Wet: Place 5

Today is wet. It rained earlier and looks like it will again. The sun stopped by for a short time around noon so the bench I’m on is dry enough to sit. The mallards, geese and waterfowl are walking the hillside and diving into the water. The turkeys are flaunting their tail feathers. The buffalo are no where to be found. I guess they prefer to stay dry. I am starting to feel drops and I can see them dotting my laptop screen. This is not the kind of day to be sitting outside, trying to write. It makes me think about how significant conditions and environment are to a writer, at least during the writing process (as I’ve come to call it, thanks to academia). Before grad school I don’t think I had a writing process. Basically I just walked around all day and every once in a while I’d think of something that sounded cool and I’d write it down. Sometimes that turned into a poem, sometimes it didn’t. More often than not it didn’t. But school, if it has taught me anything, has taught me that there should be a process. That the best writing doesn’t come from natural inspiration or “the muse,” that the best writing should be inspiration that is worked at, revised, worked at some more and revised some more. The problem is, I still feel myself questioning that notion all the time. Quite often it feels like I revise stuff into the ground. I think so much about it that I end up making it worse. But I’m being really general here right now. And I need to get back to talking about the game preserve.

The peacock just walked out into the outside pen, his tail feathers are spread out in its great amazing fanned display. He makes the turkeys look like little punks. He’s gathering a crowd. There’s nothing revised about that, unless you consider the peacock harnessed. At that point he looks like a colorful turkey with a longer tail, nothing awe-inspiring. But wow, when that tail spreads. That’s cool. I wish I had better words for it. I suppose I should, if I really want to call myself a writer. And maybe some day I will. Right now, I just have awe. And I think I’ll leave it at that.

I would like to write a poem about the peacock. But I just don’t have something good to start out with. Every time I begin I feel like I’m just writing prose, exposition at that, almost like I’m a nature journalist, not really a poet, or even a creative writer for that matter.

It’s beginning to rain a little harder, the fountain in the pond expecting company. Edward Abbey would have something profound to say that brings the notion of rain, peacocks and writing together. But I’m not Edward Abbey. I’m just a guy who finds rain annoying, peacocks awe-inspiring and writing difficult. Suppose I’ll just keep at it. Something will show up in the process.