SAMPLE POEMS
Introducing Chelsea Rathburn
Fireworks
Although we watched, the city’s stock display
seemed still and tame, a galaxy away
from where we saw our sky explode with fire.
We’d always choose our smaller, private choir
of penny crackers, bombs bought for a quarter,
the rockets someone smuggled from the border
and lit out of the nosy neighbors’ view.
With every year, it was the same and new,
the rituals of barbecue and soda,
the fights to light the grand Chinese pagoda
or be the one to spark the biggest flame.
At seven, nine, thirteen, we couldn’t name
just what it was that gave them their dark powers,
that held us hot and swatting bugs for hours
while howling sparks and flying discs of light
shot past our dads and threatened to ignite
the trees. Whatever it was, we understood
that grown-ups felt it too: in Hollywood,
the artful angling of the camera’s eye
moved from a kiss up to a blazing sky
to show that love was powerful and grand
as all the Carolina contraband
that filled our yard.
Like love, it may have been
the tantalizing risk which drew us in,
our traded tales of eyes blown out by glass,
a severed hand found hidden in the grass,
two fingers lost to slowness at the fuse.
We told of what we couldn’t bear to lose
and knew that, as we swore the truth, we lied.
We were convinced beloved China Bride,
the Taj Mahal, the flickering Hummingbird
were innocent, no matter what we heard.
After the best explosions, no one spoke
but watched the avenue fill up with smoke.
Standing in awe along the ashy walk,
even the adults gave up their talk
of mortgages and paying for our college
and set aside the awful grown-up knowledge
that we’d learn soon enough. And though the spark
which screamed the loudest in the purple dark
shrank down to less than nothing, once complete,
a little pile of litter in the street,
each burning arc gave rise to new belief.
We loved the change in us, however brief.
Untitled
It’s not romantic in the usual sense,
how, on the brink of leaving, neither could
despite the months of onslaught and defense.
Not a romantic in the usual sense,
he found her love and anger too intense;
she loathed his friends; both felt misunderstood.
Romantics, though, in some unusual sense,
when on the brink of leaving, neither could.
The Meeting Place
The requisite tour done, their photos snapped,
congratulated on the honeymoon,
they left the pools of tourists on black rafts
and placid schools of giant parrotfish
to find the shadowy source, the starting place
where jungle banks reclaimed the civilized.
It wasn’t long before they found the path
to where the waters met, saline and fresh.
Someone had stretched a bridge across the bay.
No, not a bridge, but narrow planks to make
a floating pier. There were no rails, no ropes.
The water licked the edges, lunged across,
and they too rose and sank.
The strangeness was
the thing’s precision: one side held the river
and lazy river life. The other hemmed
the sea, where leaping, snapping ocean fish
surfaced and crashed against the rocking boards.
As if there were a net, the separate sides
kept neatly to themselves. There was no net,
only the floating bridge that marked the place.
It was a frightening thing to watch the sea
so full of life, the bodies pressed against
the boundary line. It seemed to speak to love,
the shifting line, the narrow swaying plank
which saves us from the dangers of the world,
and is a danger too. They stood in it,
rising and plunging, a long time in silence,
then, knowing the thing was theirs this moment only,
turned, a half day wiser, for the beach.
The Oldest Boy in First Grade
A life-sized doll in a metal chair,
he's claimed by schoolgirls for their play.
They dress him up, brush his hair,
and give him words to say.
But while he'll smile, and blink, and shout,
change expression, suck his thumb,
no magic string will pull words out,
for birth has struck him dumb.
Years from now, the girls all grown,
they'll find him in a store some day,
and if he greets them with his moan,
they'll turn their eyes away.
To a Crumbling House
Not yet unlivable, your ceiling sags,
the soffit's rotten boards are peeling paint,
your floors slope south, the front door swells and drags
with every rain. We call your ruin quaint.
We love each crooked room, the narrow stairs,
the high stone porch, the arching fireplace.
Of course, if you were ours, we'd make repairs,
but leave untouched some of your shaky grace.
Even if we could turn back year on year,
disguise the damage, halt your slow decline
around us, you remind us to hold dear
beautiful failures of our own design,
and love the lives we build and make them sweet,
which all the time are tumbling to our feet.
Letters from Minor Loves
Perhaps we thought their authors incomplete:
dimwitted, slightly dull, undignified.
They might have laughed too loud, appeared too sweet;
it’s harder to be loved than vilified.
Whatever words became love’s epitaph,
their lines still call to us from musty drawers.
The wounded stumble through each paragraph,
spilling flowers and wine and metaphors.
Their high-pitched voices squeal love’s declarations,
singing praises that we’ve never earned,
and yet we keep these feeble accusations,
too beautiful, too clumsy to be burned.
While words we pamper and protect
march off in search of meager fame,
these lines like bastard kids collect,
skulking through our notes in shame,
the discards of our intellect,
false starts, limp rhymes, feet bruised and lame,
condemned to suffer in neglect,
half-breeds that we refuse to name
for fear they’ll prove what we suspect:
the damned and saved are much the same.
Argument in a Restaurant
We've all seen it before:
the single, sudden shout,
her stumble toward the door,
his thick arm lurching out.
Not wanting to be rude,
we look down with a smirk,
returning to our food,
forgetting love takes work.
Then one day their fate's ours.
An innocent remark
mysteriously sours.
The chintzy, lightweight fork
a weapon in our hands,
the tears come. We begin
to stammer our demands.
No use. We never win.
And though we're circumspect,
our flaws shine on display.
The waitress brings the check,
the patrons look away.
We grab our coats and walk
shame-faced through the place.
Tables resume their talk,
don't meet our bleary gaze.
Yet when we reach the car,
expecting chill or violence,
we return to what we were,
and in the common silence,
the dark, receding danger
gives way to strange relief,
the flash of public anger
stilling the private grief.
After an Anniversary
They find themselves, as couples often do,
betrayed, betraying, falling out, apart,
their traitor hearts preparing for a coup.
They find themselves, as couples often do,
searching through the wreckage for some clue,
some warning sign, a shadowy plan to part,
but find only themselves, as couples do,
betrayed, betraying, falling out, apart.
On Holiday
The darkened streets still glitter like a wish
we cannot speak, for fear it will be broken.
Here, candlelight transforms the plainest dish
until our platters glitter like the wish
for love and bliss. We split a wide-eyed fish,
pink-fleshed, mouth open, all we would say unspoken.
The darkened streets still glitter like a wish.
We cannot speak, for fear we will be broken.
Home Maintenance
Charred cords, bad lines, the smell of something burning,
and currents we can’t see but must repair,
our circuits overloaded without warning.
Charred cords, bad lines, the smell of something burning
and with it, all our dormant fears returning.
There’s danger here insidious as air—
beyond charred cords, the smell of something burning,
there are currents we can feel but can’t repair.
Slow Drowning
“NOT TO BE USED AS FLOTATION DEVICE.”
The warnings on those plastic rafts are clear,
but if you were drowning, wouldn’t one suffice?
And if not used as flotation device,
what use is there? We heard all the advice,
but we held on for our dear lives, my dear.
“NOT TO BE USED AS FLOTATION DEVICE,”
we should have heard. The warnings were so clear.
On a Career Victim Considering Leaving Therapy
By now, you look forward to melting down
within the confines of your weekly sessions,
your time to rail against your mother's fashions,
daddy's distance, the drunken angry clown
who wrecked your birthday (sixth). What would you do
without your inner child to hide behind,
no Oedipal struggles waiting to be mined,
no rare disorders? There'd be only you,
the old routines, desires you couldn't name.
Better to stay. Find something more to blame.
An Interview
I sat down last Friday with Chelsea Rathburn , the Richard Wilbur award-winning poet of The Shifting Line , to give you a sense of being Chelsea and asking into your mirror, as she might, “What’s up, Chelsea?” — since that disturbing habit of poets of addressing themselves in the third person is even a little more demented, unless your pathology’s akin to ours, than just making eyes, universally acknowledged to mean you’re secretly bonkers, at that handsome devil in the mirror. Such is the parlance of interviews (and allure of insanity) and, for that matter, poetry itself. Rathburn, as all praised, published poets are, being the nominal expert on all poetical things, expounded with fluent ease on the Big Things: writer’s block, artistic anxiety, immaturity, beer – and proved affable and amusing, ready as she was to show off her new haircut.
So how did you become a poet? What was your first poem?
The first poem I remember writing was when I was six years old. It was two lines long, and I think it went like this: “The mice they are scurrying / from the rain that is hurrying.”
I learned to read around age four (my mother was a preschool teacher) and everyday we’d go to the library and come home with a stack of books. Basically, I loved language early on, and writing naturally became my favorite vehicle of self-expression. I wrote poems through junior high and high school – though for some reason, despite all evidence to the contrary, I was convinced that what I was really going to do was write fiction, that somehow I had a novel in me somewhere, and that I would go to college and learn how to write it. That never happened; I got into a poetry workshop my first semester, started writing poetry and reading poetry – both contemporary and classic – much more seriously, and never looked back.
Did you ever have any doubts you would be a writer, that writing would be a vital part of your life?
Yes, every day, actually. I go through long barren periods where I don’t write, and it’s hard not to have doubts. Before my book, The Shifting Line , was accepted, I hadn’t written in 8 or 9 months and I remember telling someone, crying, “I’m never going to publish this book, and even if I did, I don’t have another one in me. I’m done. I’m never going to write again.” A week later, I got the phone call that the book had won the Richard Wilbur award and was being published. Even then, I thought I’d never write anything else.
I’m finally to the point now, where even in dry spells I feel confident that the poems will eventually come back. And I couldn’t not be a poet. It’s something that chooses people, rather than the other way around. I could do something else, but I wouldn’t be fully myself.
What are you doing during your barren spells?
I read – I read a lot . I hike, canoe, eat out more than I should, Google exes, catch up with friends – basically just get involved in the business of living. But there’s always the little voice in my head saying “You’re not writing!” I’m acutely aware I’m not, all the time, in the back of my brain. So while I’m a little more social in my dry spells than when I’m writing (I can’t think of a better way to spend a Friday night than writing or revising a poem), I’m much happier when I’m feeling creative and productive.
And that can last for months?
Unfortunately, yes. Imagine having an activity that’s your favorite thing in the entire world, the most important thing in your life, and then, mysteriously, not having access to it. You don’t know why, you don’t know how to gain entrance.
What happens when you try to force it?
I’m suspicious of those poets who sit down every day and write… “suspicious” being a euphemism for “jealous.” For me personally, that doesn’t work. At some point I’m simply ready and able to write again. A lot of my development as a writer has been in a sense personal development – learning to relax and let the poems come to me when they’re good and ready.
Lately, I’ve been finding that writing in different genres helps. I’ve been working on a series of funny and dark personal essays, and I’ve just started toying with a screenplay. Being able to move around back and forth, doing writing that’s not poetry, helps — in the sense of keeping me creative and energized and also calling new poems forth. I haven’t had a dry spell in a while, and I’m a good way into a new poetry manuscript. And I’ve come to accept that even when I’m not actively putting pen to paper, I’m still in some sense writing – by living, experiencing, absorbing the world.
Any advice for younger poets?
Two of the most important things writers can learn are a willingness to scrap their own work and a willingness to scrap the “truth.” New poets tend to think everything they write is brilliant, while mature writers know that most poems, or drafts at least, are failures that were necessary in order to get them to the next, hopefully better, poem. And beginning writers often stay too close to “what really happened.” Poetic truth should always trump fact, when the facts of an event don’t serve a poem well.
Whether you attend a formal writing program or not, it helps to find a group of readers you can trust. I’m lucky to be close friends with a number of writers with whom I informally share my work. I’m also in a monthly critique group that’s the best I’ve ever been in. We’re scattered geographically, so we e-mail poems and have a real commitment to giving each other good critiques. We named it after one of our favorite drinking games. It’s a fabulous group, very serious and very playful all at once – which is how poetry should be.
Q & A with Chelsea Rathburn, Author of The Shifting Line
When did you start writing?
It sounds clichéd, but I began writing poems when I was six. In the third grade I won my elementary school’s Career Day essay contest with a piece on becoming a writer, and I got to read it over the P.A. system. Apparently not wanting to put all my eggs in the same basket, however, I entered the Career Day costume contest as a comedian that same year, with an oversized suit, cigar and Groucho Marx mask. Luckily that dream fell by the wayside.
My love for language started even earlier than six. My mother was a preschool teacher; she read to me constantly and taught me to read before I entered kindergarten. We spent nearly every afternoon at the Coral Reef branch of the Miami-Dade library system, and whenever I was bored at home – I was an only child – my parents would say “Why don’t you read a book?” I think it’s only natural that I gravitated to the things that gave me so much pleasure growing up.
What experiences in your life have contributed to the poems in The Shifting Line?
The short answer is all of them.
The poems that are not directly rooted in an experience I’ve had are still going to be shaped by my past and present – growing up in Miami, being a woman, a writer, a wife – influenced by my view of the world. That being said, very few of the poems are “autobiographical.” Some which seem to be are complete fictions; others are rooted in fact but have had pertinent details changed.
The poet John Ciardi once said, “Poetry lies its way to the truth.” Meaning that the poet can’t be tied to facts when they get in the way of the larger emotional truth of a poem. To show you how this works, look at “Girl, 17, Found Dead in the Trunk of Her Car” – this is a poem based on an actual event: the murders of two of my sister-in-law’s friends. However, the real situation was too complicated to handle neatly in a poem, so I made the poem about one girl; it draws on what I knew about my sister-in-law’s friend, but it draws equally or more upon my own bad attitude as a teenager and how looking back, I feel lucky to have made it out of adolescence alive.
What about the relationship poems?
I do try to change some details if I’m exploring something quite personal. Luckily, I’m married to an extremely understanding man who doesn’t mind people wondering if I’m airing our dirty laundry. My husband writes songs, so he’s comfortable with the artistic process. We give each other free rein to say whatever we need to say, and we try to see the humor in it. For example, I have a poem, “Deciding to Stay,” which reads “He found her love and anger too intense;/ she loathed his friends,” and we laugh that, since that description of the woman is quite obviously me, all of my husband’s friends will be wondering if I hate them now!
Why poetry?
I joke sometimes that I’m a poet today because my first semester in college, all of the fiction classes were full; I happened to be standing in the office when the English department added a new section of the introductory poetry course, lucked into it, and the rest is history.
The truth is that I’d been writing poems quite seriously throughout my adolescence, and I spent just two weeks in that introductory poetry course before the professor moved me into an advanced workshop he was teaching. But for a long time, I clung stubbornly to the idea that I would someday write fiction. Poetry didn’t seem respectable – or lucrative – enough. But poetry was always what I loved, what I returned to again and again, what I copied out of books into my journals, what I could recite by heart. And so I finally gave in and admitted I was a poet.
And why do so many of your poems rhyme?
Poetry fills some human, elemental need. That’s why we turn to it at weddings, births and funerals, and why even people who “don’t read poetry” still remember some passage they learned in school. It gets right at the heart of who we are.
I enjoy reading and writing poems in rhyme and meter, because it can add to a poem’s musicality and make it more memorable. I also enjoy the added challenge of saying what I want to say while working in a metrical pattern or a rhyme sequence. It forces me to concentrate in a different way – which sometimes results in my saying things I never expected.
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