What I loved about writing poetry was that I was able to use images to create a small world that I didn't have to pull into a longer narrative or explain.  I could show you the scene of my two boys making sand castles when they were almost "too old" to be doing that, boys who still liked to play together, who had a knowing of each other, a relationship that went beyond me, beyond their father, into a life that would with hope stretch beyond my experience of watching them.

Then I could bring it all to a close and move on.

I could describe the wind blown look of my front yard, the overwhelming feeling it gave me, the amount of "quit" that I felt at that time.  I could connect that yard and that work to my feeling of depression, about life, and then show you how that's not how I work, how I put on my work boots and rake up the leaves, move on with my life each time.

And then I could revise it for a long time.  But the little gem of the story, the image, the scene--it could stop.

Of course, with poetry, those little gems have to be gems, polished and beautiful and amazing to behold, but more often than not, I would leave them in the rough cut stage.  However, I loved the notion that a situation or a feeling or an image could become something whole by writing about it.

With fiction, that "whole" feeling is long in coming.  What is nice is that in the course of writing that long, long thing is that there are spots for the poetic moment.  It's not the same, of course, as the whole poem right there, but it's not bad.  But then the story must go on, pulling up the threads of narrative, pushing toward close.

My poet's eye is still with me.  I'll note the moment, hope that some day, I will return to it, wrap it up, push it forward, make it shine.

Jessica