Site Meter Peculiar Susceptibility: And I was calm as the plane went down

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

And I was calm as the plane went down

Sometimes I wake up with a line of a poem stuck in my head.

I've been thinking these days about that space above the things on which we focus. Sometimes, it's the sky:


Sometimes it's the walls and ceiling of a natural history diorama:


Last night I dreamed that the plane I was in clipped the Sydney Opera House before it went down. We were hovering above that eminently photographable skyline identifier.

I've never been the kind of poet that writes from dreams. I write from research. I read. I visit archives. I look through photographs. Frankly, I don't know how to write a poem from a dream; I don't know how to make that relevant to a wider audience than myself.

But I like waking up with a series of words in my head that I trust to be a line of poetry.

2 comments:

A A Ron said...

Maybe you had Conor Oberst floating in the back of your mind....

Ali said...

We're going to a party. It's a birthday party. It's your birthday party. Happy birthday, darling.

Love this post...I wake up with a line on my lips a lot, too, and scribble it down before going back to bed. Then I find it later and it goes from having made perfect sense upon its writing to absolutely no sense at all upon its reading. The last one, a few nights ago, was: "If kisses were easy, Eden's like flowers." No idea.