A Small Poem About Tom Petty

A SMALL POEM ABOUT TOM PETTY

1.

Every simple story spills me out. There is a town collapsing and a dreamer growing up; and there is love, hopeful and without shame. And God, is it killing me.

I am pretending to be someone else. I am not too old to forget being young, crying at one thing at once. Leave me alone with the night and the radio; I am going to let it wear me out. The relief, the kind of tired that happens after living all this life. I did not want it to be impossible. And lately, if my name could mean good, I would like that. My heart is complicated, and it is breaking, and it is usually me and it is usually time, and I cannot help but notice all my ghosts over the American sky. You said the stories still fit. You said if it is worth feeling, it is worth telling someone about. You said it is never enough, never enough and it is perfect.

2.

Was there a message passed through the dark receiver? I heard your song that night. Sometimes we are in a car, driving. Tell me a story, pass the time, I need to listen to your secret conversations of drawling sound and patient silence. So it was all true: that the bellowing river of loneliness silted heavy with grief carved a sanctuary of a canyon. I saw it when I was young. I thought: dream. In this dream we are driving over a mountain pass. The windows are open. Each flake of snow is an anger or a hurt. Falling softly, cold touch, melting away. Thank you, mountain, for overcoming. Thank you, forest within a forest, for keeping us safe. Thank you, honesty, you meant it. And thank you, dark car and the reluctant space where joy would be, I am full of a dogged and scrappy hope; I am ready to be taken home. I wave you goodbye and the dark car moves on. If this road exists then there is a place I cannot see but I believe in asleep just around the bend. A point on the horizon where the sun rises to blind you with all that is possible and more than that. Starlit profile, weathered, triumphant. It arrives as a long and welcome rest.

3.

You are my small town, you are my green park. You are my blue secret. I am so sad today, I think you would understand. I would like to hear one more story and close my eyes. But I will not be leaving any time soon. The sky makes a tomorrow promise and I say okay, one more time. Tomorrow I will tell you I miss you again.

Say I am a listener, I hear you all the time, and I plan on speaking, I am just waiting for the rain to pass or for the courage to speak up despite it. Like daydreams where time filters through sunlight, I pass through landscapes. The points I touch are ribboned with pain, as is any desire, and I do find myself wanting. I have grown, mangled and earnest. The speaking and the listening of my life and the endless living with it. In sincerity and in Heaven we can find ourselves singing and singing.

Kind eyes, I love you, crooked smile, I love you most.

4.

When I was young I was enveloped in a kind of young light. It loved me so much it devoured me heart-first and mind second. For all that it has done and all that it will do I can now call the light nothing but tender. Imaginative I grew and built the light a box built for quiet. Can you see my secret, my shame, hidden and glowing between the slats? A blue night piercing itself with stars. Trace the connections, invent an animal, a story, a song. Something I have never understood: it is easy to sit at the table with your head down, but it is not good. It is simple to write poem after poem about being tired while you do not sleep. Poems that halo secrets without touching, hungry bellies full of fear. Love means forgiveness, constant. My love for the body that wades me across an eternal river. For the electricity of thought, may it be safe, may it be warm. This may be the strangest time I have lived. Until tomorrow comes in this grove of neverending where the days are illuminated, the days fall from bone in the light.

5.

The way my dog circles in her bed before she falls, before she sleeps: a poem like that. An open form waiting for the right feeling to rush in, to say what I could not say out loud, not then. In the bluest of nights the houses that leave lights on are guardian angels. I am walking by and putting myself inside. When I heard your voice in the room where for me the world closed its eyes I felt no songs. No poems. I felt no body, nothing. After the dangers ceased I could not help but feel responsible and deserving of something terrible. I was worried that no one loved me and that no one should. Everything is a message; I am going to try to sleep it off. Your message hurt, and then became love, was love all along. When I sleep I can dream and when I can dream I dream sometimes that you are alive. That you can speak to me. We pray to strange gods. Who cares, they listen. I can listen to your music again; I am growing braver. I have to forgive myself. It has been the most spectacular grief.

6.

You said if it is worth feeling, it is worth telling someone about. You said it is never enough, never enough and it is perfect. Starlit profile, weathered, triumphant.

It arrives as a long and welcome rest. In sincerity and in Heaven we can find ourselves singing and singing. Kind eyes, I love you, crooked smile, I love you most.

This may be the strangest time I have lived. Until tomorrow comes in this grove of neverending where the days are illuminated, the days fall from bone in the light. I have to forgive myself. It has been the most spectacular grief.

AUTHOR’S NOTE On the evening of October 2nd, 2017, I walked over to Kelsey’s house while listening to the Greatest Hits of Tom Petty. I remember. I had not listened to Tom Petty in nearly two years, but that night, that night with a broad autumn sky, I felt bigger than what I had felt the last time I heard his music played. I was sick of the fear of fear. I was ready to try something that terrified me. So under the vast shifting sky I put the album on. I felt the current of panic. I felt joy running parallel. I stayed in my body, exhilarated, feeling the same way I had felt when I listened to him as a kid: that the impossible is possible, the real never easy, but so gloriously real it will be enough, be what you never thought to ask for because you never thought you would get. I tell you, I felt free.

When I arrived at her house, I found out Tom Petty had been hospitalized.

He was not going to wake up.

My childhood memories are primarily sound and light. I remember listening to Tom Petty in Tori's dad’s truck while the pale Seattle sun filtered down on us through the cracked windshield, dust motes suspended in golden air. I remember buying the Greatest Hits CD at the Wenatchee Antique Mall. My parents did not get it, but the cashier thought it was cool. I remember my brother and the neighborhood kids making a skateboarding video with Tom Petty as the soundtrack to their tricks. I remember listening at night to his songs on the radio with the volume down low, drifting alone in the dark but for the company of music.

In a different kind of memory where Tom Petty played: I remember fear and pain and confusion, immediate and overwhelming. Someday I will be able to tell that story, its sound, its light. How I grieved myself before I was given a new grief towards a stranger, someone I only knew through the impact of his music but held dearly when I could not trust myself to hold my own self that way. On the other side of those griefs, I would imagine myself alive at a Tom Petty concert. That song would come on and the pain would be sparked, then overridden. I would be released.

Like any hurt person, I wanted what was impossible: to understand everything. I read interviews, I watched live performances, I listened to his entire discography. I walked with the music under every kind of sky, and I used it all to form new memories to his songs. When I could not focus on anything, I could focus on that. The work of the possible, its presentness.

Grief has its own kind of music and I let it play, I listened to all its voices. I am always here, listening. I quickly wrote the first section of this poem in some kind of shock. Then every few months I would find myself again writing to Tom, short letters, a conversation ongoing. Always something about the cyclical nature of what it meant to me to heal, about what I kept coming back to and what I was letting go as time passed. Then more direct, with feeling: Tom, I feel sad. Tom, I miss who I used to be. Tom, look at me surviving now.

An elegy is a poem dedicated to the dead transcribed by the living. I cannot write a real elegy for Tom Petty. I can only say in plain truth who he was to me in my small life, what his music represented in these electric moments, all of them. And in that way, as the poem exists, he is still living. All my selves: still living. I remember.

With love, Megan E. May 2020