was a Saturday
in May.
The ground thickly wet,
black and stamped with clover.
On foot, and with some trepidation, the two
set off to tour
their neighborhood,
which was not the underworld,
not one neighbor trapped forever in hell.
The minatory chorus
grew sparse
and ornamental.
A shimmer rolled through the aspen
like a veil,
and the journey ended as it began,
in a house at the edge of a cutbank,
where a woman
and a man
learned one more lesson:
there is a land of the living
and a land
of the lost, and the bridge
is fine as a child’s ribbon, and the river
is dark
as the face of God
describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.
I compose by sound, and a poem’s form is often revealed to me in the revision process. While revising this poem out loud, I realized the poem was a sequence of four-beat measures, and some beats were silent, like musical rests (for example, after “chorus”). The challenge was then translating the sonic experience onto the page to create the “score” for the poem’s music. Here, I’ve used line breaks to signal those musical rests, with some adjustments. Hearing someone else read it will be the real test of whether I’ve succeeded with the score!