Jody's Notes
So it's a challenge my friend poses to me. Write a happy poem. About tomatoes in a garden. (Because she was growing tomatoes in her garden.) After our conversation I try to write the poem the way I usually try to write poems. I put a theme down: tomatoes. I start to free-associate some images. And then I write (suddenly) this first line: My father is dead.
(For the record, my father wasn't dead--not at the time I wrote this poem. He wasn't even ill; there was nothing going on with him or his health that would suggest autobiography at work in my putting this first line down on paper. How it usually goes, by the way.)
So I pause. Because, after all, it's not clear I want to get into something like this. In a poem. (For at least two reasons. First, it can be emotionally troubling, and second, the result can be maudlin.) But I go ahead anyway. Once I have the line: ghost is a crop like any other (which I spontaneously generated in trying to write this poem), I know I'm going to finish it.
I don't try ever again. Writing a happy poem about tomatoes, I mean. Obviously that's not where I live. As a poet, anyway.
I republished this poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
My father is dead.
I look at the tomatoes he’d planted
and realize ghost
is a crop like any other.
I talk to the ground,
beg it to manage something
better this time. But no,
what wanders through the living room
that evening
is insubstantial as usual.
We chat,
nothing new going on in his life,
mine idle with triviality.
I’d lie, but I can see he doesn’t care.
After he leaves,
I lay out all the color photographs
of him I can find.
I pretend the snapshots are flowers.
© 1999, 2001 Jody Azzouni