Reading Time: 6 minutes

The OnlyPoems Poem of the Month arrived via email last Monday. The assignment cycle has become routine by now. I have drawn an illustration to pair with the poem of the month every month since April, so October makes seven times. July and August were you-picks, where the editors chose between two drawings, so there have been more than seven illustrations, but all-told seven months, seven full moons. I count on the poem to arrive within a few days or as much as a week before the end of the month, but I don’t block out time on the calendar for drawing. Instead the drawing tides finds gappy hours or half hours here and there, usually later in the day. But last week, Monday, I taught until seven, and then Tuesday I was preoccupied with the 🍀Celtics-versus-Knicks🩳 NBA season opener, and for whatever reasons, I didn’t get around to drawing until Wednesday, and even Wednesday’s pixel work was a hard start–tentative, second-guessing, sand in gears. Chew on your Apple pencil until it gives you a toothache.

I pressed on and worked all the way through the drawing on Thursday, and gradually I felt the process pick up momentum, snowballing tints of what I wrote about last time, carrying on like poetic misprision: orbited in small but growing circles from a serendipitously keyed generativity–merely a phrase or line, follow what clicks. Maybe it is comparable to being towed out to sea, little one-person lazy river air mattress-style, calmly and without wavering, not heavy, slow barge or cruise liner or rusted armada. As an inventive process, the flow state also reminds me of secondary imagination, which I have not read about directly but heard CGB describe this past summer, citing Freud, pretty sure, as that which, as from dreams or hazy memories, reassembles something uncanny in language and images though not always bearing fidelity to reality. Here the peculiar and the ordinary eddy, swirl, inexact edges bounding them. This, if we learn to listen for it, sparks wonder.

For this particular drawing, Sizing the Dark, I held closest (and returned) to a few images from middle lines, about sitting on the porch in folding chairs, about a yellow light. You can read them here. The poem’s phrases recalled an animated gif I have used in a couple of presentations over the years. I didn’t know it until a recent writing group session when I posted it to the chat and asked if anyone knew, but the image is a brief cut from The Bird and The Bee’s video for “Polite Dance Song.” That video released on January 1, 2008, but I never had heard the song, never had watched the video, only knew the gif. The gif is all over Pinterest boards from 2010, yet in post after post it appears unattributed. I always thought of it as the twinkling specter gif, stored where I can remember to find it under the filename starfieldmentor.gif. It is an image I first used in a talk about mentorship and social media at the Computers & Writing Conference at Purdue U in 2010. Seven years later, it resurfaced in a talk I delivered at EMU called “In Walks a Snowflake.” “In Walks” was a presentation about the unseen, inobservable company we keep–elders and mentors and relations who we carry with us when we enter a room, and about why and how to involve that inobservable company, literacy being all about involvement, as Deborah Brandt teaches us. The EMU presentation wasn’t as conventionally academic as most other presentations I’d delivered up to that point. There I was on January 20, 2017, presenting the talk about sponsors of literacy, sponsor avatars, ethereal relations, and snowflakes to a full room for the Academic Success Partnerships Scholars’ Banquet. Even more, Ph. took time out of his day to attend. He sat to my left and even took a photo of me as I stood full-throated and nervous on that platform, following script and slides, voice occasionally quaking, verklempt in moments like standing at shores of affective groundlessness can make us feel. Here is that photo he took.

I’ve used the photo as a professional head shot for a few years, and I have been cautioned casually by university PR types that it doesn’t quite pass the standards for the genre, that it is too much action shot, too much full body, that it is too much a younger person than I happen to be now, evidently all crow’s feet, withered by time and stress and sitting too much, and gray race stripes catching me up with other grandies. Holding out, my nonchalant defense is that I have throughout my career only used as professional photos images of me that were taken by Ph. and Is., as this underscores what an abundant source rejuvenates, to see myself as they have seen me. Whatever else can be said of that loop, it somehow always picks me up, brings me home.

And so with starfieldmentor.gif in mind, making its return every seven years or so, I read the poem of the month one more time and one more time the middle lines stuck. Silhouettes. Porch sitting. Folding chairs. Yellow light. Whiskey pours.

I think I drew rough sketches of the chairs first. Added the porch-like platform beneath them. Then attempted to fill in scenic details, fashion a secondarily imagined cyclorama, mulling over What porches do I really understand?, their architectures even crudely enough accessible to form lines without going about reviewing porches, studying their forms directly. There is this one, here at the end of Rosemary Road, front porch where I sweep leaves or pluck tiny hornet hives, where I sit and read and fiddle with ideas. Also the porch at the condo in Ypsilanti where the octagonal window holds on as unique 1970s punctuation, translucent and shapely. Once I recognized that porch to be this illustration’s porch, the lines fell easily. Perhaps for another post one day, is this what it means to be a so-called visual person?, to follow a step farther the overlaps among language, image, memory, and making as if special the thing stirred by these conditions?

With the 2D illustration reasonably complete, late Thursday I added an animated element. I wanted the silhouettes to appear both empty-ish yet activated. Continuing in Procreate, I saved a copy of the 2D jpg, then added it as a background layer. With the selection tool and the outlined silhouettes, I could add layers to the animation and in each layer fill the space with color and texture. Finally, I added a fixed foreground layer with a yellow crescent, gaussian blurred, and tuned the frame rates until I found the twinkle rhythm I thought worked best.

This entry is beginning to feel processually overwrought, so I’ll close with this, the final touch, about titling. I considered variations of porch lighting, porch light, leaving the light on, and so on. And then I stumbled onto this Charles Wright poem from 1977, “Sitting at Night on the Front Porch“–another vector altogether new to me but also familiar, in that it pointed to this animated gif I’d made, pointed toward what I meant, much as the animated gif pointed soft arrow and dotted line back to it. And herein was the drawing’s title:

“Sitting at Night on the Front Porch” by Charles Wright

I’m here, on the dark porch, restyled in my mother’s chair.
10:45 and no moon.
Below the house, car lights
Swing down, on the canyon floor, to the sea.

In this they resemble us,
Dropping like match flames through the great void
Under our feet.
In this they resemble her, burning and disappearing.

Everyone’s gone
And I’m here, sizing the dark, saving my mother’s seat.