What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
In the sculpture, Aeneas wore a helmet, held his son’s hand, and carried his thin father, weathered and wild-eyed, but alive. My father
was bearded and wild-eyed before he died. My son was ten days old and sleeping all the time, and though I do not pray I knew if only one
could live, it should be him, little belly little brain, hand curled tight around my finger as I nursed him down to sleep then drove
the unlit road back to the ICU to find my dad now clutching at the family gods and spitting: Back! at an approaching nurse, and then to me, quietly:
Who can I trust? as I harangued the doctors for more drugs. I could not carry him away, and like Aeneas, I made mistakes. He died. A whole
library burned down. The myth of my autonomy began to fade from my own system of belief. Instead, a chemical intelligence was using me—
mother, daughter, vehicle—to change and recombine, each body cast aside in time. I washed my hands in running water. I changed clothes in the garage
beside the washer. I watched everybody sleep. Some carried their fathers on their backs, some fled with children from wasted cities and armed attacks. What can’t be carried can be scattered on the water.
“For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration."
"My understanding of what a poem is has been formed over a lifetime by the memory of the poems I love; the poems, or fragments of poems, that got into my head seemingly of their own volition....In fact, I believe, that is the true mark of poetry: you remember it despite yourself."
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