Ebbs

I’ve been running around poems the past week. Unable to settle on one I want to sit with. It’s all feeling. Sticking your hand into murky water, waiting for a bite. In Oklahoma they call this noodling. I’m not a big beefy man with hairy arms and cut-off camo, but I still feel like I’m driving the boat a little drunk. I still feel like I’m plunging my arm into brown water, feeling around dark catfish holes, hoping for a bite – from a fish, not an 80-year-old snapping turtle. I think the guys who do that for fun are crazy. But maybe that I dig around for words and feelings would make me crazy in their eyes, too.

I wish there was a writing rhythm. But I haven’t found it yet. It’s an ebb and flow, a friend said, and she’s right. There’s nothing linear about writing. It’s waves, eddies, ripples, standing water. It’s downpours, purges, falls, trickles. We try to live such linear lives, time – one second after the other. The list of things to do in a day – one check after the other. We forget nature doesn’t always work like that. Seasons yes, but inside seasons are currents we can only see when the leaves are circling on the ground, the trees.