I don’t like wasting anything. I don’t like wasted food or wasted paper or wasted time. Especially wasted time. I plan my days out so that I can make maximum use of every second I’m conscious. I was talking to a poet friend this morning, and I asked her if she ever felt guilty about taking time to draft a poem.
“Only if it’s not productive,” she said. “If the writing goes well, that time is always justified.”
Sharon Olds writes about human waste . . .
Waste Sonata
by: Sharon Olds
I think at some point I looked at my father
and thought He’s full of shit. How did I
know fathers talked to their children,
kissed them? I knew. I saw him and judged him.
Whatever he poured into my mother
she hated, her face rippled like a thin
wing, sometimes, when she happened to be near him,
and the liquor he knocked into his body
felled him, slew the living tree,
loops of its grain started to cube,
petrify, coprofy, he was a
shit, but I felt he hated being a shit,
he had never imagined it could happen, this drunken
sleep was a spell laid on him—
by my mother. Well, I left to them
the passion of who did what to whom, it was a
baby in their bed they were rolling over on,
but I could not live with hating him.
I did not see that I had to. I stood
in that living room and saw him drowse
like the prince, in slobbrous beauty, I began to
to think he was a kind of chalice,
a grail, his love the goal of a quest,
yes! He was the god of love
and I was a shit. I looked down at my forearm—
whatever was inside there
was not good, it was white stink,
bad manna. I looked in the mirror, and
as I looked at my face the blemishes
arose, like pigs up out of the ground
to the witch’s call. It was strange to me
that my body smelled sweet, it was proof I was
demonic, but at least I breathed out,
from the sour dazed scum within,
my father’s truth. Well it’s fun talking about this,
I love the terms of foulness. I have learned
to get some pleasure from speaking of pain.
But to die, like this. To grow old and die
a child, lying to herself.
My father was not a shit. He was a man
failing at life. He had little shits
traveling through him while he lay there unconscious—
sometimes I don’t let myself say
I loved him, anymore, but I feel
I almost love those shits that move through him,
shapely, those waste foetuses,
my mother, my sister, my brother, and me
in that purgatory.
Waste is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Sharon Olds cherishes the little shits in her father’s body, even if she struggles to say “I love you” to her father. Her father is not a shit, she says. He was a man who is “failing at life.” His main fault, it seems, is disappointment with his life choices.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I really don’t like wasting time. Every morning, I plan my days out, using lists and numbers and checkmarks. That list was fairly short today. I attended an art bookmaking workshop in the morning, and I hosted a library concert by one of my favorite local bands (Ramble Tamble) in the evening. Plus, I got to hang with one of my best friends at the concert. In between all that, I drafted a couple new poems, as well.
I’d call that a pretty productive day.
Of course, I could have gotten a lot more done. That’s always the case. I rarely cross off every item on my daily lists. If there are more than two or three unfinished tasks at the end of the day, I count that as a failure. As I sit typing this post, I still have three unfinished chores. Therefore, by the rule I just stated, I’m a big, fat loser today.
I’m okay with that, because I have drafts of two new poems from workshop this morning. That means, by my poet friend’s rules, I have had a very productive day. I’m going to stick with that.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about time and nature, based on prompts from two days in The Daily Poet . . .
July 21: In celebration of Tess Gallagher’s birthday, spend some time in the outdoors, even if it means taking a walk to the post office or stepping out to retrieve the mail. Gallagher, reflecting on exploring vast amounts of territory in both the Pacific Northwest and the Ozarks, states “it builds something in you.”. Whether it’s an appreciation for bird song or a fondness for cottonwood fluff, let the natural world build something in you today, then share about it in a poem of ten lines of ten syllables each.
July 22: I often find my best poems while driving, but only when I pay close attention, viewing road signs, billboards, restaurants, and movie theatre marquees with fresh eyes. Who lives on the street names Never Give Up Road? What does a store called BIGLOTS! tell us about the age we live in? Wipe the nothing’s-new-under-the-sun sand from your eyes, and get into your car (or motorcycle or bike), and make a poem out of what you find.
Yellow Brick
by: Martin Achatz
Each day, I drive into sunrises, lick
yellow brick light with hungry eyes. Today,
I spotted a roadkill doe in the ditch,
her legs snapped, neck angled strangely, as if
she was still leaping milky streams, charging
through cedar swamps after shadows of winged
monkeys chasing the emerald heart of day.
If she only knew, if she only knew
all she had to do was click her hooves once,
twice, thrice, and think of sweet, ripe blueberries.