Kimberly L. Becker
As a Southerner who has lived "up North" for many years, driving through Richmond always signified coming home, especially when I passed the train station. I admired it for many years before looking it up. With its interwoven rhyme and repetition, the villanelle seemed like a good form to convey both stasis and change, just as every trip, while different, calls to mind previous, similar ones.
When I went back and looked at a free verse draft for the poem that would become "Watershed," I realized the pantoum was the perfect form. Having written one previous, dreadful pantoum, this one seemed to write itself. With its almost incantatory repetition and two steps forward, one step back movement, the form suggests vacillation between the present and the past, as well as, in this case, the lapping of the water. This is a sad poem, one that was made easier to write by using a received form, albeit an exotic, unfamiliar one. I changed "things could have been different" to "should" because it better complemented the "sh" sound in watershed. The title was one of those rare gifts: at once a description of the Chesapeake Bay geography, a transformative event or turning point, and, to my ear, an allusion to tears that have been shed.
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Driving Through Richmond,
Passing Main Street Station
All our traveling means impermanence;
We are unrooted at our very core,
Always arriving at irrelevance.
Mirage of home shimmers in a distance
We never reach despite the traffic's roar;
All our traveling means impermanence.
Traveling stresses our deep transience:
Will we ever see the place we'd set out for?
Always arriving at irrelevance.
Richmond, we pass through you with little sense
Of all the battles that your body bore;
All our traveling means impermanence.
What year is it? The time is out of tense.
What has the four-faced clock chosen to ignore?
Always arriving at irrelevance.
The train station's become the highway's fence,
Its elegant façade holds trains once more.
All our traveling means impermanence.
Always arriving at irrelevance.
Watershed
Things should have been different.
This is what I think as I watch
My son explore my friend's docked sailboat
And remember my father's boat.
This is what I think as I watch
My son descend with his father into the cabin:
I remember my father's boat;
How very sick I was that day on the Bay.
My son descends with his father into the cabin.
It reminds me of my own father and
How very sick I was that day on the Bay,
That time we went out years ago.
It reminds me of my own father and
How much he liked to sail.
That time we went out years ago,
We tried to navigate the loss.
How much he liked to sail!
My son will never sail with his grandfather.
We tried to navigate the loss.
We were out of our depth.
My son will never sail with his grandfather,
Because I am unmoored from what was sure.
We were out of our depth.
Things should have been different.
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Kimberly L. Becker has recent or forthcoming work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Borderlands, Ghoti Magazine and Umbrella, as well as in a forthcoming contemporary women's poetry anthology, Letters to the World (Red Hen Press). She lives with her family in the Washington, DC metro area.