AUTISM: A POEM

This blog has been created as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. This working manuscript should not be considered as complete or published. Instead, this should be viewed as merely an early stage in the process of creation.

I have placed below some of the pages from an isolated venture in one of my typescript loose-leaf folders. The contents here represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poetry sequence with the tentative working title of
Autism.

The poem will grow as new sections are added. The individual posts are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and similar language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

Readers are asked to regard this piece as a work in progress, a partial or rough draft rather than a finished product (even if some selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various edits, emendations, or expansion may be made to the posts at any time in the future. Moreover, at some point the entire sequence will be removed to undergo a complete revision.

Therefore, I urge visitors to become followers of the blog by clicking the link in the sidebar, as well as to follow on Twitter for updates. Readers are also invited to browse my personal web site for additional information.

Indeed, a significant part of this experiment involves a certain amount of transparency that includes the possibility for readers to communicate responses and offer constructive suggestions, both of which I welcome through post comments or e-mail messages.


Also, I advise that the order of the numbered sections is not meant to be at all definitive since the long poem’s sequence will certainly be reorganized as the work in this temporary format starts to resemble a completed manuscript and begins to assume a more formal shape that might eventually be suitable for publication. In fact, I welcome interest from book publishers as well.

Thank you for taking the time to examine this trial stage, a test which I perceive as a preliminary process in the composition of a possible poetry manuscript. —Edward Byrne

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

AUTISM: A POEM


. . . . . XXXIV. Disappearances


. . . . . 1

Crisscrossed limbs of winter trees
. . . . . rise along this winding river bank

yet littered with wet leaves. Heaps
. . . . . of bright clouds drift downstream,

moving through a struggling noon
. . . . . sunshine as blue skies shift to white.


. . . . . 2

Alex appears to like that blanched
. . . . . wintry sunlight as it seeps between

these tree branches—the long lines
. . . . . of silhouette drawn on a steep incline

of lawn—smiles when he finally sees
. . . . . first flakes fill the folds of old weeds.


. . . . . 3

Every dim December evening seems
. . . . . to disappear into an empty night sky

as quickly as a slipknot, its string
. . . . . pulled tight, suddenly becomes undone,

or as silver coins might vanish, lost
. . . . . to sight by a magician’s sleight of hand.


. . . . . 4

For more than three weeks now,
. . . . . our son continues to refuse to speak

one word, his soft voice silenced
. . . . . by a will of stolen language. Though

Alex still listens to each question
. . . . . we ask, conversation has been absent.


. . . . . 5

We await the uncertainty of another
. . . . . cold front while the Weather Channel

warns of heavy snowfall. Tomorrow
. . . . . morning we will note the slow erasure

of everything, even those natural
. . . . . features marking grounds around us.


. . . . . 6

The storm will arrive by dawn,
. . . . . sometime just before Alex awakens

for his birthday only to notice
. . . . . once more the way this landscape

has transformed, those familiar
. . . . . details of his world again taken away.