A Life in Poetry - Nov 2 2022

 

A Life in Poetry

Nov 2 2022

I hung the painting upside down.

Over-watered the dahlias

wore mismatched socks.

The dog was sick   —

vomiting on the rug

then promptly scarfing it up.

And the poem was lost

when I hit delete

instead of save.

The day, though, was beautiful.

warm, cloudless, dry

in a spectacular fall.

The universe, as usual

indifferent to my troubles

unimpressed by the triumphs.

In middle school English

there was pathetic fallacy,

nature

in sympathy with us.

In real life, no such thing;

she is oblivious

and we're on our own.

Turns out

I knew the poem by heart.

The painting

didn't matter anyway,

it was the abstract art.

And in the end

no one noticed the socks.

The dog, of course, is always happy

so what's the harm?

We were also taught

that poetry rhymes.

But nothing is as neat

as a nice rhyming couplet.

Life is dissonant,

with uneven meter

inconsistent diction

and line breaks

that aren’t yours to make;

sometimes, in the mid

dle of a word.

And while a good poem

is ambiguous,

it finishes

when just enough's been said.

But in real life

events are unpredictable

   —   things end where they end.

Sometimes

simply stop.