I just counted the poems in my “to be revised” file. The total comes to 125, give or take, and there you have it. They all need work. I pull them out, fiddle with a word, a line break, delete whole stanzas, switch out “burnt” for “charred,” change the tenses, pull all the “ing” words, then put them back–all the while trying to remember the spirit of the poem—when I wrote it and what mood I was in and why it was important to get this moment down. Take for example this one…written a few weeks ago when I was in Oregon:

Over the Pass

On the last leg
I drive
behind a motorcycle
listening
to the Moody Blues, following

the ribbon
of yellow stripes,
singing to the biker man
who reveals no patch
of skin—
wanting,

in some throwback,
to trail
him until he rolls
to a stop in some dusty,
lost town takes
his boots off the skids,
and slides

his helmet over his head.
But it is better
this way—
pretending,
waving and cranking
up the volume, taking
a sharp

left
away from the setting sun
and gunning
the car
on home.

It had been a long day. My mother and I left around nine in the morning from my house in Sisters, drove the three hours to Portland, had lunch, visited my father and about four o’clock I dropped her off at her home and headed back over the Santiam Pass away from the cloudy and drizzly Willamette Valley. At one point I thought I had missed my exit and back tracked a couple of times, freaking out about my blurring eyesight and how I could barely make out the words on the giant green highway signs. I was struggling desperately inside of my head not to feel old and over the hill (couldn’t help the pun here). I fought the impulse to turn back, to stop and take a rest. I just wanted to get home before nightfall. With about fifty miles to go I found myself behind two motorcycles and, even though I had opportunities to pass them I did not. As we came to the summit of the pass and began to descend the clouds gave way to sunshine, my vision was 20/20 again and the years that weighed so heavily a couple of hours before melted like spring snow. I wrote the poem that night as the sun set.

I know the poem needs something. It’s telling me that loud and clear. It’ pretty good until the last sentence that begins with “But it is better / this way” where I feel the poem trails off (uh, oh, another pun) and, pretty much cops out. It’s part of a pattern I see where I can really go for it in the beginning of a poem but the endings!! Man, are they a bear most of the time. I wonder if it’s my brain that can’t seem to go certain places, that resists fully expressing my desires, phobias and rage. Or, is it (and I think this is pretty likely) that I want to wrap it all up with a nice bow? Want to have a happy ending? To engender hope, rather than despair? Want to provide a solution and not the question? Ah, now I think we’re getting somewhere.

So revision can be a real hard nut to crack, what with the internal head-circus going on and then getting down to the actual crafting of the poem. The latter seems like easy street compared to the former, which is why, I think, writing poetry intimidates so many people. The requirements are many, foremost of which is to never stop digging into your psyche, asking the tough questions and trying at every step to not be attached to an answer, to your answer. Come to think of it, this is most likely the primary reason I fell into poetry (or it fell into me), as another one of those ways to poke, provoke, confront and come out elevated. I better get back to working on that poem—and hey, if you have any ideas for those last lines don’t hesitate to send ‘em.