Solipsistic Regrets for Jennifer

Me, 1990

Today's challenge from One Stop Poetry is to dust off an old poem that celebrates and begins to speak to our origins as poets. Here's my offering with a commentary that follows.


I.            

These days

I stomp on pain-staking ground

shifting beneath my feet

crumbling under my sole and you

stumble over my disturbances

and me:

Because

      heel ball toe

I dance alone in darkness

to the beat of remembered tongues

speaking lips words unspoken downcast eyes

for fear of seeing and unseeing

a child hurt and told

not to move because

He says so.

Because

   She sat and sits there still

a dark live thing bone in hand

pressed by a will too big to escape

the press the prod her body's surrender

to a hand feeling and unfeeling

the sun's beat against her back

her squint for turned heads

in fear of remembering hands and un-remembering

hands before they touch

un-being because

she must exist to hurt.

Because

   Night like mercy came and comes

a veil to cover myself to express

my mad dance my breaking

of old ground beneath bare feet

before summer.

I speak by heart

an unpracticed passage written

by remembered hands on my body

and forced performance

to choke on furious fingers

remembered and stuck

in my mouth down my throat

told to suck and take

in dirt between flesh and thumbnail

like exacting measures of poison

for the healing I half-believed.

Because

   I hesitate in darkness, listening

for the unremembered sound of my flowing blood

and alert to false echoes like a howling dog

bemoaning a pitch imperceptible to the human ear

yet howling still

alone.

II.           

These days

I do not want to be

alone and still

I hurt you .

because I am frightened by your unspeakable shadowy form

because I am an unremembered ghost

because I am sorry for my pain

because I am mad with desire to touch the space of myself in you

because I need myself these days.

Jennifer

because I desire broad daylight to dance

with you on ground made new

by the together of our feet,

these days, still

I am asking for second chances

to be to love

myself and more

to offer you

in return.

Ami R. Mattison

July, 1991


On “Solipsistic Regrets”


This poem is my earliest surviving poem, previous ones having been tossed, burned or perhaps tucked away in the forgotten remains of my past.

With the exception of re-formatting the font, I’ve left this poem exactly as I’ve found it.  The elder poet in me begs to “fix” it. At this early stage in my career, I had no clue about line breaks or punctuation, much less an understanding about how to use words to their best effect. So, it remains as is, a reminder that I began somewhere else and fortunately have greatly improved.

I was 25 years old when I wrote this poem to my first girlfriend. It was towards the end of our 5 year relationship, and we were breaking up. I wrote this as a way to explain how the events of our break-up were triggering old scripts of violation and abandonment in my life.

When I titled this poem, I’m pretty certain that I had just learned about ‘solipsism’ or the theory that the self is the only reality. And I remember I felt that the word suited my sense of how I’d become caught in a morass of my past and how my memories of it had suddenly become my present reality.

This poem was the first time that I ever wrote about my history of childhood sexual abuse.

But what I remember most vividly about this poem is how I felt keenly that there was no other way to speak of my experiences except through poetry. A letter, a conversation, or a story wouldn’t do. Only poetry could possibly begin to tell of these experiences from my past; only poetry could speak how I felt in that moment when I wrote this poem.

It was a powerful lesson: poetry is necessary; it speaks for us when nothing else can.

© Ami Mattison