Heart’s Thaw

Oh, what the hell, why not a random poem. We Write Poems wanted a Zen poem about body-soul connection, and while I can’t claim this is either Zen or a body-soul connection kind of poem, I guess it veers, like a wheeling bird, slightly close to both. I just wanted to have some fun with rhyme and structure, and come up with an image or two worth repeating. It was just something to do for a Monday evening, I suppose.

Heart’s Thaw

After such a long time heartsick,
to see the birds’ northward line
and the archery of homecoming–
from the bone to the flesh grown thick
moans a green sound, the rhyme
of the body with the sky hums
vowel on drowned vowel– the signs
meaning spring and rain running
will fill each part and cavity– the sun
paints bird backs as a flame the wick,
gravity claims their upward climb–
and the flock tacks right, lowly divine
with the sleepless heart caught undone
in its wake– knotted by the quick
turn, by the art of so many dimensions
and leaves who burn with becoming.

The Subjunctive

You know, I bet I could write a better poem called “The Subjunctive”, but at the moment, this is an exercise for NaPoWriMo (and the last!), to take a short poem we like and turn every word/phrase in it on its head. A recent find is Ada Limón’s “The Conditional”, which you can read here. I liked it as soon as I saw it, at least partially because of the grammatical reference, so I went back to it for the exercise. I think my poem is more similar than I thought it would be, even though I did my best to really alter a lot of elements. Ah well. Language, she is the universal beast.

The Subjunctive

Let yesterday tumble in.
Let the sun unfold its tropical bloom.
Let rhubarb bend with reddened youth.
Let the moon glint as a pure blue monocle.
Let the cat’s nose flare valleys.
Let snakes coldly leave no trace.
Let his cap be a velvet planting-pot.
Let me always keep on watching: the squinted
past, trickling like water on rock, always
orbiting, always changing its light.
Let me meet him again and again. Always him.
Let me waste that first forever glancing away
from each other, back to shy back, catching
a butterfly and letting it crawl the cool sea.
Let it be worth something. Let it never be
enough. Let him say he’s done: not I, buried
elsewhere, ignorant with joy.

Symphony through a Basement Window

I have to say, I will be relieved when this month comes to an end. I just feel bled dry, creatively, right now. I’ll make it through tomorrow — I’ll get the prompt up (at some point), I’ll write a poem (maybe two), I might even hit my goal of sixty for the month — but then I am taking off for a solid five days. It doesn’t help that I feel bled dry in several other aspects of my life right now, so I think there’s got to be some slow re-accumulation. I say this every year, and never stay away for long; probably this one won’t be any different. But I think I need to start taking a more measured look at what I’m producing, how to improve it, how to find things worth saying and say them uniquely.

This one is kind of for NaPoWriMo. The five foreign words required by the prompt are in there, I promise.

Symphony through a Basement Window

There’s a woman who plays the berimbau upstairs,
scratching along with an old LP from her batizado.
The chorus bubbles out, and her voice lifts with it, starling
greeting starling. I do not think this is the same woman

who, during dinner, hurled a stack of china plates
into the airshaft as she screamed, maricón, cabrón,
the one whose husband slammed the door behind him
and let his dinner petrify on the table. And she
is not the only musician careening round the courtyard:

theremin bows awkwardly over the collapsing fence,
flickers through the screen, laced with bass guitar
like tectonic plates discussing their shift. This band
always holds parties full of hiccuping laughter
that I’m never invited to. And when the sun droops

red into the chimney, some animal, must be a dog,
wails its awful diminuendo and I want to drop everything,
climb the fire escape, come to the rescue–
but I could spend hours trying to figure out

which window to break, the building an echo chamber
drinking sound like the sea drinks a river. Sometimes
I press against the screen humming into it
so it can imbibe me, too. When the alley grows dark
and the boiler quiet, I press my head to the pillow. There,
far-off is the tempered beat of the subway buried alive,
there I am, riding it into the night.

Inheritance (II)

I wrote a poem called “Inheritance” a while back, so the “II” is just to distinguish the titles; and they are pretty different in feel. Again, I don’t want to talk deeply into this one, but there’s some roots and some story behind it, I suppose. The Poets and Writers prompt was to take a cliché and explore it: cleaning clocks was the main one for this, though skeletons in the closet informed it slightly as well. That’s about all I’ve got right now; have to go shake off this over-caffeination I’ve subjected myself too.

Inheritance (ii)

We stopped the grandmother clock, like you do,
catching the pendulum to still its tongue.
Then we rolled it out of the house without speaking.
Light curled on the living room’s nicotine flowers
pasted to the wall, and from the carpets
ash rose to follow us ghostly to the van, follow us
all the way home. How many years
can you let something stand silent in a corner
pretending it’s not there? It’s like those murders
nobody talks about, the body buried
not underneath a persimmon tree out back
or along the chain-link fence, but in the walls,
in a locked trunk. When a house has its whole face
removed, you must unlock all the closet doors, open
everything. The air lifts old newspapers,
hurled glass, and even things of wood and copper
bigger than sons, daughters, unmanageable things.
It takes a practiced hand to wheel a body
from place to place, and a careful one
to wipe it down, prop it up, find a whorled key
with which to wind it. Tar has beaded on the posts.
Rust in the bells. Then it sings the hour once again,
reminds us there used to be good days too, silver
and entirely happy. Everything grows tired,
even love. Still a strong hand can unbury it
seeking old music after the hour grows late,
and a steady one keeps it going, going.

A Kiss from Far-off Eden

Today’s Miz Quickly prompt is to do sort of a cento of eavesdropped conversation, but since I find it hard to break text out of the conversations themselves (plus the fact that brunch with my family is the narrative equivalent of two freight trains loaded with chemical fertilizer colliding), I decided to just do one of my random-wandering Poets.org centi, as I am sometimes wont to do. The path just kind of unfolded delicately, and I’m not sure I have any deeper reading, but eh, it kept me occupied.

A Kiss from Far-off Eden

I know that David’s with me here again,
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
our right shoulders red, our wavering hips indigo–
but what does he know about inside and outside?
(I come up to him
in the land of missing pronouns,
and when it starts to get dark,
we hardly speak.)
I’d ask how such wretchedness came to cumber
all mistake. One world that shuts air into
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
whoever you are, holding me now in hand,
without you here, I’m viciously lonely.
Of all sweet passions, shame is the loveliest:
you are not me, and I am never you,
you with me, on me, in me, and you’re not.

Sources: Vachel Lindsay, “My Lady is Compared to a Young Tree”; Robert Graves, “Not Dead”; Denise Levertov, “In California During the Gulf War”; Traci Brimhall, “Our Bodies Break Light”; Li-Young Lee, “Immigrant Blues”; Galway Kinnell, “The Bear”; Marilyn Chin, “Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony”; Alberto Blanco (trans. W.S. Merwin), “The Parakeets”; John Logan, “Three Moves”; Trumbull Stickney, “Mnemosyne”; Reginald Shepard, “Drawing from Life”; Li-Young Lee, “Eating Alone”; Walt Whitman, “Whoever You Are, Holding Me Now in Hand”; Aaron Smith, “Boston”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Praise of Shame”; Philip Lopate, “The Ecstasy”; Marilyn Hacker, “Coda”

Recursion Twenty-Eight: deltas

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
~ Orson Welles, American actor, writer, and director

I’ve noticed that maybe the primary physiological effect New York has had on me is my sensitivity to morning light. At home, my bedroom has an east-facing window, skewed very slightly to the north, so I grew up as an early riser. College and my other city apartments have had windows of various sorts, but living in a basement for the last (almost) two years, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in how I deal with the sun when I’m at home. Being okay with waking up to sunlight a 7 am changed to a slight grumpiness when I lived in Philadelphia, and DC; now that I have hardly any sunlight at all in my home, this morning (and other mornings at the old homestead), I just pull the covers further over my head and start weeping. (There was this bird singing right outside the window today, I wanted to just throw the sash open and throttle it. Dammit, bird, I need my sleep!)

(But at least they are better than those city birds that sing at 1 in the morning due to light pollution.)

We’re so close to the end, everyone. I have two more specific prompts in mind for the last two days (which I know I wanted to do from the start: the first may be a tad difficult, but I have confidence in you), so today will be the last one for that “central theme” idea I’ve been touting. Of course, you can keep revolving around one thick theme, but the river is now splitting into its final distributaries and spilling onto the shore. With that metropolis of ideas floating in channeled water and people gathering around to partake sitting on the horizon, at last we begin to taste the brackish water of the sea. Think of the Nile, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Mississippi: too much thought and action to be contained by just one path, in the end.

Not to make it seem like you’re going to undo the last week’s work of gathering a theme together into one firm but flexible cylinder of riverine inspiration, but we are now going to shave down that accumulation of ideas and themes again. Take your theme and separate it into six pieces at least. You may wish to have each of the ideas behind poems you wrote over the last six days make an appearance, but also try to get more abstract, dissecting the Main Idea into several Subordinate Ideas. See which ones have enough life of their own to find their own groove and thalweg down to the bay, or which ones will be devoured by the tide. I’ll take my biological process in the world one (I promise this will be the last time I bring it up) and chop away: evolution, the food chain, humanity as animals, symbiotic relationships (like those figs + wasps), measuring time through life cycle, and the physical sensations of being alive. So, if those are my pieces, what I want to do is devote attention to each, just a little bit: it could be the phrase itself, or it could be an image, but expose it. Make it concrete.

You then want to choose what kind of a delta you’ll have. Will it be a birdfoot like the Mississippi, building new land as it rushes to sea? Will it be massive like the Amazon, with each chunk of theme getting its own stanza? Will it be holy like the Brahmaputra, holy to vacationers like the Rhône, or choked with mangroves like… I don’t know, some other river? Think about the coastline you want to cross at last, and whether it will be straight or wavy, pushing out to sea with sediment or caving in, riddled with tree roots and flamingo legs, or empty except for dunes and beachgrass. Allow your themes to interact with the landscape in the way the delta’s distributaries cross mud flats and bob with fishing boats. Maybe you want to extend a thought the way sediment extends spits of land, or obscure a thought as wetlands muddy the boundary of water and land, or make a thought marvelously clear, as when the river reaches through desert. I leave it to you to interpret how this goes, but in the end, all the delta’s fingers reach the sea. This does not necessarily mean that they are lost — currents are far deeper and stronger than we often suspect — but the ending should perhaps be surrounded on all sides by other, different, saltwater thoughts. Threaten your themes, but don’t let them be interrupted/drowned/vanished completely yet; the reward will be greater.

We still have two more days to go, though. What better way to celebrate than to come back and share?

Origami

Another quick one, as I am now off for the next social extravaganzas of the evening. This is for the Poets + Writers prompt to talk about someone close to you using any of the senses except sight. There’s a ton of poems I’ve written that are sappy lovey dovey things where sight is, if in there at all, the least important of the senses. But I tried to be at least a little more complex with this one. It’s not entirely a true story, at least for me; I hope it is true enough to resonate with you.

Origami

Even after you’ve died,
there are still moments of you
scattered through the day.

The wind brings pine smoke,
someone squeezes a vanilla bean nearby,
I am frying butter and cinnamon.
Your body was the storybook
I could read with my eyes closed.

When a goldfinch tugs
scrap paper from the grass,
I feel swept up with kinship.

Occasionally the air is flat enough
that I, too, can peel loose its scent,
fold it carefully like origami.
Then I hold it to my mouth
and breathe the way I used to breathe.

Mondays at the Office

A quick one before I go in to dinner, inspired by Miz Quickly’s photo gallery offering:

It’s kind of a wry one that I think we can all relate to, in one way or another. There’s this physical reaction to Mondays that I would love to deconstruct further, but I think the absurdist dream that came out of this photo is the best I can muster for the moment. (And Frank O’Hara is still resonating in me a little bit. I can imagine him going out on his lunch break like this guy.)

Mondays at the Office

You feel like unclipping the phone’s receiver
and taking the helical cord into your mouth, swallowing,
swallowing, ripping the guts out of technology
to take them into your own. Like Cronus’s children:
death will come to you in the shape of a hiccuping bell,
another e-mail, or the goddamn fax machine jamming
again. You are not the only one: Marianne sets fire
to the ficus plant by the door, and James
shreds the photos on his desk one by one, while Yvette
staples, staples, staples, staples. This madness
lives in a cubical comb which you seal off with wax,
individual, but all in this together. What is work,
you think; it’s impossible to hear the answer over this
ringing now passing from your esophagus,
through stomach acid, into an intestinal confusion.
There is paid time off; there are holidays. But really,
what you all need is to be paid to go once per day
outside onto a flat green place, stripping off shirt, tie,
patent leather shoes, spread out and laid upon
underneath a timeless sun. What is mercy, you think,
but the freedom to show off ribcage and collarbone
turned up to that mythological blindness
free from income tax, memoranda, the purgatorial 401K.
Once per day each of you will queue up to go.
James will return glorious in his own sweat, embrace you
half tears, breathe in your ear that it’s your turn.
You will stagger past security, run type-numb fingers
through fountain water, smell the fresh-mowed grass
as you expose yourself in relief. Cough wires, shit wires,
empty yourself of copper. Strike the pose bees must
when the queen says, enough honey, when Cronus says,
split me open, let the passionate gods break free.

A Frost

All right, all right, I did an erasure poem. I’m normally not fond of these, but I figured I should be a good sport with the spirit of the NaPoWriMo prompt and do one. I’ve marked the erased text in cream, so you can probably still make out the original, but try to only read the black text, I guess. These always make me feel distinctly un-creative: I feel like taking someone else’s work and chopping away pieces with a machete leaves behind something that is either too similar, or makes so little sense (and the sense it does make is only because of what was there originally). But then, maybe I’m picking the wrong poems, or maybe I’m just trying too hard. I don’t know, this and transliteration are just the bugbears of my text-mucking life.

A Visit from St. Nicholas
(with apologies to Clement Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

New Jersey

Finally, the weekend! Guys: I needed this like you would not believe.

I finished (again) Lunch Poems on my way home, and some O’Hara — along with some Whitman and Sandburg, I guess — influenced the feel of this one. Miz Quickly’s prompt today was to observe Nature, while yesterday’s Poets and Writers was to write a letter to a landscape, which seemed to go hand-in-hand. And while I struggled with the themes all day, I realized that traveling New Jersey almost end to end was a pretty good source, so this is a little paean for the old home state. It’s kind of wonky and rambly, and doesn’t do a tenth of the justice that I’d like to, but then again, it’s only one poem, written to prompts, and it’s late. Be merciful, I beg you!

New Jersey

The length of you electrified, the breadth of you cast-iron,
mouth sunk deep into one city, tail rattled round another,
         what do you think about underneath?
Do you start with a man walking tunnels under the Hudson
to burst out into the Secaucus sunlight, slodging through
         marshwater pierced with telephone poles
whose wires dip parabolic underneath an egret’s wing?
Will he say, this is the arrowhead, flung forward, carved
         scrap of flint dipping its colonial point
into marine history, extending in a perfect line, industrial
revolution and immigrant tale, feathered with one eye
         pointed east into tomorrow’s Atlantic sun?
Who will smell salt air as the cars roam these counties
packed with fine gravel, listen to the mosquitoes buzz
         fear of the finchmouth under viaducts
crazyquilted with graffiti, buckling freight, hollowed like
a careful clay gorge? Are they women with moonscape hair,
         men with block-letter tattoos, children,
muddied and painted, roaming from stone checkerboards
onto your threadbare fields to execute the last crabapple,
         deer stalking the interstate’s shrug
to gnaw a bit of alder shoot? How do they weigh on you,
you who were always slight, the runt, the performer,
         the intense gaze, always warmer than
anyone thought, even with vertebrae all full of steel pins,
your limbs catalogued and the ospreys tagged, your feet
         shod wooden and dipped in Delaware Bay?
When spring comes fierce and yellow, dogwoods hang up
chandeliers in all your roofless parlors, and the cherries
         weep, do you tell them, this is no death,
show them a man walking tracks, a child splattered pink
and black, first tomato bloody in her teeth? Won’t new life
         wrought out of rust and broken glass,
wrung from reeds round empty factories, need a mother too?
What better land than one that sings them its similarity:
         small, wise, proud, wild, radio, radiant!