Evening is the hardest skin we carry. I got this last line for The Weather in the Womb from an exercise that I adapted from the US National Poetry Month 30/30 challenge – writing 30 drafts in 30 days. I didn’t sign up, but I dabbled.

The original exercise replaces every noun from a pre-existing poem with the seventh noun that follows on in the dictionary. I didn’t have a dictionary, so decided to replace nouns consecutively from another poem. I think it’s a good way to generate a new line if you’re stuck, although of course, you benefit (or not, as the case may be) from the syntax of the original.

The original poem is Jane Hirshfield’s Hope and Love from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions . I don’t have permission so I include just an excerpt.

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
if the solitary habit
is their way…

…I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry…

The ‘replacement’ text was verse 4 of Wild Idyll, by Mexican poet Manuel Jose Othon (1858-1906) translated by Samuel Beckett.

The salt and infinitely bitter plain,
Like a dead ocean’s dessicated bed,
And in the grey distance, by way of haven,
The precipitous crags, forsaken and stark.

On my rigid face the evening spreads,
like unguent, horrible obscurity,
and on your skin, burnt by the sun, the copper
and sepia of the wilderness’s rocks.

And in the hollow where eternal shadow,
beneath the cragy peaks’ enormous frown,
provides a bower and cavern for our love,

the lianas of your body twine
about the virile subugating trunk
in a vast palpitation of our lives.

The translated poem was this:

All salt
the blue plain
slept among the ocean.
I do not know the custom of beds,
do not know
if the solitary distance
is their way
or if he listened for
some missing crags
not knowing even
that was what he did
in the blowing
face in the dark.
I know that
evening is the hardest

skin we carry.
He slept with his long sun
folded, like a rock
put away.

The original ‘hope is the hardest love we carry’, with its confident use of abstract nouns, delivers more, but I liked ‘evening’ here a lot, particularly with ‘skin’: it fit with the summer that marries and the autumn with its head in the sink. The evening as death, and all that we carry with that certainity.