1.

It is early April when we stumble upon the white flowers, their long, thorned limbs, a hillside of tangled thickets, a brambled bliss. I see blackberries, the possibility.

The kids sit in tall grass and chew on clover. They sketch five-petalled flowers and small leaves in their notebooks. They date the page, add a location: Our Blackberry Patch. It is the youngest who names it. 

We are on private land, possibly trespassing a space so forlorn even our breaths seem loud, boisterous. Nevermind that we drove thirty minutes to get to a lot where we'd discover a path rambling round a hill and then through a small forest leading us here.

Forget that this expedition, like most, is unplanned, a source of stubbed toes and ankles swollen by fire ant bites, a glorious accident—all of it. 

For the rest of the month, we make this pilgrimage twice a week just to check if the berries are ready.

By the end of April, the flowers have vanished. The kids draw raw thorns. The temperature warms.

It is May when the tiny green fists appear--the first berry buds--thousands studding the hillside like rhinestone shrapnel. 

We go in expectation. We carry our backpacks, our water bottles, our notebooks, our hope-eyes, our just-in-case bags and baskets. We are ridiculous. This is the pilgrim's plight--to look the fool while raving towards magic. 

By mid-May, the berries have turned a soft pink, a mottled early-redness, the dim fuschia of a second-aunt's powder blush. We discuss the fleshy berry made of multiple drupes. No one mentions the hours we've spent packing, preparing, driving, hiking, listening to terrible radio, doing the same things over and over, in the same place, with the same scope--only to arrive at the not-yet berries. The poem is Our Blackberry Patch. It is overflowing with not-yet berries. It is eating me alive. 

2. 

"Paper head, I prefer you
because of your emptiness;
from within you any
word could still be said."

This stanza from Margaret Atwood's "Paper Bag"  lives in a poem about making masks.

We poets are, I suspect, continually making masks and waiting to find ourselves in them. Losing, sinking, stumbling, missing the party, forgetting the event, conspiring with the headache.

There is a hunger that keeps us folding paper, making pages, avoiding people who are doing important and constructive things with time. This hunger is the servant of fascination.

3.

Mommy is doing her fascination, the middle daughter tells a friend. Mommy isn't available to drive. Mommy is very distracted, and this is evidence of bad mothering in certain circles that never liked Mommy anyway. 

Today it is pickles.

Please understand that the pickle is actually a cucumber in translated form (which means it has spiritual powers) but also a verb with the power to astonish things. Please do not underestimate the power of staring at pickles. I am here for the god in the image of pickling. 

Fascination is transgressive. It is unpopular, anti-social, divise. It is a waste of time and idle hands.

Yes, it is a damned sin to follow the mole rat into the darkness and wait. But there is no other way into it, this fascination thing--there is no fascination that doesn't risk being wrong, seeming stupid, losing something. There is the watching and the waiting. There is no formula, no fascination machine, just the mollusk on the rim of a sink. 

4.

Midnight passes without trumpets.

I am still awake on the back porch. I am here for the stalk-shaped word that must arrive so I can reap what the page wants from me. When it arrives, the word is a scythe. 

Unlike the visionary who assembles a system in which to find safety, unlike the ideologue who uses imagination to create a fixed outcome, a predictability, you, the poet, are discovering something different every time. It is elusive, slippery, less than a vision, this slow dance of courting the poem's possibility. 

Matthew Olzmann once said, of poeming,: "Novelty is not enough to sustain our interest." The reader needs to see how we make meaning an intriguing object. It is not enough to dress the Barbie in a silver space suit if one isn't willing to offer her a story, a context.

If the poet must lie, let it be for something marvelous chased to the hilt, something worthy of a scabbard. A blackberry pie.

5.

"A lyric poem is a created and instantly destroyed world," said Marina Tsvetaeva. It takes patience to build something that only exists for an instant. The poem is like the human, present in uniqueness for an instant.

Dear poet, this has never been a question of ability or skill. Clearly, you are not the best poet. You cannot be the best of anything without fudging, lying, ignoring, erasing. 

You are not a politician or an elected official of the Poetry Republic. You have zero constituents. A reader is only there for a minute. Instead, you are someone who can't stop obsessing over words. You cannot represent anyone except the longing. You, in your lonely, should know that. You cannot be representative. You can only be the pen holding the scythe, the pinch-marks on the porch. 

This is not about the book or the byline.

It is the thing under the thing in padded slippers.

6.

Now that I have the word, now that the scythe has appeared, I must save it for the poem.

I must find the perfect nest for it to ruin.

If I can't find a poem, I will leave it in the graveyard, or use it as a title for an essay about a word I did not want to lose and yet failed to use properly. 

7.

I fail words all the time. In my mind, I tend a graveyard for lost poems, their bones and fragments, the lyrics that never rose from the page or found a way to settle in stanzas. There are so many footballs there.

As for the living poems, I worry about their health and safety, their longevity, their lifespan--especially the nocturnal dwellers with their tiny button eyes and furrowed brows. I worry about their avoidance of light. 

"How many poems will we actually be able to recall at the moment of our death ... or at the moment just before? And will they console us, anymore than we might already be consoled? Remembering is the poison ... "

- Brandon Shimoda, "Winter Dwelling"

Maybe the poems barely matter. And yet, like Shimoda, I find the writing irresistible. Like the god I can't really believe. Like the hummingbird with the fastest heart on the planet who must work so hard to restart it every morning that it sometimes just dies in its sleep.

8.

The sea the sea. The bone the bone.
Both are inside me when I read the words.
The book lends my life from the library
Or my life is the book on loan.

[Dan Beachy-Quick, "Homeric Philosophies"]

I owe the scythe to fascination. 

When I say fascination, I mean the awe that consumes our attention. An interest so ravenous it won't stop before revising the mental landscape, before bringing a mollusk to bear on a deity or a divan. The interior is altered to make space for ardor.

I mean the secret obsessions writers hide from any eyes that aren't a page.

I mean the sacrament of offering a wilderness to the notebook's cathedral, and all the private profaning one must undertake to properly worship something. I mean the field guide I made to save every tree and weed in the yard. I mean the narratives cut from my children's nightmares.

I mean the friction between fracking and fucking on the tongue, how both exploit the subject, and how this is not dissimilar from the way a poet touches the fragile places. How touch and torch are so close, and how fracking and fucking are both relations, operations, excavations.

I mean the way love has bent my body like a top-heavy tulip.

I mean Egon Schiele, Stephen Sondheim, Arvo Part and ashes to ashes though not quite dust. I mean dust is too easy, too shut.

I mean the figure of black dresses that have covered me like a personal font across a time-line, a chronology of blackouts.

I mean amnesia, paradox, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, the sad, raving nihilists.

I mean every plant I've killed with neglect, every friend I've loved best after losing, every way in which I'm better at elegies than tending or caring.

9.

Jericho Brown reminds us often, sometimes with a crown of flowers on his head, that the poem asks impossible, intractable things of the poet. "The poem is a poem because it asks us to reconsider ourselves and what we hold dear." The poem relies on "our ability to create emotion in people who were numb may be the greatest of our abilities, since this is what poets throughout history have been hated for."

Poetry is a discipline of desire. I don't want to stop, and I don't want it to end, so I find ways to brick it into my life. The poem wants relentless fascination, dedication, and interest. This whole thing is an argument for fascination that carries a shovel and scythe in its trunk. I mean something I've never had, namely, the slow discipline of waiting, the habit of paying one's respects to the possible. 

I mean I'm not finished. The poem wants a monk.

10

The monks chant. Iambic di-meters keep demons from resting in their throats and causing trouble. "Brother, we must die," recites a Trappist before throwing a few spadefuls of dirt over his shoulder.

Every day, the monks dig their own graves. What seems like a warning is disciplined anticipation. 

I want to wait for the poem like the monk waits for death.

I let a monk pray for me.

I pay a monk to pray for my dead mother.

I buy pansies in season to please her.

The monk welcomes the sins of mankind onto his shoulders. He then coddles those sins, he caresses and nurses them with chants and complines. The monk believes his songs will make the sins better, his words may raise the dead. He says he prays to lighten the burden of love for mothers who must worry about children. He says he prays to make it easier on God who stays busy loving so many. The cool part is that God lets him inch a little closer with each prayer. Contemplio, he says, is constant--every act of every instant is dedicated and divine.

11.

Every act of every instant is an open hand or enchanted pine straw. This is a fact.

Another fact no one talks about is that "the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image."

Traci Brimhall wrote this is an essay about her mother's death, an essay which sits with grief and its attendant guilt, the faithful partner in mourning a mother. Using second-person to extend the realm of complicity, Brimhall accuses the daughter:

"Her death hurt you. Her suffering never did. If the lion is also a devil, unbutton your shirt and feed him."

I don't think we can appreciate our mothers enough while they are alive and still wanting the best for us, still being pushy and interfering in the icons we'd made of independence. Perhaps it is this exorbitant individualism that leaves us without rituals or proper forms of expiation. 

Roman kids had to sacrifice animals on an altar in order to restore the familial bond with parents after death. I should be grateful that all I need to do is pay the monks to bless the water and mutter vigorously. 

But: the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image.

The love is the chord is the rage is the weft. The loss is the theft. The child is what's left to carry the ashes. The essay is the poem that couldn't handle it. 

12. 

"Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue." Ocean Vuoung wrote this.

Ocean Vuong wrote an entire book about being a queer Vietnamese first generation immigrant, and this person--like the book--is a poem.

Poetry is the commitment one makes to longing. Poetry: this long love affair that competes with the rest.

And yet, every poem is the first one, every time is the first time, every verb is the first kiss, its spentness. All the awkward hesitation, curiosity, momentum, and suspense. It is erotic, this call to poem. 

The love poem takes what we imagine as threat or fulfillment and sits with it--the third thing that changes Eden. Lover, beloved, and that which came between them is what activates the poem and its longing. 

There is a love poem in that sidelong glance towards an unpleasant mother-in-law. There is a love poem in two-person tent crumpled in the trash bin. There is a beautiful, beautiful poem by Nicole Sealey called "Object Permanence":

There's a name for the animal
love makes of us, nomad, I think
like rain for the sound it makes.

13.

Our Blackberry Patch is the poem.

The pilgrims wait near the car, their backpacks solemn, the tingle of not-yet berries on their lips.

I am fascinated by what we’re doing, and what I’ll do anything to finish. What I love may be killing me. I’m not finished.