Poetry

Poems are like a classroom of students — you're not suppose to have a favorite but there are times when you secretly cheer for the success of just one.

I'm happy to announce that one of my favorite poems recently won first place in the Tallahassee Writers Association poetry contest.

The poem — Fern, talus, tide — will be featured in Penumbra, TWA's annual journal published in March.

Fern, talus, tide

Drew Myron

It's salal, he says, but I don't know how

to say what he touches, how to make the

words that form new memory

It's alder, birch, spruce,

a shore pine edge in offshore wind

We drive through days of dictionary

pages, catalog a new land of heather,

and fern, talus and basalt

Surrounded by twisting syllables

and vines of vowels, we reach new ground

Our tongues trip over fresh formations:

alsea, siltcoos, siuslaw

On hands and knees,

we sort through language

slow and halting, finally give up

to touch earth instead

Wordless, we hunt for smooth rock,

broken shell, soundless objects

that will speak for us

It's ocean now, not asphalt and engines,

that rushes and recedes

Current and tide,

sunbreaks and river roads

a new vocabulary that says home

• • •

I recently discovered that one of my poems was included in a wedding ceremony. Tend, from the Forecast collaboration with artist Tracy Weil, was read at the top of the mountain in Telluride, Colorado. I'm easily flattered but this time I am especially touched. I did not imagine Tend as a love poem, but, really, what poem isn't? Poems help us articulate the grasping pull of the heart. Now, I see Tend freshly, and with love.

tend

pick absurdity

the crazy wildflower

of each dangerous bouquet

roll in the futility of chase

with each abrupt end

approve a shortcut

allow decay

mend slowly

weed your garden

tend to discouraged daisies

make space for what lasts

willow heather birch

plant fresh feeling

and solve

just one thing

From Forecast, the word-art collaboration featuring poems by Drew Myron and interpretive paintings by Tracy Weil. After a year-long tour with stops at Weilworks Gallery in Denver, Colorado, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the poetry-painting works are now available for purchase. See more of the show, and the special edition exhibition book at www.weilworks.com/forecast.

• • •

The data is grim. There are 35 million people worldwide – a 10% increase over 2005 – living with Alzheimer's disease. According to a 2009 report, the number of people with Alzheimer's is expected to nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030 and 115.4 million in 2050.

In the shadow of these numbers, I was honored this past weekend to stand with a group of writers and share poems about people we love who have lived — and died — with Alzheimer's. The reading was held at Looking Glass Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and each of us had work in Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disesase.

It was a powerful event, a weave of voices from husbands, wives, sons, daughters and grandchildren — each of us touched by this disease of erosion. We shared our poems with a full audience and we were all part of a community we never wanted to join, and yet grateful for the connection.

I'm honored to have "Erosion," a poem about my grandfather included in the book. My grandparents Bart and Lu (Lucinda or Lucy) Myron were wheat farmers in Washington's Spokane Valley. After 40 years of farming, they retired and spent winters in the desert. In their last years, they lived with my parents. Bart lived to nearly 95 (just a few months shy) and Lu lived to 97.

Erosion

Who knows how
the mind files memory?

Missing pieces, your
history, this life, lies
three states to the south —

lost rusted cars, bindweed
decay in the sun

wild geese fight winds
that rattle shingles, shake doors

your vacant eyes sort
through weeds, neglect

memory somersaults
lands against antelope
bones blanched in desert heat —

futile to search for data:
the face of a son, the hand of the wife
price of wheat, words,
any words to rise, rescue us

from this wait,
this long silent loss.

- Drew Myron


Read more about the book, and the reading, here.


• • •



How many people does it take to make a poem?

I’ve been re-reading Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, a volume of playfully sophisticated couplet queries, and I’m finding my own thoughts now nuanced with rumination.

This latest examination stems from the arrival of The MacGuffin (Spring/Summer 2009), a handsome literary journal from Schoolcraft College in Michigan. My poem Lucy Loses a Limb appears in this issue, and I am giddy as an actress thanking the Academy.

A few months ago, while doing a radio interview promoting Seashore Family Literacy’s Young Writers program, the host asked about poetic influences. This is not a trick question. Still, my head swirled with possibilities, my voice cracked and I could render just a few of my favorites, delivered in a thin voice bereft of the appreciation I carry for writers who weave words and feeling into a handful of carefully crafted lines.

How many people does it take to make a poem?

My Lucy poem — written in the voice of my 95 year-old grandmother — is just 16 lines but the thread of influence is deep and wide. A poem is born long before the first word arrives. If we’re lucky, the piece takes shape from the beautiful mash of people and places, wounds and worries, and the books and writers that help form our voice and view. Once on the page, we are lucky if our words are questioned, honed and revised by numerous hearts, minds and eyes.

No poem — or story, or painting — is born in isolation. All life is influence, gratefully.

Lucy Loses a Limb

Drew Myron

After 75 years
I didn’t bury a husband.
I lost a limb.

Each day a swift new cut:
the upper arm, the elbow, every finger
and then the thumb.
There is paralysis where
ache meets absence.

At night, when I turn to talk across
the dark, my voice is heavy as hay bales,
thick with the grit of memory.

I feel the throb of
phantom fingers,
erased one
by one.