Poetry as a Rope: A Craft Essay by Emily Laubham
Blood Ritual found me because I left the door between Now and Then open. One evening, with red wine in hand and my dog collecting sticks nearby, I felt an electric kind of peace, even with mosquitoes hovering relentlessly—a melancholy buzzing in my ear. I scribbled down, “Unwelcome in my wine,” and went back to defending my weird little peace. With just a few words, I kept the door open, knowing I’d return some other time.
Reading old journals always feels like joining a conversation with my consciousness. Next to “Unwelcome in my wine,” there’s a quote from Sue Monk Kidd: “All my life, longings lived inside me,” and another line I wrote that wound up in a different poem: “I ran from innocence, but it ate me like a lion.” Like half-dreamed dialogues, they fit together in a way that only makes sense to me. Sometimes not even to me. Most times, actually
I came back to the line “Unwelcome in my wine” over the years, folding and unfolding it in my head. The memory changed. Was I happy when I wrote it? Anxious? Heartsick? Eventually, one truth floated to the top. That evening, I was missing everything I still had. My dog, my yard, my frame of mind, the alchemy of mosquitos drinking my blood and me drinking them. They were right there. I had them all, and I missed them. That became the driving force of the poem as it appears in Abraxas—the appalling, wonderful awareness we have of time passing, always.
Writing asks me to look at the world with reverence and perspective, to view my life not as a series of past events but as something infinitely more complex that constantly interacts with the present and the future. Sometimes I think, if I zoom out far enough, I might find God, or something more accurate. Ironically, poems are often magnifying glass.
Poems are also love letters. Mine are, at least—written to me from me, outside the confines of time and space. I cast one end of a rope into the future, and the other, back toward the version of me I was when I first wrote a line or image. I’m open to the possibility that this poem—and all poems—will keep changing forever. But I hope that bitter, sustaining drink will always go down smooth.
