconsciously. Between Daniel Kahneman's quick heuristic thinking and slow considered thought (as described in the Nobel prize-winner's Thinking Fast and Slow), this definitely belongs in the first category. Unfortunately, a first impression is often inaccurate, and memory sticky.

Of course, first impression immediately suggested to me the literal meaning of the word: an actual impression, as in pen on paper, or a printed woodcut; and similarly in analog tape, where sound is impressed on tiny magnetic particles fixed in orientation and place. So the poem plays with this concrete idea of physically impressing upon, and inter-weaves it with the persistence of memory.

The nature of memory is a recurring theme with me. There is its unreliability: repeatedly conflated and re-made, each time it's called upon. And also its subversiveness: lurking in the subconscious, then unpredictably emerging as intuition and prejudice.

Although as powerful as first impressions are, and as hard as it is to see anyone as they truly are -- even ourselves, to ourselves -- if we stick with someone long enough, we eventually get it right.

(Btw, while I do write the first draft in pen, they've almost all been thrown out, and are now mouldering away under tons of dirt in some landfill somewhere, or are being put to good use as recycled toilet paper ;-) . Similarly, I edit on the computer, so all the intermediate steps are now irretrievably deleted. Unlike the ghosts of memory, and unlike the first impressions that harden into certainty, there are no first impressions of my writing left. My poems only look as if they effortlessly and fluently wrote themselves!)