Month: February 2020

notes on ‘Music for the Old’

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I wrote this poem in the time around the death of my wife’s paternal grandmother.  She had dementia, which was quite severe in her last years.  The poem isn’t meant to be about her personally or specifically; just about her type of situation.

Poems like this, where every line makes a rhyme, are really time-consuming to write.  Good rhyme takes time.  It’s hard to write with a normal voice, saying things that sound at least somewhat natural, making the poem say what you want; AND at the same time hitting your marks to rhyme at the end of each line.  I returned to this poem off and on for over three months before considering it ‘done’.  I probably wrote over a thousand minor versions of it before it got this far.

Long ago a teacher taught me: rhyme makes you think of new ways to say things; and those new ways to say things are a wellspring of poetry.  So I prefer writing poems that rhyme.  And most people prefer to read poems that rhyme.  It just takes forever to write them.

 

Music for the Old

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Please turn the TV volume down.
Turn off the singers and their shows.
It’s too late for all that carrying on.

They sing crescendos.  What I want to know is
what can they say about the long descent?
Where is a poet for the sloped plateaus?

There is no muse to guide the spent,
skipping tune you sometimes hear
from the aged, in their tales of discontent.

The linoleum is faded where
their steps have been paced and re-traced
til the leftover beat is thin and spare.

Some notes are gone now. Others spaced
wrongly – a new, blue variation.
Someday all of it gets erased.

I’ve heard that blue music on occasion.
It comes like radio waves, wavering
as if from a far-off, fading station.

-B Taylor, 2020

notes on ‘Old Song Played Again’

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This poem is a true story for the most part.  I was in Waffle House with my kids and some song from the 1980s came on the jukebox (or whatever digital thing they have now to stand in for the old jukebox).  The song contained that made no sense, back when I was a teenager.  But when heard it again after many years, I understood it entirely.  And it changed my impression of the song, very slightly … for the worse.  For some reason the new knowledge of that old line deflated the song just a bit.  It took some of the fun out of it.

The worst part of the story is that, while I recall the feeling and the place vividly, I honestly don’t remember what song it was, or which line.

Old Song Played Again

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An old song on the radio
is heard again in one’s forties
after many years of interlude
during which the song
and memories of the song
have lain apart, dormant.

At the song’s new playing
here in the diner on a Saturday
some old idea is newly understood,
a truth revealed which had been hidden
years before back when the song
was often played on the radio.

How to reply, from that point on
when the children ask “Is this the one?”
Something has changed.

Background sounds intercede;
forks clinking, murmured conversation.
The song plays on.  You know each note.

“It was my favorite, when I was young.”

-B Taylor, 2016

notes on ‘Engineer Blues’

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I wrote this poem over 25 years ago, back when I was a student.  I think it was my best work of that time.  It’s the only poem from those days that I kept.

I was always inspired by large-scale, mundane engineering works such as highway overpasses, towers to carry high-voltage lines, etc.  They always seemed (and still seem) so majestic, even though no one thinks much about them.  Engineering works are that way sometimes: amazing, and utterly un-noticed.  Somehow they also seem a bit sad, especially these static ones that literally stand in one place for their entire lifetimes as the more interesting world changes all around them.

The original idea of these was to contrast such works to more traditional statues.  Most statues are build to recognize and remember powerful men.  Towers like this are built, well, just to serve a purpose, and not recognize or remember anything.

notes on ‘Sketches of 16 Men’

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I have been roughly half of these, at some time or another.

The reference to ‘childhood home’ came after writing the rest of it and needing a way to end it; something to rhyme with the word ‘poem’.  These are really meant to be contemporary / modern-day things that I have done or seen other men do; so I am not personally meant to be the ‘reader’ in the last stanza  But I guess there is an implication that we watched our fathers do a few of these things also, when we were younger.

Sketches of 16 Men

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A man without any business sense.
A man who lives in the present tense.

A man wielding a large axe
splitting logs, which he then stacks.

A man disinterested in his dinner.
A man who states aloud: “I am a winner.”

A man laughing at his child’s joke.
A man without a job and broke.

An angry man, slowly becoming
sad instead. A man running.

A man blind to his own violence.
A man who realizes, and repents.

A man screaming at the screen-
a madman, for his chosen team.

A man alone with his fears
on a dark porch as daybreak nears.

A man eating a hot pepper by itself.
A man pulling whiskey down from a high shelf.

An old man who thinks of his childhood home,
reading a short and simple poem.

B Taylor 2020

notes on ‘Idea of the Dog’

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This is a true story about my wife. She noted one night, after sleeping poorly, that now she sometimes sleeps curled in a ball “even though I’m not sure the dogs are there; I don’t want to move because I might wake them up if they are there.”

I contemplated this for quite a while. My own policy is to kick the dog off the bed whenever he’s in my way. And even if he isn’t in my way, usually I’ll kick him out just on principle.

It seemed like an interesting idea, that it was not the dog in her way, but just the idea of the dog that was in her way.

One cardinal rule of poems is to boil it down to very direct and short statements; and not to ramble on. I broke that rule here. Sometimes it’s good to break a rule. Here it was just more fun to ramble a bit, and rhyme while doing it.

Idea of the Dog

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My wife refrained from stretching out
her legs in bed, so as not to disturb
the dog lying there. Although I doubt

the dog was actually lying there.
It was dark and I could not see him
in the blackness, with his black hair.

The actual dog does not sit, nor fetch;
nor was he actually on the bed
in that space into which her legs would stretch.

She feared the dog would be inconvenienced; 
though I don’t think it’s possible to inconvenience
a dog. (That is one difference between us.)

And I’m very sure that an idea cannot 
be inconvenienced. It just cannot.
Nevertheless, though it was a bit hot

and she would have preferred mightily
to stretch her foot out from under the covers
instead she remained curled up tightly

in a ball and endured, so as not to be a
hinderance or bother, and continued
to accommodate herself around an idea.

For while the actual dog was absent in this case
the idea of the dog was quite real
in that night, in that particular space.

B Taylor 2020