Elegy Ending Without a Rhyme

This is the next-to-the-last day of the poetry-writing retreat.  The retreat is now in its tenth (and final) year; this is my seventh time attending.  For the first few years, the retreat was held at a country inn in the Poconos; for the last few years it's been held at a convent in Mendham, NJ.  I loved the inn, but I love the convent more. We stay in little tiny rooms in a converted orphanage, each one holding just a narrow bed, nightstand, small dresser.  One hall of the orphanage is painted pink, and the beds all have pink sheets (floral or striped) and pink blankets; one hall is painted green , with green-patterned sheets and green blankets. I'm staying on the pink hallway, across from my writer friend Clara.

Our poet leader this year is Kim Addonizio, and the book she's using for our primary text is Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune. Each essay in the book focuses on a different poetic structure, built around a different poetic "turn": Randall Jarrell is quoted as claiming that "a successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem." The moment of that crucial shift is the poem's turn. 

For example, emblem poems begin with careful observation of an object and turn toward meditation on the larger themes it can illuminate. A concessional poem begins with conceding the weakness of its argument before pressing on to its conclusion - one common form of a concessional poem initially points out the negative features of a beloved before extolling the beloved's praises. Poems with a retrospective-prospective structure have a temporal turn.

This afternoon we wrote elegies, which can turn from grief to consolation or resignation - or sometimes from an attempt at consolation to its failure.  The model we used as our prompt was a poem called "Elegy Ending in a Dream," by Patrick Phillips. His poem used a call-and-response structure, contrasting what he thought the experience of grief would be to its more crushing reality. Kim then invited us to write own elegy-ending-in-something poems: e.g., elegy ending in a song, a laundromat, a fairy tale, an ice cream store.  Here is mine:

Elegy Ending Without a Rhyme

You have left me

A fork without a spoon.

No, a fork without its tines.

You have left me

A sky without a moon.

No, a moon without a sky.

You have left me

A ball without a bat,

No, a ball without a shape.

You have left me

A head without a hat,

No, a head without a face.

You have left me,

A bird without a wing,

No, a bird that never flew.

You have left me,

A finger with no ring

Chopped bleeding from a hand.