O

O

Starting point. An opening.
What's missing: Absence. Zero.
Zilch. Naught. An empty space.
Sound of being taken off guard.
Coin, perhaps, or plate, or wheel.
Sun. Moon. Egg. Zygote. Maw.
Bucket as seen by a descending
drop. Target. Lens. Operator
Partner to x, and sometimes y.
Hug with kisses. Wedding ring.
Circularity. World without end.
Orbit. What the compass said.
Business end of a barrel.
Bullet hole. Alpha's omega.
Peephole. Stasis. Enso. Stain.
"Absolutely not" with N.
Odor with body, out with knock.
Face without eyes, the eye itself,
iris. Boundary. Clique. Nailhead.
Brain pan. Binary "Off." Omphalos.
In soccer: nil. In tennis: love.
Belated realization. Abject failure.
Beginning and end. What's left
When there's nothing to say.

Process Reflection: The idea for this came to me a while back when I was scrolling through my recent blog posts and saw the post I had done last July about the letter "E." Like that one, this is just a list poem, a right-brain exercise, inventorying associations I could make with that particular shape. The fun part in writing it was playing with the sequences of sounds, the singularities, the surprises. I started out just writing things as they came into my head but spent a lot of time rearranging them, substituting words ("maw" for "mouth," for example), trying to tighten up and cut back on stray syllables. I knew I needed an exit line and liked the little double entendre I came up with in the last line, but then had to go back and replace "nothing," in the third line with "naught," which I actually like better, now that it's there. I felt the same way in writing this that I often do when I'm working on an abstract drawing, which was focused down in a way that makes time sort of disappear.

That was yesterday. Today a motorcycle starting up next door woke me up at 4:30 a.m. and as I lay in the dark in other words and phrases began occurring to me, so I grabbed a pen and paper and lay in the half-darkness, scribbling them down as they came. That has always been an interesting time for me when I'm writing: in the space between waking and sleep the brain seems to work a little more fluidly, with the kind of associative logic (or illogic) of dreams. So this morning it was a matter of folding the new material into what was already there.

So this is where it is now, subject to further consideration.