I went out for a walk this morning looking for a tree. Not just any tree, but one that would tell me something, that would give me permission to write the day’s poem. I’ve done this several times in January, at least once a week, sometimes more. Sometimes I find the tree, sometimes the insects find me, the sky, the air moving through the branches. Chihuahua has become strange to me, or perhaps I’ve become strange in it: now I know where the desert trees are, which ones are in bloom, which ones just endure.
January has been a month of exercise. Not in the poetic, elevated sense of the word, but in the literal sense: something that must be done, a muscle that must be flexed even when I don’t always want to. Some days the poem turns out interesting. Other days it just comes out and that’s it. But it comes out, and that’s what matters in this experiment I imposed on myself without really knowing where it was going.
What I didn’t expect was how much making it public would change things. I publish each poem knowing someone might read it, and that forces me to be more careful, to refine, to ask myself if I really want this out there. I’ve discovered that I have poems saved up, poems I wrote in January but don’t feel ready to share. Not because they’re bad, I don’t know yet, but because they touch something too recent, too raw. They’re private in a way I can’t fully explain. I’m surprised that other poems, on the other hand, cost me nothing to release into the world. I don’t know what that says about me, but there’s something.
Nature became my muse without me consciously deciding it. I suppose that’s what happens when you go out looking for poems regularly: you start paying attention to what’s there, to what was always there but you’d never seen. I’ve fallen in love with trees, with insects, with the sound of wind in the afternoon. I know my city in a new way, more intimately. I know where certain trees grow, how many there are, how common they are. Before, I walked through Chihuahua thinking about other things, listening to podcast or music maybe, now I walk to see.
But beneath the trees and insects there’s something else. There’s a subtext running through many of these poems, a reflection of what’s going on in my mind, personal games that only I fully understand. Some more obvious than others. It’s curious how nature can become metaphor without you intending it, how writing about a tree can be writing about oneself.
I don’t know if these are good poems. Time will tell, I suppose. What I do know is that January taught me something about sustaining a creative commitment, about going out to look even when I don’t feel like it, about making vulnerability public even when it’s uncomfortable. It taught me that poetry can be an exercise and still be genuine, that I can experiment and refine at the same time, that knowing my city is a way of knowing myself.
Now it’s February. The muscle is a bit stronger. The trees are still there, waiting.
