Fragments

I love to write, and for the last fifteen years or so have been scrawling poetry into the margins of books, on errant receipts and airplane napkins. Most of it I never keep, although I wish I had.

My mother was a voracious reader, and taught me to read when I was in kindergarden. Incidentally, I also was taught to write in cursive before most of my classmates had conquered printing their name. I always asked for books instead of toys, reading and rereading the books until the spines literally split and the pages fluttered. In my basement are a stash of my favorites from childhood - Twiddlebugs at Work (a Seasame Street book), The Penguin Who Hated the Cold (a Goldenbook I think - but maybe Disney), The Dollhouse Murders, The Witch of Blackbird Pond - and perhaps fifty others from various ages that I hope someday to pass along to my own children.

I loved all sorts of books, and still do today. I wrote a lot - finding it cathartic to make up stories to escape the emptiness in my own life. Eventually I branched out into poetry, and occasionally I still find my earliest poems tucked into my grandmother's books. I've never been comfortable sharing my writing with people, as I am perhaps my own worst critic and tend to throw away most of the better pieces.

I was heavily moved by e e cummings, Marge Piercy, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Sylvia Plath and an untold number of other poets - their names not remembered, but their verses etched onto my heart.

In particular, I remember in seventh grade flipping through the poetry books in the musty public library and finding a poem about birches - their branches inextricably linked "at the ruined end of summer" or something similar. For the first time while reading I was moved to tears. I have been looking for a long time for the poem, as I only remember snippets of the lines, and those, I am afraid may have been warped by a faulty memory and the passage of time.

I wish somehow, these fragments of memories were larger - that I could sew them together and remember.