This week’s poem will set off some fireworks in your head. It’s full of surprise and thick syntax that makes its own kind of clear-eyed sense. I’d recommend you read it at least three or four times. It’s a wild ride, and the multiple readings will help you hear what’s being said, rather than just staring at the big red explosions in the sky.
An elegy is usually a poem for someone who’s died. In this case, Adrian Blevins gives us a poem for the tiny parts of herself left down south, where she grew up. Blevins lives near Waterville and teaches at Colby College.
Little Elegy
By Adrian Blevins
Winter’s no drag in Maine to me. More like
the big-fancy sister of the present tense
as in all up-to-date and forward-looking
and even vaguely avant-garde and insubordinate
like the sky itself can’t say what’s going to happen next
whereas back in V.A. the Jeffersonian troposphere
was always rusty and nostalgic like wagon wheels
and people in boots smashed at the hoedown
and despotic mothers making toy rabbits
with kids who won’t leave the country store
but must lean against the sides of things forever.
Winter’s back home I mean the weight and the weight
and the sad-missing vapor-mist weight-weight
of people everlastingly almost somehow passé
whereas in Maine for me at least it’s not
because I’m not at all from here as in I’m not
all that much really these days from anywhere
since by coming here I somehow left my little atoms
and proteins and other cells and whatever waters
somehow completely behind like a specter
might leave an old watch on her deathbed
and never know thereafter what the foghorn means
wailing all sopping and crestfallen like infants like that.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Adrian Blevins. It appeared first in CRAZYHORSE no.89 and appears here by permission of the author.
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