I FEEL THE MEMORY OF WRITING YOU
I feel the memory of writing you
beginning to carve out its riverbed
deep in the shadow of my passing through.
How after scanning you beneath, I flew
a little lower; how I turned my head:
I feel the memory of writing you,
my labyrinthine road I had no clue
how to begin or end before I read—
deep in the shadow of my passing through—
the story I demanded to be true.
In each one of the knots along the thread,
I feel the memory of writing you.
The moment when I felt your pulse, I knew.
And as you slowly found your form, I shed—
deep in the shadow of my passing through—
a love song to the love song that you drew
with words I’d say to words I hadn’t said.
I feel the memory of writing you
deep in the shadow of my passing through.
—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
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Pedro Poitevin: “When, during sleepless nights with an infant son in my arms, I discovered that I was too constrained to do the kind of mathematical thinking I was used to, I began writing palindromes and posting them on Twitter. Shortly thereafter, Aurelio Asian challenged me to write palindromes in meter and form. I did, for a while, but meter and form eventually liberated me from my bidirectional straitjacket. These days, I occasionally even write in free verse. (I suppose poetry measures my freedom.) I write poetry because doing so helps me exercise a form of attention, one that benefits from varying degrees of freedom and constraint.” (website)
