Why I Write in My Diary Every Day
I falter a patch of birds and spill
their song. I prickle the daylilies
with homilies and hurrahs. Nice pleats,
I say to the scarecrow, ruptured
drag queen of our pastoral snows.
My old oaten pipe is rotten now,
my pollen fallen into sickly weeds.
Poor weeds and thistles, witty
with bees. Sometimes I think
important somethings in the field.
Sometimes I nothing into wood-
land and dark my way around.
The scatterbirds are picking teams
now: over there against over there.
I am in the middle, here,
doing middle things. And
the clouds look like rabbits
with bad dreams.
| Gregory Lawless |
|
levelheaded: Why I Write in My Diary Every Day
Rare is the sentence not referencing the self in Gregory Lawless’ “Why I Write in My Diary Every Day.” Despite seven “I’s” and four “my’s,” the speaker doesn’t come off as the kid who has yet to comprehend that by standing directly in front of the television, he blocks your view. Instead, his ego participates in the natural world surrounding him. Little by little, he moves from mental intervention to mental invention—somewhat of a surrender of self.
A diary is one ripe place for personalized idiom. Strictly speaking, we don’t “falter” birds (a “patch” of them, no less, as though they’re crops), nor “prickle” the flowers with verbal utterances—only the writer and speaker know exactly what’s going on here. The typical privacy of a diary affords prime opportunity for an unlikely combination of heightened- and lack of-self-consciousness, allowing for the chronicling of mental events just like these, as well as the joy in rhythmic sound our speaker shows (“daylilies” and “homilies,” “oaten [. . .] rotten,” “pollen fallen”).
There is a high level of mental activity progressing in the poem, changing shape. We go from a speaker who talks to the scarecrow and imposes his private language on nature to a speaker who is capable of an extreme brand of empathy—he compares the clouds to “rabbits / with bad dreams.” Not only is one natural image likened to another here—with no assertion of the self except what’s implied in observation: that it originates from a self—but on top of that, the speaker describes the kind of dreams the rabbits are having. We go from observation and involvement to imagination. The speaker has earned his way outward to a partial eclipse of self that foregrounds other. In this manner, Lawless reflects on transcendence of the daily and of the self via the mind’s faculty. We arrive at a controlled, expanded alternate reality, an empathy with careful authorship.
- The Editors
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