Mudpies

A recent entry from Bright Field on Renaissance Man (dated August 7 — there is no permalink) brings to mind my own struggle with breadth and depth. I compare my creative process to the making of mudpies: you roll up your sleeves, get mucky and have fun, and if what comes out of it is interesting or beautiful you give it away; if not, not. And then you move on to the next mudpie.

I wrote a poem about this last year — calligraphed it, rolled it up into a scroll, tied it with a green ribbon, and handed it out to folks in my writing group at the time: a mudpie about mudpies. I like the villanelle form, not widely used in English (but best known in Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night), because it’s like a dance, a song — and very appropriate to the kind of lightness I’m trying to explore. Thomas, of course, was able to plumb the searing depths of human experience with this “light” form — every time I read his villanelle I gasp. Anyway, here’s mine:

Ars Poetica

I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
I flit from here to there, I breathe it in.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

Mudpies are shaped in ink, or paint, or clay
Or paper, leather, sewn with linen strands—
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.

If good, or beautiful, they multiply:
Plucked, like August squash, then loved, and given—
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

Proboscis searching, reaching for the sky—
The canon, though shot down, gnaws deep within.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.

Perhaps the newer gods have a reply:
Express yourself. It’s all the same. Just spin.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.

I wander, search, a light-fingered magpie.
I learn the rudiments but don’t dig in.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.