Found Art

I’ve started the painful process of going through yet more (and more!) boxes from storage. These are filled with details from our old life; letters from Japanese students, books on obscure Japanese grammar, and the like. I went to put a history book I bought 12 years ago in Scotland in my “going away” pile when I casually flipped through and found this slip of paper carefully folded inside. It was a poem — an original poem, mine.

I have dozens of little slips like this with things as varied as a short children’s book I wrote while waiting for Maya to have her surgery (explaining clefts, of course) to epic poems written on multiple scraps. Most of it is complete crap, at least I think so, and I have yet to write a story that doesn’t put people to sleep. But I kind of liked this poem, and it felt very Missy, circa 21 years of age.

I wrote a lot of poems like this, full of urbane detail at the beginning and ending with some sort of hyperbole. It was a technique we worked on in creative writing, this grounding in facts, and the use of “t’was” or “shall we then” made my professor shudder. “Use modern language,” he said. “Most people only ever see old poetry. We are not in the 18th century. Use English.” It changed how I thought about poetry a great deal.

Anyway, as I am probably putting my readers to sleep (as I am so good at doing), I will go ahead and type up the poem. It is untitled.

I found God one day
On a little green hillock near Boise, Idaho.
I, driving on the freeway, look up
and behold! Like Saul of old, I see
a glimmering light, a veritable
spectacle of
amazement. And here
I thought he was just an old
man with a gray beard, sitting in the
celestials. So of course I screech my
modern car to a top, smoking all four
rubber tires. I grab my instamatic
camera and run to win a Pulitzer. As
I reach out impulsively to touch
infinity, the light suddenly
clears and I am only staring at an
old woman, standing,
hunched,
in front
of
all
humanity.