Love and Other Gravities or (Where Do Books Come From?)

Like so many other things in life, it started in high school.

I had just moved from the Nevada desert where the dry heat weighed nothing at all, to the marshes of Louisiana where the sultry thickness weighed on you like a load of wet laundry. 

But it wasn’t all bad.  There was a girl.

The first time I saw her was the first day of my junior year.  Still, I can close my eyes and let the electric squiggles work their fuzzy magic… and there she is, like yesterday.  She wore a cut-off jean vest with matching cut-off jean shorts. Not the deep indigo denim of the 00’s, but the light stone wash blue of the 90’s.  Every edge was frayed like she wielded the scissors herself the night before.  She was cool.  She was all I could not poem. 

At that time I was crowned with the ignorance of adolescence, and so these fevered lines sprung from the inky oblivion that is a teenager:

Eyes, so blue. Hair, so blond.
She smiles, and the fiercest storm
calms.
                          -  High School Me

I’ll admit, it wasn’t the most scholarly verse.  And it wasn’t like I hadn’t written before. There was the screenplay for Back to the Future 2 that I started when I was ten, but then abandoned when I found out someone was already writing two of those.  And then there were the handful of short stories that a friend and I wrote in middle school.  But those were predominantly retellings of Home Alone, set around different holidays. 

Those few trite lines for my Denim Goddess were the first time I had ever put raw emotion into orderly words.  They were the first time I had taken an untamed, intangible thing and made it touchable: etched onto college ruled 8 x 10 1/2 and ripped out of a spiral notebook so the edges matched hers. 

Fast forward: 20 years of Love and other gravities. 

I suddenly had an idea for a book.

© everythingpossible

I will detail the minutiae of taking this book from idea to print — with all its self-doubts, revelations, out-takes, rough drafts, and other catastrophes — in later posts.  But this post is about beginnings. 

I began with fifty poems that I felt were pretty decent.  After a good, hard look, that number dwindled to forty.  After consulting with friends, it got down to thirty.  But then, something strange happened.  The book started to have its own opinions.  It wanted to say something.  The poems had their own story to tell.  They had their own mean. 

And as I started to realize what that meaning was, I noticed holes in the collection — like those glaring vacancies in the cheap motels speckled along The Great American Highway.  And so, guests for those empty rooms started to arrive.  Some had been on the road for years, and some were away from home for the first time.

It wasn’t enough for each poem to stand on their own.  They wanted to engage with each other. They wanted to band together in chapters and talk amongst themselves.  And then the chapters wanted to hold congress with one another.  I don’t mean literally.  None of the poems reference another poem.  But it’s more like they were becoming currents in a larger body of water.  In short, the book decided it wanted to ocean. 

Sometimes I had to swim, and other times I had to learn to float.

As of now, My Father’s Hand Is a Mountain Range contains (pending any last minute whims) forty-one poems.  They can be flipped through and read at random, or read straight through to tell a story.  It ’s not a story I set out to tell, and it might not even be me who is doing the telling.  But it was a story that was waiting to be told to someone… and I just happened to be listening. 

I look forward to passing this collection of poems, this small ocean, to whoever else is out there listening.  I hope I’ve improved since the eleventh grade, but worst case, you can use the pages for kindling, packing dishes, or to wrap forty-one small fish. (Maybe goldfish, if it's worth the troubling.)