delay

a delay: Temporarily I postpone all writing projects. Yet, I feel their presence in the back of the brain, all of them queuing up, waiting to be reworked, eventually to be placed on paper, then transposed to computer screen. A handful of nights ago I felt the need to explore the poem to Bob, the other memoriam on my list. For a few moments I played with ideas, with a title, with a breakdown of the intentions of the form— yet, recently I realize it would be more important to shift the situation, alter the persona’s voice from discussing directly to the past using second person pronouns. Shift the voice towards addressing the reader directly— in this manner the memory of past events becomes central focus, and not the person, which was my initial concept. This will be awkward in a memoriam format of course. But in this particular case, I want to acknowledge the distance between Bob and myself by displaying the relationship from a distance. What results would be an illustration of how I think, showing a process, rather than just what I think.
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Late Tuesday afternoon Brendan and I listen to cello suites from Bach: the raising and falling. Which matches my moods, mixtures and various. Brendan falls asleep halfway through the selection without complaints or fussy rants. His dislike of naps or bedtime can provoke minor whining—
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All day I thought about items to mention, short everyday topics which could spiral into something greater, a concise observation of human behavior which could merge into larger essays— but now of course I do not recall any of the subjects—
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Ever since the earthquake in Japan and the unfolding, ongoing crisis, I wrestle with finding a metaphor to place in a haiku— without commercializing or trivializing the chaos, the loss of lives—from what I have read, it appears these verses never take on such calamities anyway. The poems stress more of a dis/connection with nature, but never the tragedy of natural disasters. The scope of the focus falls down to an individual reaction to a mundane event, which often transform into something symbolic, something larger and unobvious to a casual reading.