My new year’s resolutions: poems in stranger and lower places, a pen by the bed, a filthier house, memorization, tenderness, sunlight. Learning how to recognize (maybe even early on) the scope of each poem’s ambition, then sizing and ending accordingly. (As I write this, my husband yells to me that our son has a new word: “burp.”)
Here’s one of my favorite clean slate poems, by Laura Jensen:
THE GOODYEAR BLIMP
The Goodyear Blimp has lost itself,
has gone down peaceful in a cornfield.
The grounded pilot walks out of the field,
no one hurt, no one around but the blackbirds,
who laughed and kept laughing. He walked
down the empty road in the middle of the day.
It was fine to be uninjured,
to have hurt no one, to walk
in the brief sweet world of the saved.