May 2017

David Huddle
dhuddle@uvm.edu

My writing is a lot smarter than I am.  When it’s going well, the composition I end up with is more interesting and illuminating than the idea I began with.  Sonnets and villanelles have been kind to me in this regard, even though I take liberties with those forms.  But sometimes beginning to write in free verse will lead me toward a pattern that presents itself and that helps the poem move toward its conclusion.  I’m a syllable-counter (because I prefer the language of conversation to that of meter), and syllable-counting helps me pay closer attention to words and phrases than I would if I were using no formal discipline at all.  I suspect that most poets who use poetic form of any kind know that (when it’s working) the constant revising it requires helps clarify and intensify the poem’s content.  In this section of a long poem about my father, the first couple of stanzas migrated toward an expanding and contracting pattern--lines of two, five, ten, five and two syllables--that strongly affected the sound, the pacing, the syntax, the line-breaks, the thought, and the feeling of the narrative.  I think of the repeating pattern of the lines and stanzas as functioning as a rhythm section works for an improvising soloist.  This poem led me to discover the form it needed, then it took me to an ending that I never would have anticipated, an ending for which I am grateful.  I’d have never gotten there by myself.
​

from “Things I know, Things I Don’t”


The phone
woke her and she knew
instantly, Mother said. A nurse said he
seemed to be--there is
no word

that suits
what was happening
to him in those early morning hours,
and I don’t know what
they said

really— 
seemed to be dying
I will say here instead of the going
that first came to mind,
they said

he was
dying—my mother
heard that word singing through the telephone
and it must have been
the sound

she’d heard
whispered in her dreams.
She got up quickly, dressed, made herself
think of everything,
stepped out

and turned
to lock the door when
she realized it wasn’t just dark out
there, there was a fog
so thick

the end
of the lighted porch
was invisible to her. But she kept
going, she walked
on out

toward
the garage, her hand
outstretched, touching nothing, the light behind
her diminished now,
she took

two more
steps, and the planet
dropped away from her, she couldn’t even
see her feet.  I am,
she thought,

going
to the hospital
to be with my husband who is dying.
She took one more step
and closed

her eyes,
and it was the same
darkness either way, eyes closed, eyes open.
She thought it harder
this time:

I am
going…  She turned back,
and in four steps she could see the porch light.
She went in and made
coffee

and sat
down at the table
with the empty cup in front of her, she
lost track of time, she
sat there,

and I
was asleep beside
my wife here in Vermont, Charles was asleep
in Rhode Island, Bill
asleep

out west,
all the grandchildren
sleeping, the ninety-seven-year-old mother
in the nursing home
asleep.

But he
was not alone, there
were nurses, Doctor Roda walked up there
to the hospital
knowing

a man
he’d kept alive was
going to—did those people have the right
words, did they say he’s
going

to die?
Do I know if they’d
say that? I have to see them there beside
his bed, three of them,
watching

him breathe,
taking his pulse, then
catching each other’s eyes when there was no
more breath, no more pulse,
no more

life.                
  What 
words were spoken then,
when they had to turn away from what they
had witnessed? I want
their words

to be
common: Do you want
some coffee? Is it still foggy out there?
even I’ve got to
take a
 
piss. I
want them to be who
they are, my mother in the car later
making her way there
to be

who she
is, my brothers, my
children, my nieces and nephews, even
old deaf grandmamma,
I want

no one
ever again like
Mother to have to grope out into that
complete darkness
where it

didn’t
matter if she was
alive or dead, for that moment she was
not anywhere and did not
matter.

He was.
I say my father was
here. I say he lived thousands of strong days.
I know he got sick. My
father

died. I
can say that, can walk
from home to work, can touch my daughter’s hair,
can say anything
I want.

   “Things I Know, Things I Don’t” appeared in Stopping by Home, Gibbs Smith Books, 1988, which is out of print.  
The poem, however, is also in Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
© 2017 David Huddle

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