DEVIL'S CROSSING
Favorite 1
Devil's Crossing went through a billion drafts or so it seemed like, starting as a conventional, not super interesting poem and morphing into the experimental poem it is now. Me being the religious imagery junkie I am, I knew I wanted to delve into that aspect of my writing, so I started there with my first draft.
Collapse
The socks on my nightstand,
striped and worn through with holes,
slide to the floor and land with an anticlimactic thud.
I consider reaching down and picking them up.
But they look much more at ease
lying among the frayed edges of the rug on my floor,
faded orange and yellow melding into the threadbare greys.
So I leave them.
The books stacked on my shelf have fallen diagonally,
propped against one another like tired soldiers.
The book end on guard has left his post
six inches from the edge and allowed their escape
from their neat, orderly rows.
I could call them back to attention if I wanted,
command their spines straight.
I know, though, that as soon as my bedroom door
clicks shut, they will collapse back into their slumber.
So I leave them.
My eyes drift to the window:
Birds chirp, and the pine tree outside brushes
against the wire screen. The wind drives evergreen
into the corners of my room. My skin feels paper thin
and singed through, edges torn and bent,
like origami that’s been folded over too many times.
I listen for Your voice in the trees, the swallows, the small gusts,
and sitting in a rocking chair near the door, I wait for Your spirit to find me,
to overwhelm my being and shake me to weeping.
Eyes closed, arms spread open, but my chest remains collapsed,
empty and void.
I crumple finally, and so You leave me.
As I continued to work on this piece before groups, I realized how boxed in I felt with it the way it was, in the style it was in. It had the type of imagery I wanted, yes, but it still felt wrong and incomplete, like there was something missing from it. I noticed there was this abandonment by God that I hadn't intended to include, but here it was, and that really intrigued me. So that's when I decided to completely scrap it and start over.
I still wanted to use Christianity as a major component in this piece, but now, I wanted it be used in an unsettling way. I wanted to go above and beyond how an individual like myself might feel if I felt like God had abandoned me; I wanted to go into what might happen if God abandoned an entire community. At this point, I turned to Pinterest for inspiration. Midwestern and Southern Gothic had long been on my mind, and Pinterest was a great resource for accumulating ideas for the type of imagery needed to create a Gothic-type poem.
Women in white carry, for whatever reason, a strong creep connotation, especially when set in weird backgrounds like old farms. I think it has something to do with the Women in White ghost stories: women, who have become so distraught over their husbands' cheating on them, murder their children and then commit suicide after they realize what they've done only to roam around dressed in white, murdering other men who are unfaithful in an act of revenge. Anyhow, this image, with the woman in white, served initially as the inspiration for the rewritten first stanza.
The preacher shuts off all the lights and pushes us out the double doors
and on my way to the car I swear I see
a woman in white standing in the window
He says he’ll see us next Sunday and disappears
However as I continued to write and revise, I felt the same sort of feeling that I was being caged in by the types of images and the style I was using, so I took the newest version of Collapse, now titled The Fall, and I rewrote it again. I took the same pictures, but I focused on different aspects of them or incorporated them in ways that were new. For instance, this picture, though I still did use a little of the woman in white, was used more for its shadow in the latest rewrite.
Version 2: Initial Rewrite
The Fall
I. The preacher shuts off all the lights and pushes us out the double doors
and on my way to the car I swear I see a woman
in white standing in the window blank face black eyes The preacher says he’ll see us next
Sunday She screams
II. On the ride home the interstate is empty and corn fields line the sides like
concrete walls People in town say all the missing children dance between the
rows playing ring around the rosie
III. Mama has an oak door in the back of the house
locked with the iron key around her neck Shadows dance under the eave
in spasms and Mama mumbles Latin under her breath when she passes Sometimes I hear
shrieks of agony and the dragging of chains Sometimes the cross in the hallway
turns upside down
Version 3: Rewrite #2
I. there’s smoke before we see the road but when we get to
the gravel drive it’s lined with flames the church still stands at the end
and I swear I see a woman in white dancing in front it reminds me of Hell
Mama doesn’t seem to notice
II. the interstate is empty and corn fields line the sides like
concrete walls people in town say all the missing children dance between the
rows playing Ring Around the Rosie the children are never found
only bones
III. at night sometimes there’s bonfires in the fields with people dancing around
them shadows convulsing and voices shrieking they sound like the coyotes and look like them
writhing on all fours when they are still the blackness behind them still shifts like fingers
reaching in the morning a dozen will be missing but everyone
forgets
As you can see, Version 2 and Version 3 share many similar descriptions such as the corn fields and the woman in white as well as this idea of shadows convulsing, all images inspired by my Pinterest adventures:
Starting in the top left with the church road lined with fire, I felt like this image was a strong representation of the idea of God's abandonment, which subsequently indicates the rise of Satan. (Bear with me---I know this sounds oddly like a Satanic worship whatever thing. I promise it isn't.) That idea is unsettling in itself, a thing I was going for, while also drawing on the religious imagery I wanted. This image was coupled with the woman in white in the third version's first stanza, and it being such a vivid image gave a good starting point for the observations the narrator makes.
The top right was the inspiration for the third stanza, and the bottom left the inspiration for the second.
All of these revisions took place before groups. I know that this is why we have groups, to make such extensive revisions, but I had a vision for this piece that couldn't be achieved with just one group. Also I was just really excited about this (I've been a little low on the creative juices until sort of recently).
Anyhow, I took both version 2 and version 3 to groups because there were elements of version 2 that I did really like. For instance, it was much more unsettling than version 3, though version 3 was definitely the better poem because of its detail. I think the major reason it was so much more unsettling was due to the fact that it was a bit shorter, but it also had much less detail and left more to the imagination. However the lack of detail weakened it in that aspect, so I was torn.
Another thing I struggled a lot with was how long each poem was; I really didn't want a long poem, but the more I looked at it, the more detail and length I found myself adding, which to me diminished the effect the poem had. In an attempt to balance between these two aspects of the poem, I shifted to focusing on the structure of the piece. You'll notice that neither version 2 or version 3 have any punctuation. However version 2 does still have capital letters where each new sentence begins. In version 3, I got rid of any distinction between sentences. On top of this, my group and I focused the majority of our energy on creating unnatural line breaks that were still strong and intentional. Both the unconventional line breaks and grammatical structure ended up working together to sort of balance out the detail and create the unnerving tone I was going for, giving us the final draft:
Devil’s Crossing
I. the interstate is empty and corn fields line the sides like
concrete walls people in town say all the missing children dance between the
rows playing Ring Around the Rosie in the shape of crucifixes in the morning there’s
charred footprints but the children are never found
only bones
II. there’s smoke before we see the gravel drive but when we get to
it it’s lined with flames the church still stands at the end
and I swear I see a woman in white dancing in front
Mama doesn’t seem to notice
III. at night there’s bonfires in the fields with people dancing around
them shadows convulsing and voices shrieking they sound like the coyotes and
writhe on all fours when they are still the blackness behind them still shifts like claws
reaching in the morning a dozen will be missing but everyone
forgets