There is beauty in digging through your old documents. You can find different parts of your old self in the titles, within the actual documents, or even the date they were created. The whole interaction works differently than looking back at old pictures— there’s a more subjective and intimate transformation that really only you can observe, because you’re the only person that understands the full stories behind those old poems, rants, essays, or last-minute presentations.
This poem I found is called "Swallow," and although it isn’t my best, I wrote it in one sitting. It’s a poem that exhibits how my mind flows, because writing it literally felt like words were slowly being woven from my head into the computer screen. Looking back at it, I can remember the chapter of my life in which the poem was born, and what this poem meant to me then.
The poem wasn’t written in a time of turmoil, or some significant part of my life. It was during Spring Quarter of my freshman year at Stanford, and I had an event for work I had to be at twenty minutes after its completion. I was more stable than I’d been in months, and I was even a little inspired. I was in my dorm room and looked like a deranged homeless man, having just completed a last-minute essay an hour before. But none of these things are why I wrote the poem. That’s not the point.
The point is that this poem is special because it’s an authentic representation of the stillness of my life in the moment it was written. It wasn’t written in a way that was anything but myself, in that moment, and for that reason I can remember the circumstances behind its creation surprisingly clearly. Which, in all honesty, for someone who has a terrible memory, is pretty damn nuts.
So. Enjoy Swallow and take from it what you can. But I would encourage you to take a night and look through your old documents and the chapters of your life they represent. Don’t restrict yourself to the more intimate writings, read over your old essays and presentations too, and laugh at how you used certain crazy phrases, or remember how you were obsessed with a certain word.
The lexicographical evidence we provide ourselves in saving all of our old documents allows us to create tangible, intimate histories of ourselves and of our subjective interpretation of the world in each moment as we grow older, so why not take a look?
Swallow
When I swallow
he melts into blue
the trees scrape the
perimeter of the sun and
under my feet,
the grass is in an affair with the wind.
I recall,
somewhere,
when he’d found God in the birds,
proved it by showing me how
the veins in the air
fed into the Tigris and Euphrates upon
his forearm.
Our laughter wore robes of August nonchalance,
the ants sang Bob Dylan, they did,
they really did,
and we closed our eyes
to climb the mountains of our rib cages,
a competition to see
who could stare the farthest
into nihility without crying.
He got lost,
once,
right there, in the middle of the clearing,
stripped his clothes,
flattened them on sun-bathed rocks
next to sad stories
and waited for them to dry.
Every Sunday after
his ears began to whisper,
and when he started screaming
at the ferns for Dad’s forgiveness,
I asked him if we should stop.
But we were miners,
with grit, the strongest kind,
digging here for secrets.
I guess he’d found the
truth,
now,
hanging from
the
redwood,
a broken branch.
