no ups and downs, my pretty

I'm giving a reading soon and so that has me thinking about poetry. That is to say also that everything else feels turned against me so that once again, like a sheepish ex-lover, I creep back to writing and expect to be taken in, mostly as a way to distract myself from whatever else it is.

I've been looking through, of all things, my old school notes from undergraduate. I threw a lot of them out after college, but a couple remained mostly by the virtue of their notebooks being incomplete, and I, ever a practical and un-wasteful girl, kept them to reuse. It's a pity that some were thrown out, too, because of everything I feel good about in myself against the difference of what I hate, I have long valued my ability as a note-taker. It's not that I ever wrote neatly or accurately, but I kept a near perfect internal commentary on whatever was going on in class, complete with the better professorial quotes, drawings, half-begun letters, notes passed, revelations, scraps of poems, doodles of dragons (yes, even then) and other assorted hodgepodge bits. They were almost more like journals.

I had a close friend ask me recently if I thought I was one of those writers who took herself too seriously, or not seriously enough. I think I said both, but tonight maybe I will seem like the indulgent former. The one notebook I looked in tonight got used and then re-used with an odd strata effect. I never wrote these two bits into real poems, they just stayed as drafty dead bits. Still, even if their quality is bad and embarrassing to me, they are perfectly juxtaposed over periods of my life and touch me now in some kind of uncomfortable, sentimental way.

The first is from the end of my senior year of college, when I was stuck in this required symposium I'd put off as a freshmen, surrounded by freshman. I remember the day I wrote this it was spring and storming.

the way the air
curls up in your palms
low clouds give you something
a hard twist of gray
I want to love you
but the leaves are turning
over and over, flashing
their white underbellies.

And the second is much more graphic and listy and rough, from the end of my grad school career two winters ago when I was teaching freshmen. I would write terrible little stream of consciousness things while my students were doing their exercises. I think I might've saved one line from this old thing, which is good, because I lost the stomach for the ending so much that I couldn't even finish re-typing it here.

thumbs of clay, tuckahoe
simmer down
scrape or gnaw it soft while
carolina parakeet such a pure clatter
cockleburr, cockleshell, mussels
pickerel, arrowroot ground in
a mash pot put it in the fire
put this to fire
better to be switched with light
or know the blood trails through
the forest we're hunting
compass less the needle
tell us the correct geography