Living Revision

I live in an oddly shaped studio over my parents’ garage. It has very sloped ceilings, strange nooks, a giant closet (or a tiny bedroom), and a weird looking cross beam that seems to hold up the roof. (It also comes with woodsy view, a nearby owl who gets very loud around 1AM, and some pretty cool landlords/neighbors.) A week ago, my sister collected about half the furniture for her new home in Boston. I did a happy dance in my newly emptied space (which had served as a family furniture storage unit until I moved in mid-pandemic) and then realized I was going to spend the month of June living in a partially revised poem.

I had lots of blank space, some things I knew I wanted to keep, some clothes and linens I probably wanted to donate, a couch that needed to be relocated to make better use of the space, and some ideas about how to decorate the newly revealed walls and rearrange the remaining furniture. It was like living in a draft from which I’d recently deleted a bunch of lines, a draft full of highlighted trouble-spots and/or hand-written questions to myself—only I could walk around and make breakfast and live with/in the space.

I started by vacuuming up all the dust bunnies and dead insects that emerged from under the old bookshelf. Then I found 37-inch bookshelves (to fit where the ceiling slopes down to 38 inches). Then I used the process of re-shelving my books to decide which to keep and which to resell. It was like cutting some unnecessary adjectives, writing a new line that created new possibility, and then trimming some more to fit the new possibility.

I’m still inhabiting my work-in-progress. I’ll move a lamp and live with in a its new location—seeing how it looks/feels/works there and how that fits or doesn’t fit with the rhythms of my life. And then I’ll move it again. Or I’ll decide it does work there, but now I need to move the arm chair closer...It feels very like the process of writing a new line into a poem and then leaving it overnight and reading it aloud the next morning to see how it holds.