These December poems

These five poems come, I suppose, in response to my last poem 'Tuesday' which ends with the simple question: Where are you?  This question comes from and in reference to Genesis 3:8-21 where the Bible tells us that the Lord God was walking in the garden in the cool of that day while Adam & Eve were hiding in the trees.  That singular question (3:9) zeros in on the heart of this new condition that they find themselves in, the condition I find myself in every single day: naked, in need of clothes. These lines are then some offerings that attempt to answer the question posed, a poetry from the 'naked' perspective.

As I was thinking further on why it is that I write at all, especially from such a vulnerable place, it occurred to me that in crafting verse I was indeed not unlike the wood carver, looking at the raw form and chipping away until beauty was born.  It seems artists of all ilks are compelled by this need for beauty and the beautiful. And while this parallel to the carver may be true in one sense, I think in another way that the writing of poetry, at its core, requires a uniquely complicated culmination of varying roles.  It is as if first the poet is a timber cruiser, searching an endless forest for just the right tree. Always vigilant, mind fixed with his crude ax in hand, out some fifty miles into the wilds he marches on.  He goes because, as we all know, not just any tree will suffice his purposes.  It must be quality selection of timber that stands true in a part of the forest he thinks capable of producing a crop of the right shape and design.  A soft and pliable quantity that has grown up under the correct conditions.  In reality, this journey, this seeking is the most essential piece of his work.  The poet needs that path just as much as he needs the raw material, almost more than he needs his subject. But now there she stands, the one that is bold enough to contain his potential work of art. It is then that his role evolves, as he becomes now the lumberjack fierce and strong.

I have hacked and packed out many a desirable 'tree' in my short time as a writer.  The work is both exhausting and exhilarating simultaneously.   But as any decent carver can tell you, finding good wood and bringing it home do not make art.  The details must then be etched carefully with a tried and steady hand. Each phrase's edge sanded into the right kind of shape so as to improve the new born form. Truth be told, I think I may never get there.  That impossible perfected place I can only envision opaquely in my mind's eye. That elusive space where the journey, the cutting, the packing out and all of the finish work somehow fall into a harmonious syncopation, like a song being sung.

And so it was, last Tuesday morning, that I awoke under a new fallen snow almost startled to realize the position of my heart.  So far to the north and bitter cold.  My inner thoughts sounded an ethereal alarm of sorts. My vulnerability so real to me there, beneath so thin a veil.
Where are you?  those thoughts inquired.
"I am journeying naked through the trees," I replied.
"Clothe me... in your words."

A.S.