For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding; it is the deepest part of autobiography.
-- Robert Penn Warren
Poems can be a unique way of telling a story. At other times, they have a unique way of only inferring something, implying something or creating an impression of something. Something that more straightforward narrative or prose doesn't quite capture -- a part of something deep within us, profoundly personal...even risky, in the attempt to discover or in the exposure that may result.
February 29:
An extra day—
Like the painting’s fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.
An extra day—
Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.
An extra day—
With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much—
just one day’s worth, exactly.
An extra day—
Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.
An extra day—
Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.
-- Jane Hirshfield
“Behind this poem, written February 29, 2012, was the death of a friend. I had, months before, brought her the present of a traditional bamboo-slat painted reproduction of a famous Chinese painting. She had commented, with her customary inhabitance of all things from the inside, how hard it is to paint a cow so well from the front. Her death was unexpected, and a letter from her I had not wanted to put away was still out on my kitchen table. My year’s extra day circled around it.”
