Poetic Obsession

Poets and Writers sent out a prompt today: Look back through the poems you've written this year and make a list of images or words you've repeated. This list will guide you toward identifying your poetic obsessions. Choose one of your poetic obsessions and write a poem that fully explores it. So I did. Below are selected frequent words in my drafts and new poems (minus articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and the like).  The list is really quite lovely, a poem in and of itself, the story of a year:

21 lights, 20 rain, 18 moon, 18 mango, 17 wedding, 17 mouth, 17 floor, 16 station, 16 horses, 16 breath, 15 smoke, 15 sleep, 14 grandfather, 14 face, 14 city, 13 music, 13 hours, 12 room, 12 memory, 12 waiting, 12 hands, 12 half, 12 cousin, 11 wife, 11 press, 11 narthex, 11 factory, 11 evening, 11 dust, 10 voice, 10 vision, 10 wrong, 10 wind, 10 two, 10 roads, 10 rasp, 10 platform, 10 know, 10 keep, 10 gravity, 10 gone, 10 everything, 9 young, 9 tongue, 9 overripe, 9 months, 9 girl, 9 aquavit, 9 another, 8 thrusts, 8 staring, 8 skin, 8 sky, 8 roofs, 8 mornings, 8 forgetting, 8 fish, 8 earth, 8 drunk, 8 deliver, 8 caesarian, 7 bed, 7 womb, 7 thrall, 7 thoughts, 7 sea, 7 passengers, 7 nativity, 7 mountains, 7 metro, 7 Jerusalem, 7 days, 7 ditches, 7 dark, 7 cotton, 7 corrugated, 7 child, 7 cannot, 7 brothers, 6 underground, 6 stopped, 6 starseed, 6 staggered, 6 snorts, 6 scars, 6 highway, 6 Helen, 6 clutching, 6 ceiling, 6 bridges, 6 bottomland, 6 bedroom, 6 awake, 6 arms, 5 trains, 5 tickets, 5 terminus, 5 swathed, 5 suffered, 5 silence, 5 sidestepping, 5 shock, 5 sanctuary, 5 river, 5 return, 5 raw, 5 marriage, 5 i-pod, 5 drone, 5 dream, 5 death, 5 bottleneck, 5 blind, 5 blinding, 5 Bergen, 5 glasses, 5 beach, 5 Arkansas, 4 touched, 4 touching, 4 tethers, 4 stains, 4 spots, 4 legs, 4 leaves, 4 hardwood, 4 harbour, 4 Argir, 4 foothills, 4 floodplains, 4 crenulated, 4 cocktails, 4 cervix, 4 Berlin, 3 winters, 3 pregnant, 3 perhaps...