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Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love

By David Wagoner b. 1926 David Wagoner

She's like a singer straying slowly off key

while trying too hard to remember the words to a song

without words, and her accompanist

is metronomically dead set

to sustain her pitch and tempo, and meanwhile,

under their feathers and springs, under their carpet,

under my own ceiling, I try to go on

making something or other out of nothing

but those missing words, whose rhythm is only

predictable for unpredictable moments

and then erratic, unforeseeable even

at its source where it ought to be abundantly,

even painfully clear. A song is a series of vowels

interrupted and shaped by consonants

and silence, and gifted singers say if you can

pronounce words and remember how to breathe,

you can sing. Although I know some words by heart

and think I know how to breathe (even down here

at work alone) and may be able sometimes

to write some of them down, right now it seems

improbable they'll have anything much like

the permissive diction, the mounting cadences,

now, or then, or now again the suspended

poise, the drift backward, the surprise

of the suddenly almost soundless catch

of the caught breath, the quick

loss of support

which wasn't lost at all as it turns out

but found again and even again

somewhere, in midair, far, far above me.

From A Map of the Night. Copyright 2008 by David Wagoner. Used with permission of the author and the University of Illinois Press.

Source: A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Biography

David Wagoner is recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He has won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. The author of ten . . .

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