“Half Full” is a poem about memory loss, a topic I am exploring each Wednesday on my Substack page and following up with a reflection on the poem itself here.

I wrote this poem in a rush–not in an attempt to do so, but that’s how it happened. Except for this series of poems, it is pretty rare for me to start a poem with a topic in mind. I prefer to read other poems and let that experience guide me to the page.

Which is perhaps why I like this poem and find it technically sound with a nice and rich metaphor embedded to think more deeply about the effects of memory loss.

I started with wanting to have a stand in for dementia, such as “memory loss is a cat” or “dementia is the drifting clouds”. The power of analogy and metaphor in a poem is secondarily, for me, trying to give the poem substance. The power is in offering a lens to view the world/idea/topic differently.

This is of course for the poet, but it is also a reader-centric decision, at least for me.

To a degree that I cannot explain the metaphor myself in the whole way I receive it reading my own poem.

In other words, I’m able to say things I cannot say any other way through poetry.

And that’s what I’m after, a chance to say not just interesting things but substantial ones.

Wading into the world of Substack has me thinking about this goal of mine, to write poetry of substance and interest.

Part of that is finding an audience that wants these things, that finds my poems personally meaningful and trusts me to bring my best and most authentic work when I post.

Substack seems like a place I might find an audience alongside the one I have here.

Except, I just don’t know. As I have used the Substack App on my phone I’ve found that the home or landing page looks a lot like Facebook and even similar to Instagram and Bluesky and Mastadon and Threads–you are given a recent topic and then you swipe up to see the next post.

Many of them have videos attached. Many of them are snippet size.

None of them I find that way are truly meaningful to me.

I’m not here to criticize social media–I like it. I find the content interesting usually and the algorithms seem to peg me well.

Except not for the breadth of my interests. Rarely am I offered poetry and commentary about those poems. I’m given lots of tech talk and a lot of trucks. And some trampoline stuff.

But that’s a digression.

This poem’s punch is the glass door–that’s the part that even for me suggests something about memory and personal history that I can’t quite nail down.

The metaphor seems to talk about the difference between technology then and now, with automatic glass doors common unlike in even our recent past.

There was something about opening a glass door and hearing a bell ring, something that is tied to other memories, that offers up lost memories just wandering through my mind even now.

The fact that the doors are glass is significant. It is rare, I think, that a store then or now would have an opaque wooden door.

The use of glass is primarily, I think, to entice a shopper to enter. You can see where you are going.

But you can also look back out on where you were. That’s what memory is in a sense–a doorway that looks back and forth, through which you can see your past and through which you can better understand your present.

When you are standing there and the door doesn’t open, that’s a similar feeling to having memory loss. That door has always opened–memories used to be cheap and plentiful.

But even when the door opens for you on its own, that’s a thing. Perhaps you have had this happen, when a memory shows up in your head randomly, when some doorway in your mind decided to just let you in.

That happens at the retirement community where my mom lives. They have an automatic door that is very close to where you sign in and out. Going to sign out the door will often open while I’m signing out and then close again before I leave.

If I stop to talk to one of the many people I’ve gotten to know over these past two years, that door just opens and closes and opens and closes.

Thank you for taking the time to read my poems and subscribing to my page. I am so close to 100 subscribers which will be a significant moment for me. If you know someone who might like the type of poetry and reflection I write here, please share my site with them.

The title here, by the way, is intended to comment on the glass imagery, in this case the pulling in the idea of a glass being half full or half empty.

While I’m not sure this poem expresses it well, I will always lean into hope and joy, even in the face of hardship, which memory loss offers in droves.