Antechamber
Word count: 241
Paragraphs: 6
“A veil awave upon the waves” —James Joyce (Ulysses, “Sirens” chapter)
“at night I go to be bed with everything I’m thinking”—Maureen Owen (everything turns on a delicate measure)
“A poem is nothing / But an empty space / Awaiting its occupant” —Chris Tysh (26 Tears)
I often do some of the writing in bed. The house finally quiet. Grandbaby asleep, Max’s murderous mewling on pause, laptops muted. A state of unresisting yet restive somnolence passes through me. I‘m both dead tired and buoyed up by the poem that’s coming my way. Being on the path to keeps me awake, as if killing time before a rendezvous. An erotic trace unspools along this antechamber, awave. Energy the dancer amasses in her limbs right up to the instant she springs from one foot in a grand jeté. In my passive abandon I let the words land pell-mell: RAVINE ASSASSIN A PATCH OF FOG
Like a dream which uses debris of my waking day to weave its manifest content, the unmade lyric sifts the heteroclite word box, pulling tiny strands, sonic echoes, where TV news, baby babble, cat litter, foldout bed, COVID mask, orange menace, knock around its side and rearrange themselves, holding the line if needed. Often the next morning, I only remember a fraction, the rest eclipsed by the eternal maw of the night.
Chris Tysh is a poet and playwright whose latest publications are 26 Tears (co-written with George Tysh), Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy and Derrida’s In/Voice. She lives in Detroit and serves as poetry editor for Three Fold, an arts quarterly journal, Three Fold.