Fear

When I was in sixth grade my father took my brother and me to the Upper Peninsula (Michigan) to visit my grandmother. She lived on the edge of Lake Superior. The jetty for the neighborhood was within walking distance from her house, and my brother and I took a 5 five gallon bucket, some night crawlers, and two poles down to fish from the edge.

 

Not having the patience for real fishing, we began throwing rocks into the water soon after we arrived. Not long after that, my brother walked back. I stayed and cast out my line a few more times.

 

The fish I caught wasn’t particularly spectacular. I don’t remember if it was long or short, fat or skinny, but I was proud of that fish, and I let it flop around on the concrete while I splashed enough water into the bucket, excited to show everyone.

 

I ran home full sprint, except for a slight, unplanned, wild and seemingly unnecessary sidestep.

 

I was told to put the fish back in the water, which I didn’t mind doing;  I had left my fishing pole anyway.

 

On the walk back, in the same spot as the involuntary sidestep, I lost control of my limbs. I dropped the bucket, kicked it over; the fish skidded on the dry concrete. I couldn’t see. I lost my breath.

 

Maybe it was only a second. Probably it couldn’t have been much more than that. As my eyes refocused, I saw the snake—blue-gray, perfectly blended with a chunk of turned up rock and rubble.

 

I threw rocks at that snake just to see it move. Seeing it, I wasn’t afraid of it anymore, and it took only a moment to come to the realization that I had been afraid, more afraid than I had ever been, a subconscious, instinctual terror.    

 

It would be hyperbolic, and an insult to that snake, to say that writing poems feels like the fear I felt standing on that Michigan jetty, but maybe a primordial fear of snakes is just one end of a vast gamut of what I fear.  If so, for me, many things fall in the middle:

 

heights

planes

tall buildings clustered together

failure

being a bad father

being a bad man.

When I write, I fear what other people will think of it. It is acute, like a snakebite

 

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The next poem you write, do not censor the content or the form during the first draft.

 

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It’s 3:30am and you are disappearing 

 

Not in the same way you hide behind your hands.

Not in the same way I leave and return through doors.

 

Yours is evaporation: a vanishing of ounces.

 

They say (the doctors) they’ve never had one blow away.

They say (those who don’t know) so petite, so small, so tiny.

They say (those who do) they’ve never seen one so happy.

They say (the books) you don’t even know you exist apart

from your mother.