NaPoWriMo Day 11: "To Manhattan"

Not my favorite effort, but it's a mashup.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt:  "We’d like to challenge you to write a poem of origin. Where are you from? Not just geographically, but emotionally, physically, spiritually? Maybe you are from Vikings and the sea and diet coke and angry gulls in parking lots. Maybe you are from gentle hills and angry mothers and dust disappearing down an unpaved road. And having come from there, where are you now?"

Today's PAD Challenge prompt:  "For today’s prompt, write a dedication poem. This is a poem dedicated to a person, an animal, or an organization. Or hey, objects work too–like a poem to a rock or paper bag. Put the dedication in the title or in a line under the title."

So, a poem about coming from New York and being in Iowa. I guess that's mostly geographic origins, but I've written and will write a lot about my family and emotional past, and when I read the prompt it felt like New York was what I had to take on.

To Manhattan

After these twenty years here, I still explain

I live in Iowa, but I’m from New York.

whatever the midwest is, I’m something else

that’s clearly you: fast walking, cutting through a crowd,

nervous and opinionated, gesturing when I talk,

with that awkward aw vowel pushing off my palate.

I remember sidewalks, peeling plane trees, the glow

of neon on wet streets, M15 bus sighing to a stop,

the smell of that dim immigrant candy shop.

It’s all your past now too, a set of vintage images.

They write how you were rough, hard, dangerous;

so odd to think that now. Strange too how hard it is

to think of you at all, how you persist in me

as crowds of corn-stalks shoulder through the fields

and windowless silos thrust against the clouds.

It’s strange how, trying to remember what I loved,

I think of gazing from the window in my school

that overlooked the river, letting myself dissolve

into its rising, falling emptiness and tidal smell,

in winter wide and white, a flowing field of ice.

In the final part I was trying to get at imagery that put New York in Iowa, and Iowa in New York. For the record, I went to the United Nations International School, which is located on a pier in the East River and lined with full-wall windows. Here below is the river as a field of ice.

       --Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not quote/copy/cite without permission.