See what you think. Am I closer to nailing this poem on irregular verbs? I was reading a poem with flies in it, and that reminded me of that night we got out of our car at the motel in the Everglades, innocent as babes of the fact we’d booked during high fly season. Swatting flies reminded me of the bouncer in my first draft.The flies leapt across some brain synapse and became verbs (as well as nouns). The leap was pretty wide, but it seemed to give the poem a personal emotional depth it lacked before. It seems that when a poem takes off in several directions at once, it begins to look a lot more like the mind itself, reaching around in its associations. I have seen that multiplicity abused, to the point that the poem flies, ahem, out of control. What I think I mean by control is that some sort of integrity informs the whole--a sense of a felt-moment, a new awareness in the moment.I took out the last stanza you saw before and went on with the poem as you see below.Thanks for your comments!I Growed Old
Rarely used irregular verbs become regular most quickly, while commonlyused irregular verbs change the slowest. Be and think are the verbs leastlikely to change because they’re used the most.
-- Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics We reached the Everglades after dark, after the light-glazed eyes of a bobcat or something crossed our path.At the motel, we opened the car doors, and the carwas all wild, dark buzzing, God, everywhere! Fliesin the room we swatted so we could sleep, flieswanting only to live, to have their time, little Evergladenouns, little verbs, that come to me a thousand yearslater, my ears on fire:“In this week’s financial markets, lending has grindedto a virtual standstill.” I’d arised, I’d spreaded out the paper,and knowed I had not dreamed it. It was right herein the national news.Methought I saw the old verbs showing up from theirswarming hollows, into the light like second cousinsfrom Bay City—barely recognizable, uninvited, restlessat the door, blasphemous in their Goodwill clothes. And I sawthe bouncer flex his tattoo, ready to smash out caught and bredand pled and bought and crept and bent and hungand knew and heard!And I thought how old I am, how likely to show upin an out-of-date dress. Who knows which fillip is thisseason’s, which not? Remember holp? Who does? Who’llremember swum? Who has swum lately? Almostno one. I was out before breakfast on the glassy lake, onlya lone fishing boat for company, maybe the last swimmerwho’s swum. I will have swimmed all my life, to hear ittold by the ones who rev their jet skis! And how, pray tell,did I get in the water? I dived off the dock,leaving dove for the archivists.What of the flies that lived but a day, the oneswe dispatched with our rolled-up magazines? What oftheir ancestry, their passionate progress toward sustainabilityof their tribe? What of my old, sad marriage, that lonelytrip together into a glade we didn’t know?I love the old verbs, limping in with their luggage,and the old flies. We had to run; we had to slamthe door. We were shaken, we were not to survive,naught was to be left of us but the being verbs,and think: I think, I thought, we’d thought. . . . . .