Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Anyway, I’ve heard people talk about how finishing a poem feels like relieving themselves of a weight, wringing something out of their body. For me, it’s the opposite. When you create something new, you have a responsibility for it, and you carry it with you. It’s like Jacob Marley and his burden of chains. I made those poems, and now I drag them around with me wherever I go. Some I’m quite proud of and wear like a nice sweater, yet there are plenty I’ve spent months working on but would never drag out in public. I think even the ones I’ve deleted and abandoned are still clawing onto me in some way–maybe like adding cars to that old train. 

With each new poem, a poet becomes something more. I’m not sure what it is, or if it’s better or worse, but writing a poem isn’t shedding a skin, it’s adding layers to an existing one. An old poet is a giant snowball after rolling down a hill, twigs and pinecones sticking out at odd angles. 

And I’m starting to like that train poem. 

—Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.