Émon's poem

I’ve mentioned Émon briefly before— he was the main character of the novel I started when I was 14 and worked on for about five years. It was the novel that taught me how to write, how to consider ideas that weren’t my own, and how to stick with a project even though it might never see the light of day.

Last year on tour in Illinois, I sat under a tree as evening fell on the festivities of Mamma Linda’s Hog Roast, and by the light of my iPod I read forty pages of Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk. I felt quiet and restless afterward, and took a walk along the road under the stars. When I returned, I pulled out my diary and jotted down this poem in light so dim that I couldn’t see my handwriting. This is what I wrote.

She never thinks of you anymore, Émon.

Yes, she does.

I lie forgotten, rubbing sides with lint in the pocket corners of her brain.

I was never a character,

any more than a random jumble of black and white ink;

but I was real.

Real as the teenage fear that is mistaken for innocence, 

depravity cloaked and choked,

silly fears, a startled glance over her shoulder at each patter and ripple of the cornrows.

Wandering the black corridor of maize

after reading sixty pages of Annie Dillard, in the curved light

of an almost full moon, she listens, she feels the air of cool breezes pressing against her sticky skin, the sky pallid and dark, the corn alight with fireflies, her heart surging small pulses into her stomach—

and she thinks of me.

This thirst, this glowing glimmer of fascination,

leads her to monolith gravestones of a man named E.H. Bacon born 1827 died 1904.

It leans like Pisa and she tilts her head,

and she thinks of me.

I am the memory of unthinkable cruelty, a creation of love, a working of waking that blossomed her mind into consciousness. She woke up with me, and with forgetful purpose she pursued this vein of a trail,

blood-vessel complexity of paths,

choosing when, where, how, who, but not realizing they were chosen for her.

I am her solace,

Her mind-mate,

The pain and the confidant of a teen with a will to write.

I wait, patiently.

I keep to the edges of her ideas, coaxing.

She never writes me anymore

But I am never far away.

~~~