Not the good kind obviously, or I'd still be one, but the struggling kind, the kind that never quite got the rhythm and timbre of poetry, that never fit in with those who did. I was more than halfway through my graduate studies when I realized this, that I was actually a more of a writer of prose who happened to get lucky with one poem, win an award, and then never replicate its (minor) success.
But even so, after giving up the poetry ghost, the reading and writing of it, the 'scene' itself, I think those years of masquerading as a poet left some vestigial artistry, an appreciation for words and a heightened attention to their possibilities, even if I rarely use these skills.
Years ago, years after I finished my final poem (though I didn't know it at the time), Sam and I began the first iteration of our relationship. Because we looked for reasons to hang out, was not ready yet to sit idly on the couch watching TV, we would regularly walk from his apartment to the Ferry Building on the San Francisco waterfront on Saturday morning to booth-shop at the artisan fair, teeming over with paintings, photography, jewelry, knittings, and various other homemade tchotchkes that we would later come to know as "lesbian crafts" (or what some friends call "cat art").
Usually, these fairs produced nothing of interest, but one weekend, an artist set up a booth and filled several racks with small canvases of stenciled words or letters spray painted against an industrial, rust-colored background. One piece stood out: a medium-sized, $375 canvas with the word 'cleave' stenciled across, perfectly aligned and centered and militant in its perfection.
I thought about that word for a long time, musing on its ability to mean two diametrically opposite things at the same time: to separate but also to cling, to pull toward but push away. 'Cleave' inspired a flash of poetry, awakened that instinct I once had tried so hard to hone. I even thought about writing a poem on it. A few weeks later, when Sam and I broke up, I actually tried, wrote a few stanzas about 'cleave,' about community and apartheid, union and divorce, about the very conflicts I felt inside at the time, but nothing ultimately came of it.
And then that poetic instinct, fleeting as it was, fell back asleep and has lain dormant ever since.
Yesterday, after work, I waited by the car while Sam ran into K9-Playtime to pick Grr up from his puppy daycare/romp session. Stuck to a nearby post was this sticker:
And I stared at it for a few moments. It became less a word and more a command. As I stood on the sidewalk and read it to myself over and over, impatient cars rumbled past and onto the highway, headed home, and I felt the gentle stirrings of an instinct I had long ago, heard it stretch and wake up after a long and deep slumber.
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