The 1974 Xenia Tornado
I was trying to make it a rule that I wouldn’t cross-post anything from the Poetic Asides challenge, but they don’t have any formatting over there, so I’m going to break my rule once, because this poem has to be centered. I forget if I mentioned, but my “gimmick” for the challenge has been to do each poem based off a figure from Greek mythology. The prompt today was to write a poem “filled with noise”, so this seemed like one way to go…
The 1974 Xenia Tornado
(Aeolus)
and piped out in disconcerting shapes
it descends with the ferocity
and symptoms of the
whirlwind:
disjunction of mammoth boxcars with a scream rusted shut
a hundred thousand birds chattering kamikaze prayers
cloud serpent hiss as it sidewinds the city streets
meteor shower of bricks against the sidewalk
shattering glass powdered breathed away
hot spitfire lightning kissing the roofs
a bullroarer a kilometer in length
howl from an infinite throat
wails of the survivors
as they uncover
the dead
step forward: let the city of
hospitality, regretfully,
revoke his sorry
invitation
Imago
Generally, when I say “imago”, it means that in the very near future, I will be leaving the vicinity. But! In this case, it’s actually referring to the last stage of development of an insect, which I didn’t know was the term until doing a bit of research for this poem. And for Latinate fun: the plural is imagines, which isn’t pronounced like the English verb, but is spelled the same. There’s cool connections to be found. In any case, this is for One Single Impression.
Imago
The artist had dressed in a gown for the opening,
violet silk patterned with white kanji at the seams,
uncomfortably formal. She worked on wood panels,
her subjects ichneumon flies and spiderwebs,
parasites and all kinds of cannibalistic arthropod.
Corrupted inbred cousins of the animal kingdom.
After we toasted her success with alizé cocktails
in cheap plastic goblets, she was taking questions:
one index card said, where do you get your ideas?
She said
art is
when you can feel the centipedes crawling up the walls of your veins
when inspiration is skittering through you
when your hands are thieves in the dark
when a flame draws your diffident mothwinged heart and roasts you alive
when flesh is devoured breeding maggots
when there are thrumming wasp nests in the brain that won’t be silent
when blood is sapped by a thousand whining permutations of shape
when all the colors refract in compound eyes
when the morning dew on the cobwebs in your skull catches the sun
There was silence, and then polite applause.
After all, no one could deny that brilliance goes through
many forms.
St. Patrick’s Day
So I put together five poems for submission over the past two days, plus the two I wrote yesterday (one for Poetic Asides, one for here), plus this one I’m about to put up, and still one more for Poetic Asides after that. Then two more tomorrow, if I get to the OSI prompt. This has been quite the poetic weekend. Anyway, here is my effort for Read Write Poem’s food prompt; it occurred to me how many food memories I have, of all kinds. I thought about discussing the time I ate, with mortified politeness, pâté de foie gras, but that will have to be for another day.
St. Patrick’s Day
My grandmother had lived through the Depression,
meals always variables in an adolescent equation.
Her pantry became a cave of wonders,
one-woman caravan of spices and delicacies
that dazzles me even now, after she’s gone;
we still find cardboard boxes of treasure in the cabinet.
She took the seventeenth seriously:
corned beef sliced expertly thin, the pattern of
pink marble, aromatherapy of simmering cabbage,
potatoes peeled and boiled. We’d sit and bump
elbows at the table, and my grandfather
would raise his reverent glass.
I haven’t had corned beef for a while now: it tastes
too much like the past, smells like a hollow kitchen.
But I still spray my hair green once a year–
they always did love that–
and when I roll an Irish potato in a skirt of cinnamon,
bite into that butter and coconut and close my eyes,
I think, sláinte, sláinte, may you both know fortune,
wherever you may be.
“Abracadabra”
“Bedside Manner”
“Intercessions”
“Storm Song”
“Symbiosis”
Formatting note: “Abracabra” italicizes the last instance of the word “abracadabra” near the end, and there is some indentation in the middle of “Bedside Manner”, but otherwise the formatting should all be standard. As to the poems themselves, they’re all somewhat different takes on the “words of power” concept… let me know if I need to defend any of them. :)
BIO:
Joseph Harker is the pseudonym of a foolish twentysomething, lately located on the East Coast of the US. He dreams more than he ought to, scribbles less than he wants to, and is a textbook Libra in just about every way. If you’d like to bother him, it’s best to visit his online demesne at http://namingconstellations.wordpress.com (but do mind your step).
Please let me know if there is anything else I’m missing/ought to do, because, holy cats, this is my first time submitting poetry to a journal. (I didn’t just tell you that.) Thanks!
Leaps of Faith
First, thanks for the well-wishes from everyone… they must have done some good, because it’s not quite Saturday yet and I’m already feeling somewhat better. Yay! Chicken soup also helped… it’s one of those colds where you feel gross for the first couple hours after you get up, and the last hour before bed, but during the day you feel fine. Very odd.
Anyway, here is my little offering for today; I want to re-iterate that I although I prefer to keep my spiritual beliefs pretty much on the DL, I never intend any offense by the use of religious words/imagery in poems. Sometimes this mix of intriguing elements just occurs to me, and I run with it to the finish. That being said: I have always wanted to do what is described in this poem. ^_^ That, and it’s an experiment in hidden verse (because “secret blank verse” is too long a term)… I also feel like hopscotch is a very deep, existential game. If you stop and think about it, that is.
Leaps of Faith
We cleared the leaves from brickwork,
painted out the Sephirot in all the colors of the rainbow
(colors of the trees in autumn, crimson
bloodstain, pale Egyptian gold, that self-destructive blue
the backdrop for deciduous suicides)
wrote out the Hebrew letters with a careful, practiced hand:
the crown flows down through wisdom,
beauty, understanding, roots of All Things, all
entwining, crossed-connected
Tree of Life
in two dimensions, and we toss a quartz-stone,
watch it land and interrupt the flow
(Gevurah, mighty presence of the Lord)
and though they might say we’re
irreverent, we know the kabbalah of footsteps, the
counting of the cracks in sidewalks, tracing their explorable
pathways leading to a deeper comprehension:
we play hopscotch,
realm by realm, creating and self-revelating,
six and seven, maybe we’ll get into heaven
(but if not
remember that we meant
no disrespect,
oh Lord)
Sevenlings: Deaths in the Family, In Amsterdam
The sevenling is a form that was introduced on Poetic Asides a little while ago that I never followed up on… it’s a poem of seven lines, two stanzas of three with another at the end. No titles except “Sevenling (first few words)”. The first and second stanzas are supposed to have some element of three, contrast with each other, and create a mood that is either unsettling or offbeat (which is way general, I think), and the last line is a punchline, moral, summary, etc. There’s also a caveat that the “poem should have ambience which invites guesswork from the reader,” whatever that means. I attempted two of them:
Sevenling (Deaths in the family)
Deaths in the family from perfectly understandable
diseases, from a car accident here or there,
a bare handful from poison in the brain –
what if I’m the only one who loses out to hate
crime, to AIDS, to erotic miscommunication?
I can imagine a funeral of second cousins sitting
three pews back, in case they might catch something.
…
Sevenling (In Amsterdam)
In Amsterdam, I met a marathon runner. He bought me
two drinks, and we ascended to the underworld, black
curtained room where he undid the buttons of my jeans.
In Amsterdam, I saw a festival. A Sun King courtesan sat
perfectly still in the street, winked for change, and gasped
with demure joy when I bought her one yellow rose.
I have no photos. Amsterdam lives longest in the memory.
In Wonderland
The One Single Impression prompt today is “reincarnation”, a theme I already write about from time to time. This time around, I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland, for some reason, and how that kind of self-re-creation is akin to death, rebirth, etc… when you connect that with the notion of dreams, and the Tibetan Buddhist notion of bardo, there’s a lot to be said about the dreamlike end of a life. (Kind of like in the movie What Dreams May Come, maybe?) I don’t know, it all kind of blurs together, and spits itself out into the poem that I’ve typed in below. If you can make sense of it, you’ll have done a better job than I.
In Wonderland
next was the undressing, the stripping away of fabric
layer after layer falling to the ground, then
skin, great sheets of it exposing the negative space
underneath:
nature abhors a vaccuum
so what shall nature fill it with?
a person does not translate well from one language into another:
words fail to point at a meaning, and instead shine off
in all directions
here in the milam bardo a person could say the sky
or spell out the snowy beards of himalaya,
a person could dig through all that
dense empty space stored up from lifetime to lifetime
dig out
a clouded leopard whose spots tell the story of their past
a red ringtailed panda, soft-faced and white-hearted,
a relic species full of hesitant moth’s blood
for here in the milam bardo there are many possibilities,
and every card in the deck is eager for attention
observing the transformation of things:
how easily one can slip between the misfirings of a dying mind
and the compiling of dreams!
a person shrinks, and grows, and shrinks again,
but always a lifetime is like a single lazy day by the river,
framed by what smart talk fails to describe,
those reinventions in the rabbit hole,
chessboard maneuvers
where the prize for the winner is to put the body on again
and wake
St. Vincent’s School for Conformist Youth
The Read Write Poem prompt today is one of the Wordle things, with P-words this time: parallelogram, pea, platitude, processional, plethora, plaster, pernicious, prevaricate, prickle, polyglot, procrastinate, porous, and posthumous. Whew. But a few of them stood out immediately, and this is what came out of it… it is a not-so-thickly veiled reference to high school years, let us say. Doing the visual bit was really fun with this, though!
St. Vincent’s School for Conformist Youth
Eight-fifteen processional to homeroom, dressed identical,
knights and postured ladies posed against plaster walls.
Lectures on the theorems for a parallelogram, laboratory
tests on porous minerals, a plethora of vocabulary for the
budding polyglot, all in perfect order, little plastic people,
upper-class titans of the future, posthumous slaves of
the system, buried alive in capital before their twenties.
But every prison has a few escapees, who procrastinate
and prevaricate in their lessons: polymorphic butterflies,
plotting jailbreak, showing a bit of color in a pea soup fog
of platitudes and promises, pondering how pleasant to
throw paint and words and songs like foxtails in the air.
It is a pernicious plan: but oh, how they prickle to be free,
to dream, and to become
so much more
than
this: strange and curious
square
in round holes
they
crave want
out
burst from
cocoons like cannonfire
cast
their dreams with chisels
create
and co-habitate
and
call the subconscious
into fabulous
being
Heat
I’m not particularly happy with this one, but the Sapphics I’ve done so far (Air, Waves, Roots) felt like a chair missing a leg, so I figured it was time to finish it off with this one about fire. Mostly, I’m just proud of myself for getting to use “hyperthermia”, with proper meter, in a poem! Probably this weekend, I’ll take a break (aside from continuing poem-a-day, of course) and just surf through the Interwebs looking for new and interesting poets/journals that I haven’t yet discovered… recommendations always welcome!
Heat
No illusions: I’m like candle flames, rough
nomad of the bedroom, I follow night-time
trade routes, always flickering through the spilled spark
romances, heart’s blood
warms me for a moment before I run on,
desert peddler searching out human life force,
smolders like an incubus dry as late June,
starved for a hand’s touch
craving infrared radiation; flow this
energy from you to myself, move, pierce,
raw convection chains that combine us, sun stroked
lovers on bedspreads
whose relationship is a solar flare, here,
gone, mirage and incense smoke; don’t pursue me,
draw no hyperthermia from my wake, my
transient white light.
L’Esprit De L’Escalier
You know, it occurred to me that I hadn’t posted a poem from April in a while; there are still several hiding in the crevasses of my computer that have not graced the blog. (Primarily because the ebook for Poetic Asides still hasn’t been completed, seven months after the fact… sigh.) So here’s another middling one, a sonnet this time; I think the prompt for it was something like “a regret”. For the unaware: “l’esprit de l’escalier” is French for “spirit of the staircase”, used to mean that thought or perfect retort that pops into mind when you’re already out the door and halfway down the stairs. Don’t you just hate that?
And I actually have some free time before class, so I’m going to catch up on comments and blogs… I’m so behind. :(
L’Esprit De L’Escalier
I didn’t kiss you when I had the chance.
Descending from your building’s second floor
(where we misplaced our underused romance),
I thought perhaps, had I done something more,
had charmed with truths that spoke to our rapport,
then maybe I’d still be with you, up there.
Instead, I’m plodding down an endless stair.
That perfect phrase you might’ve kept me for
(an accident: it was mislaid somewhere),
was one I didn’t think to memorize;
I searched in vain for words to make you care
and step-by-step, descended, full of lies.
Although for you, all words are far too cheap,
I’ll miss your voice, and other parts I’d keep.
