Finding the Form with Laurie D. Graham
They arrive in two ways.
Either suddenly present before me, there in full, kablammo, and I’m scrambling to get it all affixed before it disappears or dissipates or morphs or whatever it does by its nature, that nature being beautifully fleeting. Or via a glacial (though I don’t think that adjective means what we hold it to mean anymore) accretion, a few lines, a few words, a few syllables, no coherent understanding of shape or presence except in the micro: a whiff, a couple of notes through an open window, and only once lots and lots of those inklings are piled up together do the fuller dimensions start to unshroud, at which point I become one of those round-the-benders on the TV with the red yarn connecting all the evidence, it’s plain as day, just look.
“Ave Maria…” falls into the former category. I feverishly clacked it into my phone with an ice cream cone in one hand. I was in the car with my aunt just before Christmas. We were in Midland, Ontario, and her brain was being slowly dismantled by dementia. She was living in a retirement residence not quite suitable to her needs, and I was the one who put her there, though she didn’t remember this and the question was no longer persistent in her mind. The dog and I were there for the afternoon into the evening to have a bit of Christmas with her. Going for ice cream was one thing my aunt could still understand and enjoy, so off we went.
This was also around the time of the convoy.
I think of my work, in both its modes of arrival, as transcription, even though that’s not quite the right word.
When a poem appears via the first method, there’s usually not much editing to be done. The only real tinkering I did was with the conceit, which also sprang from actual events:
We really were sitting in the car in a parking lot eating ice cream and looking across the strip mall parking lot when “Ave Maria” came on the radio. It really was December 23. A woman did indeed walk across the parking lot clutching a stack of red envelopes. A man really did exhale smoke into a wreath shape around his balding, ponytailed head. The Canadian flags were very much on the trucks, and there were indeed a lot of trucks.
And I really did feel a powerlessness in the face of all this, so the shape of the poem grew out of my appeal, silent and into the ether and exhaust, that my inadequate gestures could somehow meet this screwed-up, incongruous present moment, this song on the radio, this disease, this scene out the window, this horror, this failure, this ugliness, this grieving.
I grabbed the closest thing at hand and began to write.
Laurie D. Graham’s books are Rove, Settler Education, and Fast Commute. Her next one will be out with McClelland & Stewart in 2026. She lives in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.
Photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash