Red coffeeshop floor splattered
with warm milk, suggesting the shape of
a man with a gun to his head:
what does this pale inkblot
say about me?

Sunlight snags on razor wire,
bleeds gold onto our back pavement.

Meanwhile, I have finally tried to go back and catch up on all the comments that people have left. Note: I am not commenting on my small stones for the month, in the same way that I am not offering any commentary on them, as I prefer to leave them untouched by context. But if you left a comment on anything else in the last couple weeks, chances are I have finally been a dutiful blogger and gone back to respond.

There’s a new Reverie up as well. And I’m working on some things for Curio. And I’m putting together a few submission. The fun never stops, it turns out.

Year of the Dragon

We grew up navigating the arterioles,
carried along the verges of river-bound cities
in currents that couldn’t be explained. Not that
we minded: in the eddied shimmer of
shaded brook and residential stream, there were
secret passions waiting to be learned:

discovering, for example,
how to walk on the edges of things.
Every garden fence became a four-footed challenge,
every lane in our development was lined with
grey curbs hoping for an animal to tread on its back.
The water taught us how to change shape.
Behind our houses were tall screens of naked birches,
and in front the five-lane roar of the road.
We wore chameleon skins, half concrete
and half the pattern the sun makes
as it steeps through the manicured leaves.

And when the bloodflow of towns trickled into
the last horse farm, the last peach orchard,
we found ourselves buffeted along. Bridge piers,
webbed highways, infinite, inexorable
gravity of the city. Which pumped and beat. Which was
one steel-and-water muscle conspiring to squeeze.
All the beams that bear it up are
right-angled and carefully-placed; their opportunities
move only flatly forward.

Water taught so many things: it peeled
over itself and showed us the meaning of secrets.
We knew what flow was, we knew
shatter and rattle and change. Now we find it
in underground places, lit by the lamps of trains:

we find it in the unknown channels
where the snowmelt begins to collect. There are
city mice, and country mice, and then there’s us,
in between. We dream of vinyl-sided chapels
and carefully spaced trees; our eyes
half in- and half out-of-doors. And sometimes
our shadows wear the shapes of hawks,
sometimes snakes. Impossible to tell: save that
they (and the land they press on) are always
poised to spring.

This week: “lovely as a tree“

We’re going to take it a little bit easy this time. This is straight up guided process, and we’re going to think of this organically. There are three ways poems miss out on some of their potential, at least for me: you get a theme notion and plow right in to make a point (while sacrificing craft and form), or you’re so worried about sticking to a particular form that it trumps everything else (even if your meter is perfect), or you have a killer opening/ending, and spend the rest of the poem making up for it. Probably ninety percent of poems are at least somewhat guilty of one of these, to some degree. So, we’re going to grow a poem instead of shaping it.

Even a tree has to begin with a seed. We’re going to use lexical seeds here. Keep your eyes open for the next ten interesting words that cross your path, the ones that stand out. They don’t have to be long or fancy: opossum, ladderback, ascot, lifeline. Short phrases like internal combustion engine and self-sacrificial would be okay too. Mull over them for a while and pick out the one you’d like to grow the most.

Next you have to give it nutrients: soil, water, sunlight, etc. In this case, you need to give it some grammar and structure (to different degrees, depending on your style of writing). Your word/phrase by itself just floats in negative space, perhaps on the screen or the page or just in your brain, so give it some context and paint the surroundings a little bit. Do you want that opossum to be a literal one, or a figurative one (lying sly in the road, playing possum)? Is that ladderback chair an accent or a focus (a lifetime of ladderback chairs sat her up straight)? An important note: don’t make this line the beginning or end of a sentence. You’ll see why in a moment.

Try to get a full line out of it, which will inform the basic line character of the rest of the work. If you have alliteration, certain sounds, a particular meter taking shape, own it. But: even though a tree is strong and durable, it knows how to flex with the wind. We are not going to be married to these line shapes; sonnets are not necessary. Because next, you’re going to grow the trunk, by building more lines around the central one. Try adding one above it, then one below, alternating to swell it into a stanza.

In the morning
she’s stringing pearls on a purple dress. Then,
when the sun starts to fall, she’ll find herself
lying sly in the road, playing possum
until her babies come crawling home. She sings
“Oh Susannah” when they start walking,
one by one. 

(I did that one with the process, and threw two little hooks on the top and bottom, to link with what might come next. Very unintentionally, the lines all ended up in the 10-syllable range otherwise. I tried to do some alliterative pairs, as well as use the same sounds repeatedly: s, sh, p, w, o, for no reason other than the bark patterned itself that way.)

Get that stanza nice and thick with growth rings. You might want the beginnings of a narrative, like I did above, to create a character study or a heroic epic. Maybe you just want a particularly rich description to surround that original seed; maybe you want to hint at deep questions. Either way, this is going to be the centerpiece of your poem. Since such centerpieces are rarely sprung from such humble beginnings, give them the chance to really explore their boundaries.

Because next, you’re going to spread the branches. It’s up to you how many you want to include, but try for at least three. These will be other stanzas, placed either before or after your centerpiece, depending on how you want your reader to scan your poem (branches-up, trunk-down, or all around?) In any case, the branches should be shorter, and form a frame for that meaty stanza.

It didn’t always feel like this, she thinks,
thin fingers curled around a whiskey glass.

…

Mama loves her little lambs, but she can’t shake
her own terrible unreality.
It sticks like a lump of cake in her throat. 

(Clearly, mine is turning into some kind of character sketch with a story under its surface.)

Add as many of these as it takes to feel satisfied: you might stick with a slender sapling, or end up with a strapping sequoia of ten stanzas. How you choose to arrange them is up to you, but make each of those branches solid, as though they could be a short poem of their own.

Finally, we have to add a few jewels, the fruits and flowers to add the final note on the tree. Look through the poem and choose at least five words that you can either add to (with an adjective, adverb, prefix, whatever) or synonymize to make them unique and beautiful. You probably already have some words that you’re proud of in there, as a tree is pretty nice on its own. But you want those flowers to have their own, different kind of beauty. I might turn to switchgrass fingers curled around… or …like a lump of devil’s-food cake in her throat. Give it charm and character.

The most important thing here is to keep your editor to the side. Try not to prune and crop and graft too much, and just let the poem grow into what it will. You don’t have to love it – no tree is ever completely perfect – but appreciate the undertaking of it, and the organic process that creates it. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you could try to chop it down and peel out particular words and phrases (using some kind of cut-up tool), or go in the opposite direction and plant the other nine seeds you came up with. See what happens. Maybe you will discover that you prefer this kind of process to others; at the very least, it gives you new methods and approaches to draw on, hopefully.

Joyce Kilmer, though. Ugh.

The crescent moon begins her question
with a hollow cheek pressed to the iodine sky:
she is an intoned boomerang, going up
and coming down again.

One brick-laid balcony on someone’s 18th floor,
amid this rooftop vista built up
from beige stone and wood:
two chaises longues, perched upon it,
their plastic the color of neon fruits.

Tea steam catches the late afternoon sun:
I walk through it, catch it in cold fingers, sew its
hundred thousand beads to my sleeves.

The Friend of My Friend is My Enemy

Change places: now I’ll be the angel, perched
delicately on your right with long rubberband whispers
to cast like grapples into your empty ear

and he’ll put on horns, plant his pitchfork
deep to fire nerves and muscles, marionette your hands
to some self-destructive mischief. I like to say

I’m an enabler, full of beautiful vertigo and
suspended disbelief: but this is me changing nooses
for bungee cords, this is one secretive touch

always ready to pull you back from the brink,
tandem when we fall. And when he calls you up,
says paint your face and meet me downtown,

then I’m green with envy and green with worried
sick with glassy-eyed photographs the only evidence
of a wild night, or bruises and blood canyons

from this party or that. Where was he with
bandages and a well-placed hand? Picking meat
out of his teeth; pissing in a corner somewhere;

ready to do it again. A pitchfork always gets
too heavy in my hands, after a while: I wish my wings
stayed strong enough to carry us both.

I don’t mean to seem like I care about
material things, like a social status:
I just want four walls and adobe slabs
for my girls.
– Animal Collective, My Girls

The things that I’ve loved, the things that I’ve lost
The things I’ve held sacred that I’ve dropped
I won’t lie no more than you can bet
I don’t want to learn what I’ll need to forget.
– Audioslave, Doesn’t Remind Me

Goldenrod, and the 4-H Stone:
the things I brought you when I found out you had
cancer of the bone.
– Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day

Warning on the last one, should you choose to look them up: it is one of the most depressing and beautiful songs anyone has ever written.

Anyway, there’s a lot of music about this stuff, and I could probably go on. I’ll stop at three. This poem is a true story about the First Real Boyfriend. I never went to prom in high school: it was a Catholic school, and I came out of the closet instead. (My girlfriend was remarkably understanding.) So the next summer, there was an LGBT prom at the community center in the city, and the Boyfriend came and picked me up in his white convertible; we dressed to the nines and had (unplanned) gotten each other flowers; which we then gave away to the group of sassy black ladies mentioned in the poem. It was an enchanted evening that will forever sum up the totality of that relationship for me: I was 18, and in love, and I still hold on to that several years later. I kept the detritus of that bouquet until there was nothing left to keep except that one piece, which he took with him to move across the country.

We still talk. He has a boyfriend now, and I’m recently without one, and so it goes.

I was reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses last night. That informed the structure of this.

Bouquet

We gave away the roses to old sisters
sunning themselves in the June heat that night because
they said you got any of them for us honey
and we thought as good them as any other and
they belled with pleasures to receive
wilting fistfuls of red petals and thick thorns

and for the longest time the ferns and baby’s breath
withered in my room with their vase pool
long since evaporated to beige dust
until even what might have been stems or sepals
suggested only hair and hyphens and broken lines
that well-meaning mothers sweep up when you’re out

so I had to make do with the tattered
inconstant cellophane offending me with its
transparency like so much of what we were
with our brutal honesty and single tears which
brimmed and released on the phone or
in starlit parks or when you drove away from here forever

which of course is when the red scrap of satin ribbon
that had held the whole damn thing together passed
from my palm to yours leaving me thinking
that’s all there is to it except you knew at once
what it was and so silently we both knew
all there is to it is us and that is enough.

One last hummock of rock salt
dissolves slowly on the steps,
final rampart
from a brief winter war.