before/after
In between one of the recent night feedings the poem "before/after" was completed—after shifting through several quick revisions. It exists as an emotional collage of moments, utilizing a sense of desperateness Ricky and I felt the day before Brendan's birth. On December 2, in my notebook, I hastily drafted the opening stanzas as a means of psychologically addressing the issues we were experiencing as adoptive parents. The images used at that particular point reoccur throughout my journal entries and in scraps of poems for over a series of days, popping back-and-forth in a déjà vu-like fashion.
One major point I wanted to make lies in the aspect of creating metaphors and symbols. I wanted to artistically recreate the idea of Brendan into different, natural phenomena, building connections between images of stars and whiskered carp.
one early draft opens:
because we had no ultrasound,
no declarations of your physical form,
you once remained a possibility
rather than an actuality,
limiting you to a nimbus speculation:
a star-boy who fell from the sky.
a meteorite out of reach. unborn.
yet resilient. you remained
persistent in our memory of the future.
Another way of putting it I wanted to artistically represent Brendan as a poem, transferring the physical self to mythical/mystical form. I had in mind the energy that Galway Kinnell uses in his work “Under the Maud Moon”—discovering the forces in nature and the world, the Universe, then applying these elements to the child. In my personal case, I wanted to build an artistic, emotional bond with my child, with my new-born boy. A recorded history for him to read in later life.
One major point I wanted to make lies in the aspect of creating metaphors and symbols. I wanted to artistically recreate the idea of Brendan into different, natural phenomena, building connections between images of stars and whiskered carp.
one early draft opens:
because we had no ultrasound,
no declarations of your physical form,
you once remained a possibility
rather than an actuality,
limiting you to a nimbus speculation:
a star-boy who fell from the sky.
a meteorite out of reach. unborn.
yet resilient. you remained
persistent in our memory of the future.
Another way of putting it I wanted to artistically represent Brendan as a poem, transferring the physical self to mythical/mystical form. I had in mind the energy that Galway Kinnell uses in his work “Under the Maud Moon”—discovering the forces in nature and the world, the Universe, then applying these elements to the child. In my personal case, I wanted to build an artistic, emotional bond with my child, with my new-born boy. A recorded history for him to read in later life.
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