“atmospheric” came as a rush today. The inspiration was Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” though there is nothing here you might connect the two save that both poems address the reader directly as “you”.

The initial thing that struck me about Mary Oliver’s poem is how inspirational it is, how it wants to lift up the reader and reassure them, how it is about the poet and the reader sharing their “despair” with one another, how it is about the curative nature of the wild things.

I feel like I could have written this poem in a matter of minutes, except as I wrote I was interrupted over and over, struggling each time to find my way back to that original thought.

Because of this the poem strayed wildly, at one point becoming more about wordplay than it is now, if that is believable.

There is so much wordplay here still, enough to think the poem is too cute.

Considering Mary Oliver was the inspiration for this poem, I really don’t want my poem to be cute.

Another stark difference with the two poems is that I have once again written a poem as one long sentence. And I’ve let lyricism take over.

I think I must admit to being a lyric poet. I’m certainly not just a lyric poet. But if I am one, I wonder if that is a negative, a positive, or just a fact.

This poem starts off with an invitation to come in and visit, to “take off your shoes” which is a thoughtful request to make of someone, to help them feel comfortable yet also suggests that the narrator doesn’t want their house to get dirty.

The next thought, to “take off your feet” is jarring, or I want it to feel jarring. As I wrote it though I knew that it was the core of the poem, the bit I would write the rest of the poem around, a sacred bit that I would not alter.

I don’t think as I wrote that line I could foresee that the word “feet” would mean something more than just physical feet, but it didn’t take me long to notice myself focusing in on the idea of measuring things, specifically measuring ourselves against others such that praise might rise “to our heads” to the point we would lift off the ground.

So I scattered phrases related to measuring throughout the poem, “inches” and “feet” and “depth” for instance, and also I played with the idea of gathering things throughout our lives, the words “accretion” and “accumulate” being specific calls to that idea.

I also am trying to suggest that we use this physical idea of gathering things in our lives to lift us up, to levitate, and that both of these are flawed ways to measure our lives, to try to rise above.

I am implying that we should try to ground ourselves, not take off if a “rocket”, not accumulate wealth or things to the point we would need to push them off a ledge, but instead should slow down and breathe in each others presence.

The title of the poem is a reference to this, a turn on the word “atmosphere”, focusing on the “air between us” and not leaving the atmosphere on a rocket or through being lifted up. I am also trying to get my reader too think about what happens to air as you rise up, that the air gets thinner, that there is less oxygen as you rise up, that it is harder to breathe.

As for lyricism, I’m quite content with the pace of the poem and the way I break that pace both with phrasing that forces the reader to slow down. A good example of this is where I say “and let’s that/time stand on a ledge” which puts emphasis on each syllable as opposed to the duh-da duh-da duh-da pace of the poem up to that point.

I also try to do this with the lines “let’s just take a breath/another/another/another” which lets enjambment do some of that work, but also the syllables of “another”, with the spoken emphasis on the middle syllable forcing the reader to slow down, duh-da-duh-duh-da-duh-duh-da-duh.

My worry with this is that I am using some sort of gimmick or trick and not something authentic.

That is the poet critic inside me wondering, “where can I attack this poem and prove that it is hackneyed and trite?”

I need and we need to look past these critics, real of imagined, and just write, experiment, practice and risk.

The exclamation point looks like a rocket to me and like a rocket forces those around to look at it, especially here where it seems so out of place.

Here’s the image that the WordPress AI generated for the poem:

I had Chat GPT analyze the poem for me and was comforted to see this response,, that the poem is “philosophical but warm, ambitious but humble, filled with both aspiration and acceptance“.

I’ll take that.

I’ll come back to this poem again after I’ve sat with it a bit and have another look. Whatever I wanted to accomplish with a poem and even think I’ve accomplished, there is always more and less there when I have different eyes with which to see.