I started this poem in a parking lot. I want that fact in the entry from the very beginning, because I am not interested in pretending poems begin in libraries.
It was a Tuesday. I had stopped at a strip mall on the south side of town to pick up a thing I no longer remember picking up. I sat in the car for about ninety seconds with the engine off and the door open, because the air in September in Santa Fe — even in a parking lot — does this thing where it goes cool at the edges and warm in the middle, and you stop being annoyed about errands for the duration of one breath.
And then a phrase showed up. The first line of what would later become Garden of Thoughts. I am not going to pretend it arrived fully formed. It did not. What arrived was a small, slightly-uncomfortable sentence — the kind that suggests there is a poem under it but does not yet say so. I wrote it on the back of the receipt with a pen I had stolen from a hotel six months earlier. I drove home composing the next two lines in my head, badly, the way one does, getting them slightly wrong on purpose so the wrongness would point me toward what I actually meant.
The poem turned out to be about the small sealed inner garden each of us tends without anyone watching. The thoughts we keep walking through. The ones we prune. The ones we let take over even when they're choking the rest. It is a quieter poem than its first line suggested it would be. Most of mine are.
Garden of Thoughts
In fields of dreams, thoughts like flowers grow, Each petal a memory, tenderly sown. For every time you cross my mind, behold, A bloom arises, in love's garden owned.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I tell people, when they ask, that the poem began in a parking lot, because I want them to lower the bar of plausible places. The expected places — the desk, the morning walk, the page already open and waiting — those rarely produce anything for me. The actual places where the language hits are: in the car, in the shower, in line at the post office, walking into a hardware store. I think it is because in those places I am not trying. I am occupied just enough by the world to stop standing in front of myself.
That is the more honest claim about where poems begin. Not in inspiration. In small windows of useful inattention.
I revised Garden of Thoughts for several months after that parking lot. Most of the lines from the receipt are gone. The first one survived. It is now the third line of the finished poem. That is, on average, about how it goes for me — what arrives first is usually correct in spirit but wrong in position, and the work is figuring out where in the poem it actually wants to live.
If a younger version of me reads this someday, I want him to know: the parking lot is not embarrassing. The parking lot is the studio. The studio is wherever you happen to be standing when the line shows up.