April 1, 2014
Tuesday

Sweet to remember . . .
— C.K. Williams, b. 1936
American poet

It’s spring, again, finally, even though it was 35° when I sat down this morning for C&C (Coffee and Contemplation) at morning vista. We’re a month into Lent, that season of spiritual introspection that calls me to meditate upon the mysteries of sin and redemption, injury and atonement, death and rebirth, the things we have done, and the things we have left undone. As usual, I have a lot of sin, injury (inflicted), and things left undone to think about.

And, as usual concerning the things left undone, the only thing I can do is draw a line and start again. Today begins National Poetry Month, a good time to take up #todayspoem again.

I set some parameters for this exercise this year. I will endeavor to read poets whose work I have not read before. In the case of a poet whose work I do know, I will read a poem that is new to me.  I will also endeavor to search out in particular the work of Catholic poets, as part of my reading and research into matters of faith and doctrine that I’ve undertaken to support my novel.

Today’s poem appears in the most recent issue of Tin House. I am not a subscriber. I bought this issue because the cover announced that its theme was Memory, and had work by Cheryl Strayed. A glance at the table of contents promised other delights.

As with many of my literary purchases, it came into the house and descended into a pile of other “to be read” items. When I moved such a stack this morning, it surfaced and caught my eye.

“Scents” is difficult to extract an excerpt from. The words I’ve chosen are the first three. There follow then four paragraphs which, to my eye and ear, are prose, albeit luminous prose (and I do not use the word “luminous” often to describe prose, recoiling from its use, and that of “pitch-perfect dialogue,” in reviews). The paragraphs present details of everyday experiences, such as standing close in a small elevator with others. These moments are captured precisely with words we sometimes don’t think of as poetic. For example, two Middle Eastern men on the elevator are described as emitting “the sweet stink of the meal they’ve just eaten.”

That line evoked for me the memory of my summer in the city, the summer of 2011 when I sublet a friend’s apartment on 92nd Street in New York City. I lived on the 18th floor, where there were five apartments, and in the whole time I was there I saw only one other person in my hallway, and that only one time. We got on the elevator at the same time one afternoon. He reached for the floor button first, and when he pressed “18,” I did look at him quizzically. We got off together, he turned right, I turned left, and each stole a glance at the other, to see which apartment the other was entering. I never saw him again.

A little dog lived in the apartment across the hall. It yipped every time I went in or out, and was the only sound I heard from other tenants. It also yipped when its owner came home from work. I’d hear the elevator doors open, and then the little dog yipping, and then the apartment door across from mine open. Not long afterward, the scents of Middle Eastern cooking would waft into the hallway and under my door. It was not always a sweet scent. Sometimes it was sharp, and spicy, and meaty. But it was always pleasant, and I would never apply the word “stink” to it.

There is an eating scene, or a reference to food, in every piece of fiction I write. Recently I completed extensive revisions to a story called “Cardamom.” It concerns the longing for a lost love, a woman who used it a lot, that a man experiences when his wife uses that spice for the first time in their 15-year relationship. I wrote the first draft more than a dozen years ago, and many work sessions with it began with a ceremonial inhaling from a jar of cardamom.

“Scents” has done what poetry is supposed to do. I shared briefly in the recalled experience of someone else, and then entered my own recollections, following a fragrant trail up to the 18th floor of a New York City high rise again, and then back down and farther back in time to the autumn afternoon when, standing across the street from the place where I lived the year I knew the young man who inspired my story’s main character, I wrote the first scene.

I am eager to see where else poetry will take me this month.