Draft Process: What Rides on that Swift Currency of Air

70º ~ conditions the same, sky darkening


As promised, here's the second new draft for the day.  This one began just a few days ago and was much more skeletal in the journal and required a lot more work to pull it into a complete draft.  However, it was clearly an epistolary poem, another letter to Dear Madame, the speaker's unnamed mentor. 

In this case, the speaker is still trying to resolve why her mentor doesn't visit her (and we may wonder if the mentor is a figment or a real woman by this time).  In this poem, the speaker has come to terms with this lack of visiting and comments on the people the mentor sends in her stead. 

It begins:

Dear Madame--

Finally, I comprehend the distance kept
and recognize each mystic sent as envoy.

The rest of the poem (8 couplets = 16 lines), describes three of these "mystics" and the connection the speaker sees between each of the three and the mentor.  In these poems, the speaker waffles between neediness and trying to reassure the mentor that she is strong and can take it (whatever the current "it" is in each poem).  And so I begin to wonder about how our mentors can become crutches and how painful it is when we must separate from them. 

I'm much less sure of this draft, not sure if I'm covering ground already covered, nagged by the feeling of less powerful language but unsure how to punch it up, certain that the whole thing reeks of cliche.  Still, it's there and time will show where it means to go from here.

For the title, I fished and fished in a few journals and books and came up empty.  Finally, I just thought hard and came up with my own, "What Rides on that Swift Currency of Air."  In the poem, all of the communication between the speaker and the mystics is non-verbal and transmitted on the air: a smell, a whistled tune, a look.  I also like the current/currency play because there is value for the speaker in the air as a transmitting device.  Who knows?

Cirrus and cirrostratus clouds, click for link