Today, I steal time to write between
breakfast and lunch.
I have a desk in a room I call mine
but it is our guest room, our linen closet, and a cosy art gallery for my
daughters’ artwork and for the notes they slip under my door to tell me they
miss my attention.
I book time to write at least once a
week. I actually book it in the calendar
at our family meeting. By announcing my
intention, everyone in the family-- including me— takes me a little more
seriously as a poet.
I sit to write at a small teak dining
table that wobbles: probably the reason I found it on the street ten years ago. I fold Stickie notes over Stickie notes to
make a Stickie pad that I place under the pedestal leg and this helps make
things more stable.
I write longhand, for at least my
poem drafts, using lined Stickie Notes from Staples, a Papermate 2HB pencil and
a Tombow eraser. I like how cleanly the
Tombow erases. Because I draft
repeatedly in pencil on the same document, it’s important that things remain as
clear as possible. I love my yellow
Stickies: I use them for ideas, lists, words
I don’t know, or words I might be misusing (loads of these) as well as my poem drafts. Some people think that’s why my poems are structurally
small-ish; I don’t think so: I run the poem up the sides of the Stickie if
necessary.
If I have no time to work on an idea,
I write the words down at least, then toss my Stickie onto the inevitable pile
of Stickies on the desk. There are five Stickies here this morning. In the
interest of transparency—which we need so much more of these days—this is what’s
here today:
1)
The trees are dropping fledglings
like crazy-- I’ve stepped on three birds
this morning.
2)
The aloe had a brown jasmine flower
in its pot this morning; therefore the Jasmine fell in love with the aloe last
night.
3)
I want to forget you, first
love. I’d like to move on now that I’ve
been married twelve years. And you were such an asshole anyway.
4)
Can you make a taco lasagna with
tortilla chips?
5)
I despise lying in others like an ex-smoker
hates smokers. I sneak lies on the back porch--
Some
of these are not going to make it into poems (Taco lasagna and first love,
you two go ahead and breathe a sigh of relief).
But I don’t throw anything out.
This
morning, I read through the Stickies, turn on the air conditioner (to cool down
the rest of the house) and walk out. I feed
my daughters some granola and send them to read or play with Lego in the living
room. I feed our old blind dachshund and
carry her out to pee in the backyard. I go
for a short run. I go back to my table and pay MasterCard. I read a poem from Poetry magazine. I take
one Stickie—the one about the Aloe—and write a first draft of a poem. It’s as terrible as it sounds like it might
be. But it’s a first draft.
Halfway
through a kind of okay revision, I hear something floats under the door on a
current of air. It’s a telegram: my daughters
want me to come out. Olive is eleven
years old. Alice is nine and I’m
conflicted about their interference. But
mostly I listen to the words of my mother that are this voice in my head since
she died ten years ago. And she says to
me: the girls are yours for a short time;
poetry is here for good. So my time
at the desk ends for today. We bike to the pool and hike trails by the river. We
go to Claire’s to buy earrings that don’t hurt sea creatures! This is an important and difficult hunt (if
you’ve been in Claire’s, you’ll know what I mean) but Olive is obsessed with
the plastic island in the ocean which she has seen in a magazine. Wherever we
go, at my girls’ insistence we search out the translucent yokes of beer can
packs and break them apart with our hands.
Olive hopes to save porpoises by doing this. I hope she’s right (the irony of the Lego she
loves also causing harm is not lost on her: it’s something we just can’t face
yet).
Before
bed, I read course material for my day job or I read the New Yorker. Using my Stickies,
I write down words that I like, or descriptions or ideas. And I go to sleep
hoping tomorrow will give me the moments I need before my daughters’ next
messages float under the guest room door.
Sarah Venart used to write under her initials, S.E., but
screw that. Sarah's writing has been published in Numero Cinq, Concrete and River, New Quarterly, Malahat Review,
Fiddlehead, This Magazine, Prism International and on CBC Radio. She is the author two books: Neither Apple Nor Pear/Weder
Apfel Noch Birne and Woodshedding. A new collection, I am the Big Heart, is coming out soon-ish. Sarah lives in Montreal and teaches
at John Abbott College.
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