Flies and Poetry

Hmmm. What's attracting flies to my blog? Could it be the scent of stinky writing?

Why yes! I think that's exactly what it is. Because today's blog post is going to be particularly stinky.

One of my best friends in high school and college was recently cleaning out some boxes and came across a stack of my old poetry, which I had carefully compiled into a manuscript, complete with a title page and table of contents, and given to her. (She also fancied herself a poet, and had done the same for me, so I was returning the gesture.) She mailed it to me, and I received it yesterday.

Now, we're talking poetry that I wrote as a teenager. I've blogged before about my collegiate poetry writing career, and over the years I had discarded many of those poems. I threw some out when I lived in Florida, probably around the time I moved to New York. I threw more out soon after we moved to London.

But I must say, I got a kick out of receiving those poems in the mail and reading them again. The universe sent them back to me like a boomerang! Here's one that's not too bad, written in 1984 when I was 17. I wrote several poems around that time for a high-school writing competition that I ultimately won. This is not one of the poems I submitted, but I probably wrote it with that contest in mind.

Azalea

Curved and rippled,

triumphant,

yet almost too temporary

to be enjoyed.

Pink, magenta, mauve,

speckles, spots,

the Floral Leopard.
Sloping throat,

deep pink shadows,

a purple horn, curling upward,

trumpeting colors

to the sun.

Many of them, though, are less observational and more laden with the kind of emotional drama that one would expect from a teenager. I have a couple called "Because of YKW," and I know YKW stands for you-know-who, which is what my mother used to call my father. My poems were not about my father, though -- they were about some erstwhile love interest. I was simply borrowing my mother's term to keep that person anonymous (never mind any Freudian implications). It took me a while to even remember who YKW was.

Similarly, there was this one, from March 1986:

To D: The Last Light of a Bad Day

The streetlights, the orange kind,

Glow against a faint remainder of blue sky.

A peaceful end to a glaring day.

(Do you even like me?)

This cement is cooling, the heat being lifted by the night

In steaming columns...

(Half of me says you do, the other half, well...
Is it unreasonable to push things so fast?)

Mosquitoes --
Always mosquitoes on a cool night!

(Do I bother you or something?)

Relief is a great feeling.

The pressure is off, once again, until tomorrow.

(I'll see you again tomorrow.

Are you looking forward to it?
I'm living for it, it seems.)

I feel cool, relaxed, ready to meet

(any challenge.)

I wrote that when I was 19, and D was a guy in my college Spanish class who I was crushing on at the time. I'd forgotten about him completely and like YKW, I had to think to remember who D was. It's funny that I saw myself as possibly "pushing things too fast" because I don't think I pushed things at all. We did hang out together before and after class, but I never even asked him out!

Anyway, it's not very poetic, but it is very teenagery. As I told my friend in a thank-you message yesterday, "It's great to revisit our younger selves from a position of relative 'wisdom!'" Now that all these poems have returned to me, I'll keep them. They don't embarrass me as much as they used to, because I'm so far removed from them now that I can see them as a product of youth.

And look! It's another fly!