bulbs

When people ask when I started writing poetry, I have a hard time answering. I assume most people tinkered with writing poetry as children and teens. Some of us never stop.

I do remember when I discovered free verse. It felt much like the time I went back home and my father dug up a mass flower bulbs he'd found in an overgrown, abandoned "homeplace." The root-ridden clump was a confusion of dirt and dirt-colored bulbs and thready roots. But they smelled like a promise of something. I had to plant them to know what that something was.

A junior high teacher (I can remember two possible candidates for this, but the name is lost) took me and my best friend to a closet at our school. We could chose our pick of outdated textbooks and ruined library books before they were discarded. I pulled out Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse. The copyright date was already three years before my birth, but opening the pages might as well have been stepping into a spaceship.

There was Ciardi and Roethke and Cummings and Ferlinghetti. Dorothy Parker's "Resume" was in there and after memorizing and reciting it in English class, I was sent to the counselor's office for a checking over. I read Langston Hughes' "Too Blue" and heard blues, felt them. Sometimes I would take the book up into a mimosa tree to read, drunk on the strange combination of words and the smell of the pink blossoms. In a way that can only be felt at 15, the poems felt like contraband, like a secret. Poetry, read and written, remained that way for many years.

What you see now is not new. Just wintered over, hidden by overgrowth, found again.

And the bulbs? Jonquils.

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Poetry exists because the heart rebels against the suppression of its inner life. - Christina Viti