I hate when I get an image wedged into my imagination but can’t get it into a poem.
Months or years ago, as a passenger in a car, I thought that the road repairs looked like writing. Some beautiful Arabic script that I had no hope of reading.
I wrote a poem. It’s below and it’s not very good. But I can’t figure out how to use that image, what to say, how to describe what I felt it meant.
And I know that “Farsi” is factually incorrect, but if Keats can do it, so can I!
Not Taken
She couldn’t read the road, no matter
that she saw how calligraphy filled
the Farsi cracks with macadam, finding words
within the holes and breaks, the pattern
aped and duplicated, here at the shoulder, there
splitting the doubled yellows, new tar black
against the fading cinder grey.The dog passed this place on clicking claws,
escaping from his bath. She asked the tar
which way he might have turned, there at the crest–
pattered to the west or trotted east
on steaming feet. It wouldn’t speak, too slow
to crack new alphabets, to send new tongues
uncoded through its brittle skin.He came back, cold, a frost of spines to towel
and curse and scold. For years he fled. She quested
up the hill, the long black pavement, riddled
with Arabic. He’d run and return, return
until his hips failed, sprawling, his eyes clouded blue
and still the pavement murmured underneath a tire
and would not answer questions or point the way.
“it’s not that good”
Oh stop! This is great, I love what you did with that image.
If the way around making “Farsi” work is to swap out “Arabic” for “Persian“, there’s one option. It’s a great story, Julie, and I’m having trouble seeing your poem through my own haze of lost dog tales and unrecorded cross-country drives: the same image you’re engaging has been in and out of my mind, though I’m more likely to see Chinese. To conclude by retracting my original suggestion seems fair: perhaps it’s a nice touch that the road is multi-lingual? Thank you for blogging.
Thanks, Michelle, you kind person you!
Cyn, Persian is a good choice. Perhaps if it’s multi-lingual, it needs to have more distinction between the languages, so it doesn’t just look like a mistake (it originally was a mistake and I just haven’t fixed it). Chinese, eh? Hmm. I’ll need to go stare at the street for a minute. If I get hit by a bus, send flowers. 🙂
I make plenty of mistakes, ftr, most recently trolling you to consider making the wiseacre road smarter than it has any right to think it is…if that’s the proper tone-of-mind for this narrator? Aside from the narrator, you’re juggling *three* “persons”: she, dog and road…unless you want to back away from “slow” in S2L5, but this’s getting long. I’m hearing more “Dumb dog–stupid road” than “Ooh, wooka da purdy squiddles” today. Makes me wanna mess with your first stanza sumpin-ferocious, possibly even swap it into second position? What does “calligraphy filled the Farsi cracks with macadam” achieve, grammatically? I don’t have “macadam” in my functional vocabulary, btw, so I’m predisposed to hate it. How ’bout “calligraphy filled the macadam with Farsi cracks”! Golly, this’s fun, Miz Carter! I’ll try to see you’re hit by flowers, instead, in which event I’d send a cameraperson. 08^)