There’s not much worse of a
feeling than when you realize that you let down a person you care about. I don’t
have access to the specifics on this, but I can pretty much tell you what happened:
On his wife’s birthday, B. was drunk, or somehow otherwise incapacitated, and the
greetings, cake and presents, the expressions of love and appreciation appropriate
to the occasion, well they “clung to the roof / I mean of my mouth.” Meaning
they didn’t get out and as far as she knows never existed in the first place,
and he found himself sleeping out in the dog house. If you love someone, and
fail this way, the guilt and shame are tough things to haul around for the
couple days after when they’re on you like anvils in a backpack. (I’m just
conjecturing. This has never happened to me.) A poem in apology is meant to
help ease the awkwardness and hurt. Apology poems are pathetic little things,
though, and they’re usually miserably inadequate. Asking art to address
specific sociopolitical conditions and fix them is bad enough. Art isn’t meant
for that, though it can occasionally fulfill that goal. This is worse and is
almost always a failure.
I wrote an apology poem once. I
even subtitled it: “An Apology.” This grew out of the embarrassment of dropping
the F-bomb in a committee meeting once, which you’re not really supposed to do.
Even though it was attached to a discussion about environmental outrage, which
we all were in tune over, I was embarrassed. Nobody else cared, and if they did
at all, I’ve been forgiven—I think. But it was a moment where I had to look
inwardly and make a little bit of a fucking adjustment. Here’s the poem.
One other thing. I posted this sonnet
on this blog once, in response to #31. I just neglected to mention that it’s
really more an apology poem than an environmental fury poem. So here it is
again in this more forthcoming context. It’s one of my favorites of my poems,
though it does have that pathetic little apology poem drawback. I tried to overcome
that with a good measure of righteous fury. (One of my best poet friends didn’t
like this one, but she was wrong.)
Only
One Word (An Apology)
I watch the great green mountains disappear.
Arctic
wells nose down like roots, drilled
So
tankers slide through melting ice, filled
With
oil, and oil, and oil, and oil. I hear
The
frackers’ injections, that crack shale
Till
burning gasses rise like burning wind.
The
green of hillside forest cut and skinned
Away,
blasted, scraped, sickly, and pale.
Murder
burns the language used to fit
My
thoughts to word, when forms bubble like spit
From
a dusty throat, like gas from shattered grounds,
And
superegoistic caution sounds
Like
shame: Puts finger to lips and warns me to quit…
Goes
quiet...(…shush…)…but there’s only
one word for…(…shhh…)…it…
KZ
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