pen ink river

Really, I'm not kidding. I was about to give up in sheer frustration. Hours spent this morning re-reading chapters in Hugo's Triggering Town, free-writing who the Fog and Wonder Woman Pez might really be, looking for inspiration in my original list of objects, ransacking a list of "what I love" poetry prompts originally scripted in Allegra Wong's Writers Block class a year back. But I sneezed and wrote that into the poem and then let myself riff, a scene in a diner, it could be anywhere except that it was a meeting between a dead person and the person left behind and, over their otherworldly meal, they eavesdrop and observe and the narrator tries to make sense of the depth and breadth of her loss. I pushed through to some other side and then got brave enough or exhausted enough with the whole damn process to put the revision out there and lo and behold, the teacher says it's a keeper, better than to be hoped for in a typical second draft. I couldn't have done it without his advice about seeking the deeper, underlying subject. When will this become second nature, when will I be able to conjure up such analysis on my own? I feel like I'm stuck in the role of student, forever in need of a wise person mentor. Practice does make for perfect, well not, perfect but at least perfecting my sense and my ear. So that's my work for this first day of December, 50 years after Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. I guess I'm slowly learning, it's all in the view out the window, the list from a year before, the carefully scripted sneeze.