The first of these three, "...in the acre of leaves," was one of those poems that I consider a core experience. Poetry that I wrote and gave the inspiration to keep writing poems. It was written dealing with sadness after reading Craig Thompson's Blankets. The night that I finished, I saw myself a lot in the character though perhaps for the wrong reasons.
It broadly exists in the sizeable corpus of "Doug writes about Lower Alabama childhood as a self-induced therapy for his own inability to understand himself." Possibly the best of the group.
Later on I wrote two follow-ups. Initially posted, separately I have now combined them in one. I only really truly like the first, but it is still best to see them as a whole.
When, in our youth, we formed great big words with rounded edges, we always intended those "i love you"s and "forever"s and "no one but you"s to resonate honey sweet off the gates of heaven and overtake, in wayward dreams, even the divine and ineffable throne. God above. Hallowed be thy name. And fallen leaves build upon the ground, brown and yellow, reflecting tree trunks and wind blowing and small children running and the dew drops forming the day after that light sprinkle of rain, a mist woven by a morning ghost of a storm. And fallen leaves wait and rot and wilt and wash down into gullies, collecting silt. Red and black. Moments. Holding hands with our wide eyed stares, looking upwards and seeing clouds, we danced and we screamed and we hollered and kicked up dust and dirt roads were traversed and this, thank you Jesus, this was our hideout, in the trees next to the old car which our parents assured us was dangerous and a breeding ground for snakes and lustful temptations. Who was the first loved? Who was the first given, in their hearts, to that season of ourself? That great spring, fresh and damp and filled with aromatic want, misting of redemption? Who did we first speak, breath life into, bring out of dirt? Who did we first forget? Learn to hate? Watch fall And build there, in that acre of leaves? When, as children, we painted in great big strokes and rounded corners; it was funny and infuriating to watch the paint drip slightly out of place and just ruin a perfect sunset with rainwater color. A washed out storm aflight, and our eyes descended, teary eyed for no reason why, and all the heart inside swelled to the point of bursting and passing on into the next page of white.
The second one criss-crosses into two other poems. Besides being a continuation of the first one, "...in the Acre of Leaves," it also returns to Pomegranate Lips. Again, it details the notion of love gained and lost, and tries to capture the constantly flowing aspect of it. The child grows into a young man and finds a first serious relationship and cannot help but to leave it behind.
Into the shadow of the splash of remnant pools We dropped our halogen bright eyes, To sink there and swim there and lay there In the murk and the cloudy light, Understanding all the way to the bottom Of the passing whiles of summer days. We rested our foreheads into our arms, Bent over, doubled with laughter and jovial Mean spirits. We hugged suspiciously close, We claimed the skin of each other. We dived into the moon on a starlit Night, lost ourselves to the scratch of briars And the warm heartbeat inside of Each other's hand. Held quietly, like lovers do. We buried spoons and diaries, Time capsules of old spices like Thyme and sagely dirty jokes and rosaries (Rosily Mary did hollow names thighs between), A taste of garlic and limestone, of clove smoke On our chalky breath, so filled with the fullness Of Cygnus in the sky, on the full breadth of wings To meet fair Leda and take her there, fully raptured There, ruthless there, passionate. A starry asterism out the corner of our yes. We were the first loved, the first ruined, the first Tasted. We gave our hearts, the dawn upon us and the Dusk down into our excitable souls. We lost one another, lost as we are, In the maze Of leaves and thorny blackberry vines, Sweet and spiteful to the last Longing look. Into the shadow of the splash of rain, Of muddy pools, of streams, of sweat and tears, And of rivers, of the flow and ebb of trees, The great sing song ways of days falling by, And of the great liquid surge of shouts And follows, Of being seventeen and dumb, unbelievably dumb, And unbelievably ancient, So very nineteen for months and turgid springs Without end, So very young, We dropped our halcyon eyes, sleepless calm and Peaceful, flying up, To breathe the smoke of the kingfisher's cry.
After writing "...into the Shadow of Splash," I knew I was going to write a third poem to the "When" series. I was thinking about writing a poem about an old man losing the love of his life but it stalled for a long time because I could not hit that moment was right.
I eventually asked my sister-in-law — Alicia — and gave her the ability to rewrite chunks. She had full reign to change lines, to critique any little thing, and to, if she desired, tell me to scrap the whole thing. I told her only that she had to leave the ending alone. As a final request, she was to write one line that I would put into the poem virtually unchanged.
What follows is the completed poem, the end to the trilogy. It is co-written, and she shares writer's credits. The line I asked her to come up with is the final line of the poem (I have changed punctuation). Basically a deeply personal poetry series ended up being ended by someone else, and that's fine by me.
I later rewrote parts of the poem to make it less about the loss of love but about the loss of the self that lost love. Those of us who are lucky to find peace in our loves eventually break up with the parts of ourselves who were not ready for peace. And that loss of relationship with our younger self is possibly a type of grief we cannot properly explain.
Collected heat catches into the meter of the rain drop beat, Rhythmic and quiet, whispering the forthcoming tonight. Quietly, he sits on a sodden green park bench, And waits the washing away of the sky. When, in the sidewalk cracks, the water flows—filled with Half-born storms And tepid steam between some stratospheric cold And the lingering afterthought Of summer breath mixing in with the unsatisfactory deluge, Annoying in its lack of full temerity, The paltry torrents swim into once rusted grates, now clean, And then deep into brackish pools Afloat in the shadows where they are best forgot— He finds himself in no time at all, just a string of pearls Wrapped about his mind, Shoddy to his tastes, feeling fake, Baubles barely worthy their disdain. And that last, sweet taste of lavender and sweat he can feel On his tongue, in his hands, and on his lips awakening Ancient blisses by pantomime, Though their glory is long gone, First before the last, those kisses which once So asundered days and weeks And that once rose petal scent in dawn's wide yawn, Flowing streets into the past. The young Sad child which his heart still fails to reclaim, Forgotten things like minute hands, second hands, And secondhand toys where the young child, Unbrazen and so hazy was so excited That they could barely contain themself. He waits, Thinking nothing much really but remembering The sight of these things. Buried in a place underneath overwhelm: Enraptured by the rapturing into a brief, Semi-satisfactory, moment. A whole new and blushing, And secret, and giggles, and quiet, and mornings. He waits for a night sky now, in his drenched stationary Wander. For a second chance he does not actually Want, too tiring to relive a life that refused to face Its own fading light. For a time, his eyes open and looks up, the waters Flowing over the deep Until it cannot possibly rain anymore.