A frayed asterisk

Note: I started writing this almost a month ago and can’t really finish it. And this dangling essay has stood in the way of my writing anything else since then. So I am posting it and calling it done. Though it’s really not. But I am.

I almost learned a lesson today. I woke up with a first line. The start of a poem I have been trying to write all week. I repeated it to myself until I knew it. And then, a little later, repeated it again to ensure I still had it.

By the time I got down to my desk to start writing, I’d forgotten it. I didn’t write it down—I didn’t capture it.

So I spent the next 45 minutes trying to remember it. It was a three-word line, and I held onto two of the words: of violences. Yes, plural: violences. I recalled that the missing word was a quantity, a large quantity—the word before the of. I knew it was a quantity that was synonymous with, or at least tightly related to, violence (that’s why it is poetry). So I started listing words that implied both hurt and number--scad, scald, stock, scull/skull, skein. Stake, sever, severe, stab, slab, slew.

Slew. It was slew. Past tense of slay and a haul, a burden, an overwhelming amount. 

Then another word leapt (autocorrect says I am to write leaped, but I’m not gonna) into my head: gibbet. It’s another word for a gallows. But rather than the swingset-looking structure from which multiple criminals are hanged, it’s a make-shift tree--the kind you draw when playing the word game “Hangman.”   Why do I know these words and how do they just surface? 

Vocabulary pops into my head all the time--words that I don’t know I know for things that shouldn’t really have names but do. But if I don’t capture them, they escape again. These random words are kind of like superheroes--they show up when you need them and when they have fulfilled their purpose, they leave quietly and without a trace. You turn around and there is some reporter with thick glasses standing where Superman stood. He looks familiar and your instinct is to call him Superman, but as soon as you begin to speak the name it no longer feels right.

Of course, surety is not a luxury we have in the corona. Unless we are looking backwards at what has already happened, but memory is never really sure either. 

My mother called me the other day asking if I had a calendar she’d made me a number of years ago that recorded birthdays and deathdays of four or five generations of our extended family. She couldn’t remember her mother’s birth year--she had the day, just not the year. She knew it when she made me the calendar. She’s remembered the date for most of her life and, I am sure, never thought she would forget. But when she went to write it down this year, it was gone.

I know her birth year and my kids know mine. But, I am sure, we will all forget someday. Sorry for my start-of-summer morbidity, but as previously mentioned, I work in poetry. And in poetry, words tend to bleed through and on and over each other, like ink or lessons or the corona.