I sat down this morning after scrambled eggs and a sudoku puzzle, knowing I wanted to write a poem but having not one bit of inspiration.

There in front of me was a Yankee Candle we’d burned over the holidays. I grabbed a strike-anywhere match and the candle took over.

I realized this morning that for me, writing a poem begins with writing whatever words come to mind, mindful that I can use them or not, that there is no pressure that this needs to be the poem’s start.

And so, as I mentioned, the poem took over.

The first lines are all about sound here, the long and short “a” sounds of “can’t”, “candle”, “change”, “spaces”, “frame”, “days”, and “ways”. Those three lines did not change as I worked through the poem.

As I often do, probably the sound plays too prominent of a role here. This isn’t a rhyming poem, at least not end-rhyme, but I simply love playing with sounds and hearing them in my head.

I keep telling myself, “Of course I can write poems without such flourish, I just don’t want to”. But then I wonder, can I?

Part of writing style, I suppose, is the practice of honing in to the pushes and pulls of thought that guide a writer.

It would be interesting to feed several of my poems into an AI and have it analyze them for style, to see if I have certain tells in my writing that distinguish my poems from other poems.

As for this poem, it came to me during the original version that there were creatures under the pool of wax that were preparing to crawl out, more like an evolutionary allusion than a horror or fantasy one.

In one of the versions I tried to suggest that this creature was metaphor, part of a ranging section where I played the word “literature” off of the word “lit” to speak about the many ways a candle is used as a metaphor for so many different things–intimacy, hope, vision, knowledge, enlightenment, connection to the spirit world, warmth, the passing of time and many more.

I severed that section of the poem here–it was too long and too much a list at that point, losing the original thought that a candle can change our thinking and thus change our day.

The original title here was “metamorphosis”, but upon thought, I wanted to use a verb and not a noun here (though metamorph is both), to suggest that this was ongoing and not something determined. I also didn’t want to just use the title of Kafka’s famous book, that being too heavy.

So when I wrote “metamorph” it seemed perfect. Only after looking at it for a minute did I realize how closely it looks like the word “metaphor” and so, of course that is exactly what I intended. How very clever of me.

I took this picture after I wrote the poem, setting the candle on a block of white oak and catching the shadow sharply defined agains the wall. I love the heat refractions above the shadow.

Shadow can reveal so much that is hidden in our world.