13 Ways of Looking at Socks

Poet, interrupted

I tried last month to keep up with

Petra Hernandez

and her fellow Substack poets. She and

Adam Lombard

,

Tara Connor

, and the marathon champion

Margaret Ann Silver

(along with the many others I’m sure I’ve left out) rose brilliantly to the challenge of Petra’s February Poetry Adventure. I wanted to compete. Not that it was a race, but you know. I trained for this. Got that MFA. I’d be alone in my division: Poets, interrupted.

The invitation was generous and kind. Petra posted a word each day as a suggestion. 29 days, 29 prompts. Choose that word, or any other. Write a poem, if the spirit so moves. Share if you wish. Link it to her site,

Petra Glyphs

, if you’d like. How easy is that? I’m rarely on social media, have never used Twi/X, and have only recently discovered that tagging curlicue. I’m trying to venture out in the world.

The daily prompts were charming and evocative: Day 1: Pajamas. Day 2: Smoke. Then 3, Mountain; 4, Thermos; 5, Mouse; 6, Evergreen; 7, Pocket Knife.

I responded to a couple of these. But February was a whiplash month. Temperatures went from 65, to 5, to 68, within less than a week. My moods changed just as rapidly. I sat around in my robe for hours some days. I even did the unpardonable: I ran out of cat food.

On Day 8, as luck would have it, the prompt was Socks. Against all logic, I jumped on it. Then got stuck. Wrote some more. I was using what little creative skill I could muster to work on such a random thread.

The thought of pinning a poetic form, with its associated syllabic or line counts (Haiku 5,7,5 or Sonnet 3x4+2=14) to my jersey gave me cold (iambic, trochaic, dactylic) feet, and made me quake in my — well, socks. How could I share such an oddball thing?

And then I thought of Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Why not riff on that?

Here are a few meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry. I hope you find them less baffling and inaccessible even a tiny bit as pleasing as the poem that inspired them, by that smug elitist the insurance company executive towering figure of Modernism.¹

1.

Even matched, some socks are misfits.

Wrong color or size,

Or just despised.

2.

Do you know how many shades of black there are?

Said the mother of six boys, sorting socks.

3.

Socks as stocking stuffers: swaddled

In shiny paper, tucked in with a candy cane.

Is that all? I said. My father looked away.

Now I know it was everything.

4.

Out, darned sock!

Nothing mended, nothing stained. Not in my house.

Words my mother never spoke.

5.

Elastic gone, socks puddle around your ankles.

You knew this day would come.

6.

sockittomesockittomesockittomesockittomesockittoomesockittomesockittomesockittome

RESPECT

Sock it to ME?

7.

(just a little bit) (just a little bit)

The holes in both socks match, gnawed equally

By some small, hourglass-shaped longing.

8.

We enter and leave this world

Barefoot. Babies pull off socks, and delight in

Toes. Object permanence, eternal life.

9.

But in this life, I’ve folded my socks all wrong

Says the tidying woman. She makes more money

Than God, teaching people how to fold socks.

10.

Your home is the Tree of Life.

Your decor, and wardrobe, are its branches.

Including socks, says the great influencer. ²

11.

Clothes dryers connect, house-to-house

Through sock-engineered tunnels. You lose socks,

Have to buy new pairs. It’s their reproductive strategy.

A map of secret sock-tunnels, discovered in the wash.

12.

Change your socks, change your life.

Any questions? (Ted Talk material? No?

Then, never mind).

13.

The Thirteenth Commandment:

Socks always make a nice gift.

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1. I have nothing against Wallace Stevens. He’s just knit from a different skein of wool.

2. Frank Lloyd Wright, who has more followers than God.