Once I finished “Light” in March, my queue was finally empty. So I found myself looking in a folder I long ago named “Backburner” to see what was there. This is the folder where I put files for poems that I started working on, but eventually abandoned for one reason or other. Upon reviewing its contents, I decided the folder didn’t contain anything of interest to me. Inside that folder is another one named “Altogether Abandoned.” In there I found a few old ideas sitting in digital limbo. One was titled “hybridanelle—original marriage commemoration attempt.” I only vaguely recalled what that might have looked like, so I opened it.

The first 13 lines of this hybridanelle were already written. I tried to think of why I abandoned the poem, and then I remembered. It didn’t really feel like the marriage I was entering into. So I scrapped it and composed “Matrimony” instead, in large part inspired by hurricane Katrina. Much more fitting for my first marriage. The first 13 mystically abstract lines of this unfinished poem were actually more fitting for my current marriage. However, there’s just no way I could re-commemorate it to my second marriage. My wife deserves completely original poems, such as “Wild Cherry,” written a couple years—and not that many poems—ago.

So why bring this out of the mothballs? Well, I liked the language of these first 13 lines. I didn’t actually think I could make it work as a full hybridanelle poem, but I thought of this concept of life as a stream and streams converging into one another as they move through the fields of existence, and I decided I’d like to give it a try. So, no longer a marriage commemoration poem—just a poem inspired by the notion of convergent lives, hence the title.

This, my 22^nd hybridanelle, was a bear to compose. As I suspected, the refrains used in the first 13 lines were not easily remolded into fresh expressions. It also took me a good while to figure out what I was doing with the meter and end-line schemes. There’s one scheme that doesn’t use end-line prosody all, but related concepts, such as “color” and “texture,” “course” and “stream,” “pressures” and “forces,” and a few more. Pretty interesting.

The meters, it turns out, switch between pentameters, hexameters and heptameters. Being a bit out of practice, I actually found it difficult to wrap my brain around this complexity, and I kept forgetting to double-check and make sure I’m following the correct pattern. This gave me some insights into why poetry took a 135 degree turn toward gushy chopped prose a couple centuries ago. It can be bloody difficult, and a lot of times the end result is just not what you were hoping for.