This winter’s holiday school break, my grandson, now 15 and a half years old and equipped with his driver’s permit, took a two-week intensive driver’s education class. I certainly felt the passage of time as I remembered using an image of my son Seth receiving his driver’s license as I wrote a poem for him 26 years ago on his 18th birthday. A freshman in college, he had been driving for two years by then, and this was his first birthday away from home.

After reading that poem a number of times lately, I would like to use it for a discussion of how a poem grows from an image kernel.

Here’s the poem:

While Buying a Birthday Card for My Son Who’s Just Gone to College

With each card I pick up, I think of your phone calls
darting unexpectedly into my afternoons like sparrows.
I imagine the dorm room you tell me about, the rented
refrigerator, food inside carried from the dining hall, the bed
you’ve rigged over your desk, stereo components
integrated with ones your roommate brought.

It’s easier for me to look backwards, see you in your cot
at 18 months in front of tangerine striped wallpaper, bib
overalls on the floor, pockets full of garden snails and twigs.

I pick up a birthday greeting book and flip the little pages
fast to see an animation of candles lit then blown so hard
the cake slides into someone’s lap.

More memories slide of you pleading with me to play cars,
to make engine noises, grind wheels over floors, watch plastic
smash into baseboards, of you running, cleated shoes over Saturday’s
muddy soccer fields, chubby in your orange and black uniform.
I see you carrying a windsurfing board towards water not telling
anyone you are afraid there might be sharks.

Next you refuse the rides I offer, insist on using your own two
wheels though it is dark and cold at midnight. When you get
a perfect score on your driver’s test, you stand before me,
your shoulders the bar of a trapeze.

I pass through my rooms with your gifts from over the years,
drawings in blue and red and yellow, copper crab in the center
of our dining table, candle holder shaped like a deer, glass otters
and hummingbirds, the book about mountain biking you left
behind since you won’t be here to coax me up curbs.

The emotional occasion for the poem was the upcoming birthday he would celebrate hundreds of miles from our home. How I missed him. The event that made me sit down and write the poem was looking at birthday cards to select one to send to him. When I found the flipbook card, I thought immediately of his boyhood and the days when making his own flipbook cartoon offered so much fun. That “sliding” motion of the flipbook images I held in my hand helped me move from the images I imagined of his life at college in the dorm to those in my memory from his boyhood at home. Those ranged at the moment from his toddler and early childhood days to elementary school soccer player days to determined, independent middle and high school bike rider days to the days when he received his driver’s license.

To end the poem filled with images that evoked the child I raised, I walk through the rooms of my house seeing the gifts he’d given me over the years. There is a parallel in visiting the rooms with the opening of the poem when I imagine his dorm room. And when I get to the book about mountain biking, I know that I need to get up and over the curb of my sadness and nostalgia, as he would coax me to. I also know that his growing up and going to college is among those gifts.

How a poem moves is by images and, in many poems, repetition. I repeat, “I pick up” to move the poem in the short real time of the occasion of selecting a card. I repeat, “I see you” to move in the lyric or all at once time of memory that evokes the son I am missing. And in writing about this repetition, I realize another parallel in the poem — birthdays, too, repeat.

I move from the imaginings of the dorm room he has described to the images I don’t have to imagine because I was there. Once I flip through the birthday card flipbook and am amused by the image of the birthday card sliding, I use the word slide to describe how the images of my son growing up move from one to the other in my mind. I feel again how he grew into a brave and conscientious young man, flying into his adulthood as if on a trapeze.

The poem has a specific location (a store card rack) and a specific occasion (looking for a birthday card). This grounds the poem in time and space. From there, the images of the emotional occasion can span many years without the poem needing a lot of words to make transitions: “easier to look backwards,” “more memories slide” and “I pass through” do the work of moving time along in the poem. That is until the last stanza that starts, “I pass through my rooms.” Here the reader has to make the leap from card rack in a store to the poet’s house. It seems possible for a reader to fill in that the poet has chosen a card and returned home. Perhaps it was the flipbook card that sparked the poem’s event or maybe it was a different card. That is no longer important as the emotional event extends the poem into the territory of what will come next for the mother who misses her son. That is what must come next—she must learn to ride her emotions as her son learned to ride his mountain bike—skill is necessary; admiration of the child she loves is a tool toward allowing memories to sustain her even as she learns to let go.

It is easier to show how a poem moves once it is written than it is to explain how it gets written, but by appreciating the movement and leap of association and inherent metaphor in the “sliding” of the cake and the “sliding” of years and memories, I hope that you will write by trusting your own leaps of association, lists you can include, and metaphors that make emotional sense to you. The ability to trust those elements of the craft of writing poetry works in writing prose as well.

When you read poems you enjoy and admire, study the work:

What has urged the poet to speech—in real time and in the poet’s emotional seeking?

How do the stanzas or paragraphs move one to another in a seamless manner without too many words to make the transitions? In other words, how to repetitions of words and sounds help and how do the images themselves move time forward and tie time together into an almost all-at-once kind of time?

What metaphor is inherent in the expression of why the moment is significant?

I believe that in taking the time to do this kind of observation of the writing, you will increasingly appreciate the poems you read as well as the ones you write. You will begin to draft your poems and to edit them with more dexterity. You’ll find that you trust the sound and the images and don’t lean on unnecessary explanation. And you will have more fun and be moved more often as you write.