The Poem I Meant to Write

[jdeirmend]

THE POEM I MEANT TO WRITE

I regret not writing you down,
You swam through my mind
Linking words and thoughts
With gossamer chains
That glistened with meaning,
But the kitchen can was calling my name
Is "kitchen can" an idiom? I'm unfamiliar with the expression.
Using the voice of my wife.
There were skinned knees to be kissed,
Equations to be sorted out,
House rules to be followed.

Has the opportunity passed? Strong recommendation: eliminate this. You say it below in an image that makes it redundant.

Have you flown, like a caged bird
Through a conveniently open window?

Are you even now winging toward
Another poet, a different writer?

I have the scraps, the fragments,
The word-pieces I had intended
To build you from.
I will try to arrange them so,
In hopes they cast the same shadow.

Like my grandmother’s smile -
You linger just behind my eye,Not sure if I'm taking you too literally, but how is this possible? I.e., in what sense can your grandmother's smile lurk behind your eye? If this is a memory, it would be good to spell this out.
Waiting for me,
Wanting to be released
In just the ‘write’ form.

All in all, I enjoyed this for the experience that it attempts to capture. It is perhaps an experience common to all writers: throughout our day to day experience, things trigger thoughts that solicit us to capture them in writing. But we can't, by way of obligation or whatever, and the thoughts go back under, into a preconscious if not unconscious state within us. Then ensues the struggle, later on, to dig them up. This process is just an image of the powerful desire each of us has for continuity with ourselves, and how it is not always possible.

The poem is poignant, because it points to continuity and self-identity's impossibility; how fragmentary a thing experience is, and how our efforts to integrate it must at times fail. I like that it finishes on a redemptive note: the grandmother's smile, however cliched and awkwardly placed, evokes the notion that a love that is other than "I" can attune us to those parts of ourselves that seem lost, and thus help us to achieve some sort of imaginary wholeness (though I don't mean imaginary in any perjorative sense here).

What I love most about the poem just came to me, though. Early on, the speaker laments his inability to write and maintain self-identity in the inscribing of memory, owing to familial obligation. When he sits down to try and remember it, he is taken back, however, to a memory of the familial love that made identity for him at all possible.

Given that, I would say to meditate on that final stanza.