5/6/2024, #7: Poems from An Invitation to the Party - On Reading the Obituaries on Your Birthday5/6/2024 Birthday flowers - the cake is all gone: After Reading the Obituaries on Your Birthday
Never mind. Go ahead, pick up your birthday cake at the bakery where once again they will misspell your name. Strike a match. Light up that wildfire of candles the universe has provided. Set off all the smoke alarms. Make your wish. Blow. And in the charred aftermath of wet ash, of singed streamers and melted ice cream, rejoice, happy to be alive in such a world, to have had the great good fortune of an invitation to the party. It's my birthday today so how could I not choose this poem. It's not one I gave to Garnet because it had already been published in my poetry collection, How the Universe says Yes to Me (I seem to like long titles). I did however use it as the story's epigraph because it not only gave me the book's title and Garnet's birthday party pyrotechnics, it also did an excellent job of summing up the message I hoped my story conveyed. The poem itself, "After Reading the Obituaries on Your Birthday," was written long before I began working on the novel. Having just celebrated my 70th birthday, I noticed that I was reading the NYT obituaries almost every day, more often than not recognizing another boomer peer who'd gone ahead. I'd also recently finished reading Raymond Carver's heartbreaker, "A Small Good Thing" with a birthday cake at the heart of its story. (Robert Altman in his excellent film of Carver stories, "Short Cuts," perfectly cast Lyle Lovett as the cake's baker. Well worth your time but read the story too.) The last piece of inspiration was a series of very funny cake flops and disaster photos that the universe kept placing in my FB feed. All three coalesced into one of my favorite poems, one I wouldn't mind serving as my own obit (except in the interests of accuracy I'd probably have to add some whining and complaining to all that rejoicing).
1 Comment
September
|
We tend to write about what we know. I am a writer, thus this blog: Why write? What, when, where to write? Stay tuned. Archives
April 2024
|