Under the act of bodies,
we learned love by osmosis,
raising the antennae of the
eternal, a tide of sighs
by the moon, silted river
to a mouth.
We are full of rough waves
at the end, rolled in grief,
primal with useless desire,
so these lines want to become
as much as hands will memorise
a body, laying with the other.
I kept looking at the sky, at an angle,
for splendour and beauty. Listening
to a wildness of wind, then rain.
A storm shook my morning sleep.
This is second rain saying, not enough.
In the garden, a woman in a bathrobe
watered the azaleas and dogwood.
Her woolly hair was tied back.
She is Judi Dench, a lingering presence
as Miss Fairfax. I’ve bookmarked her.
I’m making up a story, stitching with
long knitting needles. So you, dear reader,
could nuzzle into a gray knitted top,
for all this falling rain.
The mind is a flickering thing.
It imagines. It thinks about what’s inside
the fridge–long beans, cabbage, & persimmons.
It wanders like a cat on the parapet.
Skimming around the real essences.
It looks at you. It leaps, a gymnast,
a coiled spring. Before you know it,
you’re drenched, inside pelting rain.
He asked for buttermilk. I wrote it down.
Baking soda. Strawberries. Banana.
These are nouns, things for extrapolating
meanings. But of themselves,
they are only pigments absorbing
light, like still paintings.
The light mixes them up in
symbolist hues, even if displaced.
Tell me, what doesn’t change?
Fish swim, holding canvasses.
Bodies feel anaesthesized.
Serenity comes in spoonfuls.
Change is ceaseless, even if
God’s answer is dull silence.
Sometimes, it kind of tiptoes,
like a cat. Did you notice that,
you unthinking cretin?
The poet ruminates, listens to
the music of internal rhymes.
Light changes a rag of tune,
remains inscrutable.
Process notes: This is about light, and music. Either…or neither.
While you’re nursing a summer cold,
a woozy patience
while being my talisman,
I walked all over town in Birkenstocks
gloating,
returned home, useful and sprightly.
What I really meant to say was
something else–last night’s surprise,
talking about math,
while looking at curly seashells pasta
in a casserole. So many cooking shows
in which the chef talked about parmesan fragrance
our TV noses could not absorb,
tickling our scientific brains.
Isn’t it excruciating,
this infinite sadness, behind it all?
It’s the barometer of the happiness trickling
in, when least expected,
or if not, then the sodium
will kill us, slowly, with high blood pressure
and all unhealthy eating habits
like too much booze.
I’m still thinking of red poppies,
and well, earplugs.
We might be needing those.
Process notes: Napowrimo #11. The Poetic Asides prompt is to write a poem titled “Something (blank).” This poem is the opposite of the terse haiku. It’s my kind of meditation. Rambling through the woods. It’s also a ramble for Charles’ excellent prompt posting over at D’Verse. It is also a reference to the excellent quote posted at We Write Poems.
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling… A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually – that is, when your reach it, you will reach it intellectually too – but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
~Muriel Rukeyser
I’ll be going to Berlin. So foreign,
so terrible, so beautiful.
Some amber liquid you’d serve
while a flute is being played,
smell of bark cinnamon, while
a hundred archers pulled back
the strings of celestial bows,
and I’d puke, neck arched like
a giraffe over the toilet sink.
You’d hand me a folded napkin
to dab wild beads of sweat.
In the manila envelope, you’ll find
a green spotted bird, a messenger
tied to a photo ring, with frills
dangling like leaves. You’ll open
eagerly the thin lavendar paper
hiding what you’re looking for.
Is it time to say a long goodbye
to Berlin? Memory is a surrogate
for identity, thin and opaque,
as in the phrase, the cataracts
of memory. You know we make do
with these chalky lapses, follow
diurnal rhythms like a drum.
Ah yes, it’s spring. Which means,
you know what it means, it always
means the same thing.
Process notes: I read the beautiful spring poem by Joseph Harker, inspired by the beautiful poem Donna Vorreyer brought out, called “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” by Jack Gilbert. You can read it here. But Berlin? Yes, I was thinking of Claudia of D’Verse Poets Pub. My brain is all mixed up with …what’s that word… spring.
It was 1999. I had forgotten
it was full of dummies,
and needles, tatty dreams
seamed, a thread trailing.
There was hardly anything
to festoon, with a pin,
evading shabby racks,
the dominion of rubble.
Soon there would be much
less of grotesqueness,
as you slid a peacoat onto
the small, empty coat hanger.
You decided on being always
decorous, quickly stuffing
the taciturn beast into
a black bulging bag.
Process notes: D’Verse had a somewhat odd prompt, and what caught Shawna’s eye was a small, empty coat hanger on the dust jacket of a poetry anthology, The Best American Poetry, edited by David Lehman and Robert Bly. She asked, “In 1999, who would nail-dangle a hanger on a wall? I don’t know about you, but I had a walk-in closet.” So yea, the poem inspired is equally weird.
Suddenly my feet find marbled
ground, those gauzy bubbles
floating away an amorphous
half life. It is here,
at the red daisy wheel,
where the light filters through
a ceiling of silver prisms
like perspectives.
With my hair turbanned
in a long scarf,
hands drawn in henna,
so you’d laugh at
my fancy-schmancy style,
turning a robotic arm so
I’ll always be looking at
fibreglass petals, blooming
large as a daisy.
Daisy robotic sculpture here.
Process notes: How do you sculpt a poem, asks Victoria of D’Verse Poets Pub? Adding layers, so a poem can be read on more than one level? On the contrary, can’t a poem be taken at its face value, no more or no less than what it is? Surely it can be both, depending on the reader, like the ambiguity of a Mona Lisa smile.
What shaped me, in the first world
when everything was spruce,
pristine like a morning star.
But I wasn’t the apple of
an indulgent cat’s eye,
and she’d strap me to a chair
with a small reproachful look,
blindfolded the sun as if
the world was a compound of dirt-coated sores,
how she secretly foul-mouthed, a sweet-talking
martyr, snuffing shame into honor,
how she inhaled & spat laughter,
balancing the bell jar.
That world was restless, shifting sadness
into ghosts, seeping like a coma,
running in steep shadows cast
on blanketed ground,
& pasted eyelids bizarrely
shut, caught in the drift
of the whistling trees.
I could hardly explain the souls
nestled in the woody labyrinth,
scorched by a latex knife
smudgy with thick glaze,
& purged of any knowing.
Image via Reena
Process notes: Here’s a poem I wrote channelling into a dark brain. Defy me if your brain is full of lavendar. The trees are there alright, but hardly an ode to a tree, as Neil Reid of We Write Poems would have us write this week. It’s probably the wintry trees that suggested such a mental landscape, provided by Brian Miller of D’Verse Poets Pub. The words came via Brenda Warren of The Sunday Whirl. And yea I just finished reading The Bell Jar. That probably explains it. Don’t you, like me, feel the need for illumination?
It’s not so usual, perhaps,
thinking of privilege,
when there’s no falling off,
no air beneath feet.
This past week, walking on
a tight rope, without a net,
when the eagle had left
our branch of sky,
the earth was flat
as a pancake, a dry winter,
you say, it was humbling
to know things could change,
in a minute, into torpor.
We never felt more
vacillating, like a language
we had spoken differently.
Maybe I had come to
the end of another book–a thud
as loud as rain,
a soft click clasping
the leaves shut.
Last night, as the laundry
dripped wet, a drizzle,
wrung by a faulty machine,
I was comforted by the moon
coming full circle,
outside the window.
I resolved not to waver
in speaking with truth, not to choose
silence, as a way out, or fall
into easy thinking, such as
does old mean something other
than a sanatorium,
playing with beads,
waiting for nothing much?
We wait for tonight’s moon,
the same moon,
traipsing across the sky,
a surety like
the eagle’s return.
The black cloud floating away
as we pried open
our oval capsules.
We’ve been fluttering in
small circles, is it time we leap,
gossamers of air?
As we listened to the blue
bird on the windowsill, we began
to shun the dull & boring.
What you’re singing
makes me feel as if I need to be
something beautiful.
It makes me lithe,
my gummy feathers fluffing up,
like some titular thing.
And we’re off, tasting the air’s
voodoo chill. The owl says,
we’re full of capriciousness.
The lissome air becomes a draft,
a soaring aspiration,
the love of song.
