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.

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!

Up Comes the Cicada

Another one before I get down to actual work I have to do this afternoon. This is for the NaPoWriMo prompt of using a list of words, Wordle-style, for a poem… I ended up using miraculous, gutter, salt, curl, ego, elusive, twice, and ghost in mine which is, for some reason, about cicadas. (I’m looking forward to their arrival, unlike just about everyone else I know.) I don’t always follow the NaPo prompts themselves, but regardless, they have some pretty great daily links for poetry sites around the Web that you ought to check out. I recommend it!

Up Comes the Cicada

Right out of the ground: dirt boils,
trees flow. You can’t help but respect
sleeper agents waiting seventeen years,
patient, webbed with their own growth,
until who-knows-what moment.
It must be clicked into place by that sun
each cicada only knows twice
(first as the salt-crystal egg, then as
one wriggling thumb to crawl the gutter),
triggered like a curl of watchwork gears
grinds their teeth. This day and age,
how can anything be so elusive?
You thump barefoot through the weeds,
all id and ego and here i am, naught else
but yourself. To go unknown under that
could be the last miraculous thing.
And the second-to-last is exposure
for the sake of just one green moment
quick with music, bodies slipped
off bodies, battered together until
particles of young cicada fill the V’s
whittled into a twig. To bloom and fall,
to rise and rejoice, and between to sleep
seventeen years: who won’t say
there is still such a thing as a secret?
Not to mention kept by nymphs who sing
like a million match-heads striking:
like how ash crumbles after the burn,
and wet fire itself must be rubbed close
to keep in your memory, down drop
the cicadas, up go the ghosts.

Courtyard with Statue of Maimonides

I’m sitting at the cafe listening to Joanna Newsom’s Ys (which I’ve heartily recommended on here before, and do so happily again), drinking an iced honey-nut latte as I wait for the place to close and the expected severe thunderstorms roll in, with a fresh new poem draft hot out of the oven for consumption by any who are interested in that sort of thing (as well as interested in the prompt by Miz Quickly to do a “postcard poem”) on an evening — like any other evening — that needs a reminder of how we’ve come from righteous, charitable places in our history, and there is hope for us yet.

Sorry, I just wanted to write a 100-word sentence. Anyway, this might be a bit long for a postcard poem, but I write small anyway. I took this photo in Córdoba:

That’s Maimonides, celebrated medieval Jewish philosopher and physician. I remember exploring the city and being surprised, but happy, to come across it. Andalucía is one of my favorite places in the world; it’s on the shortlist of “Places To Which I’d Happily Retire, Or At Least Live Awhile”, along with Barcelona, Paris, the Berkshires, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. (Maybe not such a shortlist.) And I love elements of the history, with a level of religious and intellectual enlightenment that, although spotty, was still probably more agreeable than anywhere else in the medieval era. Maimonides himself had some pretty cool ideas about the balance between science and faith, respect between mutual faiths, and compassion in law. I wish more people had those ideas.

There might be more going on in this poem under the surface. I’m not really sure.

Courtyard with Statue of Maimonides

who considers forever before he speaks,
(bronze lips pursed, bronze brow furrowed)
here where he sprouted
like the almond shoot shouldering up
between mud bricks, in that far-off century
where everyone thanks god
for the blessing of each other in the street
no matter the name, strolling along
the nearby Guadalquivir who,
if you face upstream, back to the wind,
seems just as content to flow backwards
as it is to go down to that equitable sea
where all things, anyway, end.

Envy

…and this is the other one, which is half-heartedly for both Miz Quickly’s prompt about found objects and the NaPoWriMo prompt of a greeting. (We’ll see if I can get a better one for either before I close up shop for the night.) I did a quick count and I think I’ve written 32 poems this month so far, so I’m a little behind on my goal. But then I was reading some truly excellent work from some other poets and realizing how much quality counts over quantity. That is the lesson we must forget this month, I suppose…

Envy

It was that effortless hour when the tree,
already having cracked its upper knuckles
from red punctuation into leaves,
began to show dust emeralds caught
rippling along the lower bark’s dun sea.
This is the one hour when the tree
constellates down its body;
if you aren’t looking for it,
you might later see those young twigs
clumped with seed and realize
you missed it. And then you wish
that you, too, could strip naked
on Eighth Avenue in broad daylight, stand
laughing, craning your neck and saying
good morning to everyone,
ready for all this green in you like
the grime of heaven to condense out
from your bare body, the back,
the rib-ditches, the pores from which
a thousand needles of life are rarely
expected to rejoice.

Near the Border

I did manage to get some more writing time in at Union Square between work and yoga work, but not much. All in all, I got two poem drafts, the skeleton of another poem I think could go somewhere, and what started as a poem but turned into the beginning of a short story. Not too shab, I guess. This one was written for the Poets + Writers prompt with using random dictionary words in every other line, à la a Wordle. I ended up with cheapen, farthest, infusion, Jubilate, monsoon, pelican, radius, revenge, spinel, and uncountable. I guess it turned out all right.

Near the Border

Tomorrow, the monsoon: so the cracked grey land shivers.
There is anticipation, and fear: what if the water
chooses to take its revenge at last on the deep-rooted things
which have so stubbornly refused to wash away?
From the bare gypsum mine to the farthest joshua tree,
the desert digs its heels in. A place stuck fast
with its own refusal to quicken does not cheapen in rain;
it remembers a long before and a longer after,
a radius of drought the stretch and spread of one tangling
sun’s ray. Water, it must be admitted, is mighty,
but every infusion of it moves in the end from one place
to another. Scorpions worry it will be their turn next,
when the uncountable rain whips the earth clean. And scarabs
burrow mindlessly when they hear the thunder,
little spinels and jaspers desperate to return to where they
came from, chirrucking put me back, put me
back. And a lone pelican on the lip of the swooped rise,
traveling from one bay to another, watches clouds
pile on the horizon. He croons Jubilate Deo, thinks of sudden
pools in thin streams, lucky ones, full of the briefest fish.

Theory of the Earth and the Moon

All right, I caved and got a Facebook. I mean, I’ve had one for years, but it’s my personal one; this is the official writerly one. You’ll have to go find it yourself — I don’t plan on posting the link here for all to see — but your hint is that it’s the first and last name and apparently there are thirty other people with my name before me. You’ll know me by the blacklit photo. I probably won’t add everyone willy-nilly, but if I recognize the name, I’ll say yes.

This is just a random one for Miz Quickly‘s prompt… I was listening to Four Tet, and quite randomly, got a vivid image of these two girls dancing around in Tennessee or somewhere. And then that turned into a quasi-mythological connection, and another lengthy narrative thing. What can I say; it’s late, and my brain craves restenance. (Which is rest + sustenance, combined.) Enjoy, or not, and I’ll see you on the flip.

Theory of the Earth and the Moon

Some days, they are barefoot sisters,
skinned knees and clay feet, picking up worms
and cutting them in half to see what happens.
Their yard is wide and empty.
Neighboring planets with broods of their own
hide behind fences threaded through with camelthorn
and rosary pea. These girls don’t talk to them.
They just carry on over that rusting hoe
and the radio waves, stirring up the crickets
with their slip and their shake.
Other days, they are goddesses with
private mythologies: vengeful lovers,
misbegotten children, the whole lot. But right now,
their only tragedy is the little one, born so frail
leaving her to always steal her light.
She is the ghost partner, grown up insubstantial
around her sister, playing helicopter. Still, she’s
hanging on. And the other, breathing,
tuning strings and pumping water, she presses one
big hand with dirty nails to that little eclipse palm,
laughing and starting up an off-kilter waltz.
Some days, they don’t want any nonsense,
just an easy kind of revolution.
Soon enough the sun will reach out
over the waving patches of jade and cloud
to call them in for dinner. Then it’s clear
they are family. They all go in together
leaving the ramshackle yard bare as they found it.

Little Kanawha River

I will say this: one of the finest compliments I’ve gotten on my work is when people say it has music in it, and sound that works. Being intensely interested in language, of course this is one of my primary concerns when writing, though the importance of curious imagery regularly competes with musicality. I don’t do persona poems easily, and even the voice that is “my own”, or at least the in-the-poem version of me, regularly gets a lot of his traits deleted. (But I don’t mind being an impersonal “me” so much; I sometimes feel it allows the reader get into the poem without being so objective that I engage in complete ego-deletion.) Nor am I a particularly issues- and message-based poet, like so much of the slam scene. I do feel like I’m paying a lot more attention to these issues than I used to, especially since the workshop began. My lines are getting shorter, my playing with internal rhymes in free verse has gotten more frequent, and I’m appreciating more and more the value of a delectable image stuck like a pin into a mass of papery stuff.

Anyway, I hope that kind of attention is clear. Sometimes I do let it fall by the wayside, but when it makes its way whole into the poems, those tend to be the pieces I feel proudest of. Poets and Writers had an interesting experiment that generated this one: pick a random spot on a map and write a poem about daybreak in that location, inventing details if necessary. Some of the long- long-time readers may recall when I took a road trip back in August 2009 with my then-boyfriend. I ended up landing near the Little Kanawha River in West Virginia; we had traveled along the full-size one, and in the afternoon, but this poem is pretty directly about that experience. Or at least, just the nature part of it, which I imagine would be like this. I left out the old mining infrastructure, the churches, the little downtowns interspersed with surprisingly modern rancher houses, the absolutely terrifying mountain roads, the power lines and deer carcasses and produce stands. That’ll be another poem; this one is just a very, very slow meditation.

I think the last full sentence of this poem might be one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.

Little Kanawha River

Nothing green is hurried,
whether the beech tree
crinkling summer leaves, or
each drink of mountain streams
married to the sudden bend
tacked with fog and rippling
dark from the coal seam.
But nothing green is hurried,
rivers older than mountains
least of all. Crows call
the fountain springs at dawn,
we are pleased to hear,
water is cello music
to two sleepless boys who
half-blind pull trousers on,
it’s creeping close to the ear–
but none of this is hurried.
We are heading east
past the charm of the falls
waiting for the sun’s burst
over canyon walls, the road
worn and warm and moss-crazed.
The stars must conquer
mountains, too. And always
they do; it just takes longer,
here. The land waits for light
with its walker to draw near,
meanwhile the days grow green,
everything moving through
unbanished green, our talk
tired and ready to turn
to love colored that grey
that is green slowly won,
last seen in ageless country,
always half-done– never hurried.

On This Day in History:

I am so excited! Why, you might ask? Because today, as it turns out, is First Thunder, which is up in my top ten holidays, along with several others that don’t exist widely (such as First Snow, Mad Hatter Day, and Slutty New Outfit Day). We just had a line of severe thunderstorms roll through, which directly inspired this poem; the other inspiration was seeing on Wikipedia that it’s been (nearly) two hundred years to the day that Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia. And since I’ve never been there, I folded in the Miz Quickly prompt about doing a poem that includes sensory description for three places: one you’ve never been, one you’re familiar with, and one that’s imaginary. I’ve been wrestling with this prompt for days, and I’m not entirely thrilled with this expression of it, but I think it works in other ways. Plus, I haven’t done blank verse in a little while, so it was a nice iambic stretch.

On This Day in History:

A mountain burst in Indonesia.
The sappanwoods fell bloody, slumped with ash,
while thunder drowned an empire. Summer fled–
but Earth spun on. Remember, says the mind,
desires are built from moments yet unseen
(until they are) and cautionary tales.
Some other mountaintop when we were young
once told the speechless, feel this shaking clay,
come smell the fallen magnolia tree. That’s where
our history begins. And ever since,
we wait for things we’ve missed to swing around
again, diminished, so we’ll have some right
to tell it too, crave mountains but accept
the hills. In cities we still listen for
some noise grown from all noise: a thunder vowel,
an abalone light. You know it. Yes, it’s in
those moments beating with a borrowed heart
hid underneath the hailstones. Drawing blood
that is (you feel it too?) a borrowed blood.

Cana

Well, I find myself somewhat bemused, but also chuffed, that my blog showed up on the WordPress Freshly Pressed site this morning. (Although, like when they show those sweepstakes winners on TV, and they answer the door in housecoats or sweatpants with, I don’t know, pizza sauce in their upper lip, I feel like the particular post that was featured was one of my clunkier ones.) Honestly, I have no idea how that process works, but: thanks, WordPress! I hope that means people like the blog, and that if there are new people cruising my writing, they like it, too.

So, I’m doing a couple different challenges for the month, some of which I will put on here, some of which I won’t. I think that the NaPoWriMo.net ones will all find their way here, as will other prompted poems as the occasion arises. There will also be daily Recursions, and occasional Refineries. But then, as always, I will keep my workshop poems offline, along with other prompt work that happens when I least expect it. (Tomorrow I’m going down to DC, so I hope a long bus ride will be fruitful. The next day, a ride back up!) Got in two today, though, so I hope that’s a good start…

I’ve been thinking about writing some more lurid-dream poetry. The intersection of sexuality, religion, gritty city things, elemental imagery, and lyric turns of phrase is still, ultimately, my favorite assortment of things in a poem, so probably the NaPo ones will lean heavily on those this month. I’ll get chaste and prudish and whimsical again later. The prompt for Day 1 was to use the first line of another poem for the first of your own, and I ended up using “Life is Fine” by Langston Hughes. Although, this is pretty much as opposite a direction you could go in as possible from his piece. Um, enjoy!

Cana

I went down to the river
Saturday night. I wanted to see her
disassemble the moon, make
little lamp-mirrors to mark the path.
And the men were walking on water
over to the boys’ side
to celebrate the first of Spring. It was
open-up-your-zippers weather
with two cold teeth subtle in its mouth.
The river hummed to be trod on,
sacred and sure in her alto murmur
under a stinking bridge.
I was waiting on a wooden bench.
I was the witness for sudden weddings
dripped from the earliest rosebuds.
And the river: the priestess.
One man pissed in her steady lap, then
sat next to me to make his proposals.
But I said, no, I am only here
changing the night into a story.
Watching the river spell out her name.
I perform no miracles, I kissed
into his ear. And the water is
a bitch tonight, wanting so much to be
more like us, who seem so alive.