In the afternoon, coming home from work, I try hard not to think of my day, the pointless arguments with colleagues. I found that a couple of my favorite students had plagiarized. I got news that five classes I had written and taught and loved were going to be taken off the books, so they would never be taught again.

On a day like this, it’s easy for me to believe in the essential pointlessness of life and my career. I can feel myself sinking into a place that makes the rage monster happy. He’s pleased when I’m depressed. He can show up and convince me that it’s time to fight with people I love.

My commute is long, and the traffic is bad. I live outside of Los Angeles after all, and this is a Thursday afternoon, so I pull off the freeway, and go to a coffee shop to play with anapests and dactyls for a while.

Anapests and dactyls are types of metrical feet. Most everyone I know knows what an iamb is. It’s one foot of meter, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This creates rhythm in a poem.

Fewer people know what an anapest is, two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable, or what a dactyl is, one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Even fewer people know how anapests and dactyls can take the pain of life and reframe it, so that it’s in its proper context. This pain doesn’t have to be as powerful as we make it. Anapests and dactyls help me to understand that this is just a moment. This moment doesn’t negate other moments or the beauty of my life.

Anapest and dactyl help us to create waltzes. You might imagine the rhythm of the dactyl to be ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three. The rhythm of the anapest is one, two, THREE, one, two, THREE. It is difficult to focus narcissistically on the events of one day when you’re listening to a waltz. It’s even harder still when you’re feeling that waltz because you’re writing it.

The coffee shop is loud, but over the years I’ve learned how to drown out the noise of the outside world with the music in my head. I start the first sentence of my poem with an introductory prepositional phrase.

I do not try to control the poem. That is for free verse. I don’t want to control it because if I did, the rage monster inside of me would take control of my pen, and I would become further morose getting closer and closer to where he wants me to be. So I start with an introductory prepositional phrase. They are often anapests or dactyls because of the preposition’s physical location in relation to its noun.

I write, “In the evening...” This is an anapest followed by one unstressed syllable, which could start another anapest.

I continue: “In the evening the bears walking through our camp...” This is by no means perfect in terms of meter, but I am already calmed. I am brought back to what some people call their happy place. If such a thing as a happy place exists, this is mine.

I realize that what I am writing about is the camp in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks where I live in the summer. Many people think they will find black bears scary, but I do not. I have lived with them most of my life in a pleasant and peaceful coexistence. These are not grizzly bears. They are not predators. They are not interested in hurting people, just in getting food from grubs and plants.

It was the waltz that brought me here. By not controlling it, by allowing the rhythm to pull the words out of my subconscious, the world doesn’t seem so meaningless. Those classes will be taken off the books, yes, but I taught them for years, and they really did help a lot of people. My colleagues argued with me, and I still think they are incorrect, but the vehemence of our positions came from a passion for teaching and a desire to help others. My students have plagiarized, but they did so from a place of fear and incomprehension, and I have a chance to teach lessons now that go beyond what might be found in a textbook.

Half a sentence into my poem, and I have perspective, and I have found my purpose. It is not always this fast for me, but it nearly always works. I continue:

In the evening, the bears
walking through our camp
stop when they hear me,
and rise up on hind legs...

I am not even thinking of anapests or dactyls now. I do not care. I’m in that joyful place, and I will stay here for an hour while the traffic clears out.

When I get home, my wife asks me how my day went, and I say, “Fantastically.”

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted