We had a termite inspector visit yesterday, going through our basement, tapping joists with a heavy flashlight, exploring cranes with a long flathead screwdriver.

I saw our basement through his eyes, the clutter, the disorganization I have struggled to contain.

Then we went outside, circling the house, and he saw a similar theme, leaves not dragged to the woods, ivy not pulled from the brick.

I did not feel shame. It didn’t matter than he saw this. It mattered that I felt urgent to put my world into order, to at least push piles into darker corners.

So these have been my thoughts this past day, thoughts that directed this poem.

My evenings with Wendy have routine now that we are alone in this house with our three dogs. We sit down and watch one of our shows. As soon as I sit down, at least within a minute, our dog Remy starts talking to me, telling me he wants to go outside.

I always respond, “Just a minute”, enjoying that moment of sitting down and starting to relax.

He’ll have none of that, continuing to bark in his conversational and insistent way until we head to the sliding glass door that leads to the deck outside our dining room.

I slip into my boots, the deck this time of year either covered with snow or the ground he drags me to turning to mud.

I pretend to mind this, talking to him and the other dogs the entire time, a conversation that must sound odd for whomever might hear me, a mix of encouragement to do his business and commentary on the weather.

Thus this poem.

My poems are not always sunk in such mud, their footprints so easily followed.

This one was also influenced by the poetry of John Burnside whom I discovered in an essay on the Poetry Foundation’s website this morning.

I am always on the lookout for poems that have shapes I’m seeking, for poets who have layers and some ambiguity.

John Burnside is less narrative than I am, at least in the few poems I’ve now read, “Signal Stop, near Horsley” a clear example (see the link above).

I think I am less polished as well and my metaphor is more obvious, that I draw my metaphors out more explicitly.

I asked my AI poetry advocate (Chat GPT) to compare the poems I’ve been workshopping these past few weeks with Burnside’s poetry.

She gave me insight that feels meaningful. That I can use. I don’t want to become Burnside, or any other poet, but as I develop my voice I want to have guideposts.

This poem begins with that moment the dogs and I spend at the sliding glass door, Remy’s breath clouding the window, that window’s glass inspiring the transition to the contemplation of the rest of the poem, an examination of what things are made of, of how the past became the present, of the layers of change both visible and invisible have changed the earth.

One of the cautions I learned from my high school teachers Mr. Gilbert, Mrs. Bales and Mrs. Sponseller some forty years ago were to not mix metaphors, that a poem or story was weaker if metaphors were offered but not developed, an author or poet swirled through “this is like that” and “that is like this” without sophistication.

The second paragraph introduces beard imagery to the poem, using the word “beard” explicitly and then the words “shaved”, “stubbled” and “shadowed”. The color white here is also the color of my own beard, more trivia than thematic, though my poetry advocate noted that it “evokes the idea of wisdom, as if the forest is an old figure whose “beard” is a testament to time passing, yet it remains impermanent compared to the deeper geological and historical forces at play.”

That was not in my head as I wrote.

Themes and images don’t have to be intentional though. This is a truth of writing poetry that I didn’t get in high school, that the one creative writing class that I had in my undergraduate years did not go into, that I did pick up during my MFA, though mostly because I wrote a lot.

At least lately it has been important to me that my poems have layers of meaning and offer more to a reader upon further inspection.

I definitely want that here. I am pulling images together across the stanzas. I am weaving the idea of creation against forces of nature that also create. I am marking the poem with the contrast of sand with snow, both having crystals, both building in layers and covering the earth, both smoothing but as permanence goes, the things of this world will become sand, not snow.

It’s hard for me to know even upon later inspection whether I’ve offered enough imagery to give life to the poem but not to weigh it down.

For instance, here I use the idea of glass being a transparent barrier between my world and the natural world, of glass being something human-made, of the same basic ancient ingredients as brick but allowing light to pass through in degrees, a layer as much as snow and sand are layers, but one that will eventually go away, that will “cease to fog”.

For the imagery I am using to work, some of the connections need to be ambiguous and not explicit. I am not after obvious and clear associations, though I am certainly making them.

I think that the line “if we are so occupied with this/hourglass we hold our breath” might be overcooked. It’s a connection between glass and sand and time and the way that our breath fogs glass windows, but it is also pretty obvious.

I do like it though. I thought about getting rid of it, making the theme less directly stated.

But, I kept it.

Originally I had the sand burying the dogs and I as we ran past the boundary of time, until I realized that one possible end of the earth is our molecules becoming that sand, that we won’t be buried, that our substance will disperse into the smoothing of the world.

I did not develop the alternative here, that the world could end “some say in ice” as Robert Frost wrote.

The poem felt done, though. There can be too much.

And how about an AI image that represents the poem?

First, this is my AI poetry advocate’s image:

And here is WordPress’s AI generated image:

Ok, I get these.

The photograph that I used as the featured image here was a bannister at the Postal Museum in Washington D.C. I don’t think there are copyright issues with a bannister. If there are, I’m not sure what images I can use.

I’m not quite ready to launch the Patreon version of this website. I have a lot of hesitation but I’m going to move forward soon. I am also going to work on better social media promotion with the help of my poetry advocate’s suggestions. I have 76 subscribers right now. I’d like to get to 500 in the next year. We’ll see how that goes.