Jody's Notes
So an editor of a little magazine really liked this poem--wanted to print it if I dropped the last line.
There's this thing I do, I guess. In the poetry. That some editors hate. I talk too much (that's what they think). There's this other particular style these editors prefer: say very little. (Say almost nothing.) Let the reader work it out. (Or: leave the reader alone: the reader doesn't want to hear too much from you.) Concision is beautiful.
I do that too. Really. In other poems. (Different poems do different things, right? Why isn't that okay?) But this thing I do in some of these poems annoys some of these editors. (Learn to "cut," they say.)
Poems have different voices. And sometimes you can't hear a voice if you leave out too many of its words. (Some voices need their words; some don't. Cat voices, for example. They don't go with words. So far, anyway.)
I stared and stared, contemplated cutting the line. For years. But I couldn't do it. And then, finally, Richard Smyth took the poem for Albatross. As it was.
Which doesn't mean I was right to be stubborn. I just don't know. I still don't know.
The grace of water vapor,
its choreography of light;
occasionally a charred tree:
This is sky’s gift to Earth. We,
we hide in caves, tremble among the bones
of our meal. How clean
the sky, which never eats; how
shorn of stars by its clouds.
We, we bury loved ones in mud, track across
continents, leave fossils, flints, evidence.
Moon ebbs, waxes
without hope, without envy. We tell
its story:
Someone (up there)
cares (is looking out) for us
(even at night).
In some sense, we’re right:
our descendents watch our remains
through glass—point at our depictions,
welcome us into their picture books.
This, in its way, is love.
© 2012 Jody Azzouni