Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.
I wrote a poem the other day and I'm terrified to share it with you. Which means I should definitely share it with you. Here goes…
A Memento?
These easy nothings
of our youth, these
thin-skinned superpowers
that we took
for eternal.
The low register
of our falsetto,
the ability to recall
the word membrane.
What now?
A poster screams save
our gulf.
But I want it
gone.
The thing that connects
and separates
us
stretched so thin now,
the thing.
What’s it called?
A filament maybe?
A tendril?
A memento?
It hums with my song
to you,
keening,
cracking,
high pitched, and
lower,
lower,
gone.
Thoughts on A Memento?
Something about poetry lends itself to sadness. Not the garment-rending woe of despair, but the slim line of darkness that peeks around the edge of a sunny afternoon.
I found myself on just such a sunny afternoon recently visiting family in Austin. I was staying at a favorite hotel, the San Jose, and enjoying its many quirks, one of which took the form of a poem pinned next to the mirror over the sink—something small and beautiful to read while one performs one’s ablutions.
I was reminded how much poetry meant to me when I was in the throes of adolescence. How much I loved writing it and reading it. And how after the guitar had installed a few callouses on my fingers, poetry had been supplanted by song lyrics. Similar but not the same.
The next thing I knew, I was walking down South Congress, writing a poem. In my head at first. Then on a hotel notepad. Remembering how much I enjoy solving all those little problems, working those weird puzzles, building a machine that does a lot with a little. Or tries to anyway. Aspires.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved poetry—each poem’s an aspiration, a dream of a connection. It’s the distilled essence of those seemingly larger artistic undertakings: albums, novels, essays… A poem is a furtive gasp, hope disguised as despair, sunlight disguised as darkness.
And so, after agonizing, I’ve shared this poem with y’all. Thank you for giving me the space to do so. Thanks, as always, for calling Time & Temperature.
yrs,
Rhett
PS: (Typewriter illustration by the brilliant Dan Santat for the back cover of our book No More Poems.)
PPS: (Congrats to Dan for his recent National Book Award for his graphic memoir A First Time For Everything.)
It's a lovely thing, to wake up and find one of your favorites has posted a poem he just wrote. It even helps Monday seem less wretched! And I think both 'filament' and 'tendril' are correct; filament for more impersonal connections, that we are tied to whether we want it or not, and tendril for those we found by reaching out the way a plant does, finding, then wrapping around. I'll stop now :P Love it, though.
The poem is grand, but I especially love your prose *about* poetry. Kudos to you for continuing to explore new creative spaces.