DAVID REMNICK
575
sections. Each one of them was written at a different time. I
know it took somewhere between three weeks and a month. I
would work on a section at a time, but what holds the poem
together is that it is an elegy.
It
doesn't go logically from one
section to another, nor would I want it to. The skull part was
from a dream; the armed lawnchair was actually a chair of my
mother 's; she had bone cancer, therefore "bones like paint."
The first part arises from the fact that I was the first child born
in this particular hospital and Dr. Hurt was my doctor; the
fertility business comes from a
National Geographic
I was
reading. The last stanza is about nothing ever being really lost
because it stays in the memory and is part of the natural process.
Remnick:
But you can' t pin down what started it off?
Wright:
I did have in mind a poem about my mother, but
that was not what started it. Something other than the desire to
write the poem actually got it going. Perhaps even the word
"quarternight. " It's the sort of word that might get me to
hearing a rhythm. I remember! read Andy Adams'
TheStory of
a Cowboy,
and there was a cowhand in it named Fox Quarter–
night. I thought that was a marvelous name and I may have
been saying it to myself and the first line happened, as I was
born in the early morning hours in that hospital. (Hence,
"brash tongue on the tongueless ward." )That may have started
it all and it flowed from there. I don ' t reall y remember but it's
a good story and it could be true.
