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.

Never a Boring Moment

This is for Miz Quickly‘s Wordle prompt. I recommend you head over and check it out, not only because they’re fun words to wrangle, but also because she gives some excellent advice for approaching such prompts. I won’t tell you what the words are in this one, to hold with the second of her principles (to make them seem natural), but I hope that they work, along with the sort-of-climbing rhyme scheme going on. And now one prompt done, on to the next one… it’s gonna be a good Wednesday night!

Never a Boring Moment

Each guest arrives in style
for the slab. Open them wide,
knot their veins, objects at rest
stay at rest. A heart may have
one good valve, the rivet pains
turned deadly. A heart, compressed,
yields blood money. The canals,
shocked silent, are not quite ready.
A rubber glove, a palm of honey,
a modest heart is sheet-white, quiet
for its massage, done with love
done with love, and a furious art.
Pick up. The beat. Red collage
all tissue-throb, the aftermath of
time, stood still. What a feat,
to detour death, they’ll say, awed.
What hospitable skill.
They too feel short of breath.
A nurse draws the transfer writ.
The tick-mark guest’s report
follows him out; the slack-jawed
watchers say, it was so quick,
we almost felt no doubt,
we quite forgot to pray.

White, Grey

First of two random little ones for the day… I had these grand designs to use my comparatively free evening to write and scribble away. But then, the thermometer got up to 82 (Fahrenheit, of course), and nothing I could possibly do seemed as important as going up to Central Park and lying in the grass. Which means I didn’t really have a lot of time to write, which means I’ve dashed off crummy bits of verse again, which means I’m going to just be even more aggravated with myself tomorrow. (And it will be another free, warm evening, so I might just throw in the towel.) I think what I need is a retreat, just to be locked in a room for a week with nothing but poetry.

Actually, that sounds like a good way to go crazy real quick.

This is for NaPoWriMo‘s challenge to write an ottava rima and Miz Quickly’s prompt about using the first two colors you see as the title, then writing a childhood poem keying from them. To this day, I don’t know what that white stuff was on the bird in question.

White, Grey

The broken bird lay heavy in the dirt.
A wine drop gathered in its half shut beak.
But most of it was feather-grey, inert,
and staining it, white streak upon white streak.
I wanted it to rise and stand, unhurt,
and waited– children wait– for it to speak.
We learn, when least expected, certain things:
that birds grown cold refuse to clean their wings.

Ashes, Ashes

Hanging out with Tessa on GChat before heading out to a karaoke birthday, I finally managed to squeeze this poem out like toothpaste from a tube. (So thanks to her for being my reflective surface off which to bounce ideas!) Adele Kenny had a prompt based on a Dorianne Laux poem, and since I adore Dorianne Laux, I really wanted to give it a try today; meanwhile, Miz Quickly was exhorting people yesterday to have fun with sound and internal rhyme, which made me get all Kay Ryan. (I read and re-read “Crown” and “Sharks’ Teeth” about twenty times while writing this one.) I think sound play is a direction I’ll take on a few poems this month, but specifically I wanted to do it in this one. Not that this does any justice to either wonder that is Laux or Ryan, but this is what happens when I go rampaging through my subconscious looking for the profound and sublime.

Aside from the… er, nine? I’ve posted so far this month, I have two more in reserve, and hoped to write another today to catch up with my goal of two poems per day. (Plus one prompt per day.) (Because I am an overachiever like that.) Definitely need an infusion of steam or strong drink, though. Six days down, twenty-four to go.

Ashes, Ashes

They say we’re made of
particles forged in stars,
whose suicides we lie in
the shade of. It’s like
building castles in sand:
it takes a certain art,
shaping a burst bulb
into two hands, or a heart,
that can be believed.
But the sky with all that
cat’s cradle has only room
for night’s perfection.
How could we rain down
from the Great Bear’s ladle?
Unless we are meant
to be the tomb: the lights
wearing their own ashes
bent, crooked, as crowns.

Haymaking

Finally! A poem! I’ve been feeling decidedly unpoetic the last week or so (not the least reason for which is that I’m trying to polish up three short stories to send to a contest; the first short stories I’ve written in, ugh, five years?), but the workshop last night did its job of jolting me back into a poetic frame of mind. Furthermore, Margo had a prompt with paintings, which I wanted to try:

This is “Crashed Aeroplane” by John Singer Sargent. Something about the men continuing to work with this crash in the background: I first thought, maybe it’s at the instant that it’s happening, then I thought, maybe it’s long after it’s happened, and the work must go on. But then I noticed the pipe in the rear figure’s mouth, and the phrase, “It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it,” popped into my head. And the rest of the extended metaphor tumbled out from there.

I tried to layer the metaphors and possible meanings pretty densely without giving too much away; I’d rather see what people get out of it. But anyway, that’s that.

Haymaking

The scythe-man chews his pipe as he works,
humming along with the locusts in flight.
He is all sweep and method when he comes,
sweated through his shirtsleeves. No one
ever said this would be an easy job.

Wind tonight, says the gathering-boy,
hugging the stalks to his chest, his arms
all flecked with blood. The scythe-man nods.
He looks back at the lilied house
shut up tight and wonders about the gables.

They bring quiet wherever they go, save for
the hush hush of falling timothy-grass.
A cloud-boat reopens over a golden sea gone
summer-noon green. These small disasters;
the scythe-man says one’s good as the other.

The Refinery: irene toh

Let this be the official call for Refinery submissions! After this one, the current stack is empty, unless I am just being thick-headed and missed something you asked me to look at for this little feature. And if you believe in groundhogs, there will be an early spring coming along: what better way to celebrate than by poem-revision? (As an aside: last night I took the train home from a party uptown with a couple friends-of-friends I met last night. The one was really drunk, and kept trying to ask about Punxsutawney Phil, but couldn’t get the word out correctly. We were having a mad laugh over everything from “Punky-foxy Flynn” to “Hooked-on-Phonics Bill” and everything in between, most of them too vulgar to post here.)

So, for our Refinery poem this time, we’ve got:

“If I Should Have a Son” by Irene Toh

Irene is another of those poetry blog superstars, who you’ve probably crossed paths with even if you don’t think you have. Another frequent contributor to several prompt sites, she also helps run We Write Poems and provides some of those weekly writing suggestions that it’s so easy to get hooked on. In her poems, I tend to look for specificity and unique uses of language; her metaphors often come out of left field and bop you on the nose with their originality. She writes about (in my impression) family and visionary dreams most often. Here is the one she sent in, which is a good representative of her work:

When someone is filled with longing,
a moth usually flutters to land
on the palm of a pillar, and you think,
has someone died?
When Timmy died, he sent
a dragonfly, with diaphanous wings,
unfazed, seething onto
the hall’s couch. Did he remember
where he used to lay whenever
he visited us, drank his milk
listening to our laughter?

You don’t know me, my son said.
Why, because I thought you’d be better off
doing something else, than us,
and when it is turning out that
you’re no different than us,
that your path would be in words,
not numbers, that just by the smell of
ginseng, you had confirmed its root
soaked in a bottle, uncapped.

And listening to a poet’s spoken
performance this morning,
it dawned on me that your gift
had already blossomed good. All the best
speaker trophies you had brought home
from school, why, I had forgotten.
Your birth, a year later than Timmy’s,
I’d often thought as wrought in destiny.
As if for all of life’s ill uncertainties
you need an aromatic cure:
a parsnip-looking prized root.

A powerful piece, and we want to make sure the theme doesn’t get lost in the mix. I’ll start with a few issues I think Irene ought to address, and then soften the blow with some positive reinforcement. :)
- Matt Groening talks about poets needing a complex and private system of symbols, which is true; I readily admit guilt to doing this. But I don’t think it’s the system of symbols itself that causes friction, because there are several things I want to stay: the dragonfly and moth, the ginseng in a bottle, the parsnip. I don’t need to know exactly what they mean, as long as there is some context to give me a hint. The poem is very mysterious in getting the significance of those items across, though, and I’m left with questions that are valuable, but distract from the raw enjoyment of the piece. I want to know what Timmy’s relation is to the speaker; I want to know (vis-a-vis the title) whether she actually has a son or not (though I’m pretty sure it’s the latter); and I’m not sure what the “path of words” proves, or why the speaker thought her son would be “better off doing something else”. Private significance is completely acceptable, but I want to see the door cracked open a little bit wider, because I’m afraid of interpreting the poem completely wrong.
- What also comes through strongly is the narrative: the speaker has a son, there was another boy named Timmy who died, the speaker is expressing emotions about her son. But again, there are questions I want answered, because the individual elements of the narrative need connective tissue. The transition from the first to the second (and then third) stanza is abrupt, but without a payoff; Timmy comes back briefly at the end, but I’m still not sure what the context of emotions surrounding the son are. Were they best friends, were they cousins, did they look alike and love the same things? There is a sense of disconnection between the speaker and her son; how did it come about, and is there a concrete resolution to those “ill uncertainties”? The poem could use expansion, but I suspect it doesn’t need to be longer; it would suffice to replace a thing or two with a bit more exposition (which can accommodate some more of those beautiful images).
- Therefore, what to replace? As I said, there are numerous excellent moments to keep, but also a couple of things to trim. Looking through the poem, everything I can pick out is extremely delicate, and must be carefully done, like heart surgery. (Some poems, you can cut out lines wholesale, but this isn’t one of them.) That “parsnip-looking prized root” at the end, for example: I want to cut it down to “prized parsnip” (or, if it’s referring to the ginseng “prized (some adjective like knobbly or wizened) root”), and immediately stanch the blood flow with another descriptive word or two. Some of the structure, too: “And listening to a poet’s spoken / performance this morning“, I want to change to something like, “This morning I listened to a poet,” followed by a replacement second line that makes the connection to the dawning comprehension that follows. Language can almost always be pulled more taut, unless you’re doing haiku. Then you have more room to build your poem’s body.

Enough griping! Let’s talk about some of the things that I refuse to allow to change:
- As I’ve alluded to, those images! Love them. The best speaker trophies brought home from school is a nice touch, and the ginseng in the bottle is one that’s going to stick with me long after reading this one. I get a sense of the personality of the son, and it’s paired with a nice sensory image that triggers specific thoughts. The idea of that wizened root (see what I did there? I’m going to keep voting for wizened) as an aromatic cure is touching, and I want to see more of its curative properties in action with some freshly-trimmed space higher up in the poem.The moth/dragonfly pairing; priceless.
- And that first stanza. Those first four lines especially. This poem comes to the party with an immediate presence: a nice motion from the general to the specific and almost surreal, a transition from “someone” to “you”. But it begins conversational, and continues through, changing it from your story to the speaker’s story. I loved “diaphanous” and “unfazed” and “seething”; the sound of the stanza is very rich. It gets a little bit weaker near the end (I think I’d rather see it as a statement rather than a question, since it leaves just the lead-off question at the beginning, making it that much stronger), and there needs to be tightening/connection to the next stanza as I mentioned before, but otherwise: very powerful. It resonates through the rest of the poem.
- I don’t see love in here. This might be a mixed blessing for Irene and her intention, so I’m going to defend my position: to me, this is a poem about acknowledging, confronting, and minimizing the cerebral aspects of having  a child. This is not a poem about the speaker’s love for her son. We have information about this other figure who died, Timmy (unless — see below — that is another son?), plenty of uninflected comparison, and information about the son being misunderstood, being placed off because that was what the parents thought were best. (That line “I had forgotten” and “wrought in destiny”: the son just kind of happened, it seems like.) But then there is a glimmer of rediscovery at the end (which could use expanding!), because obviously the speaker loves her son. It’s a rare poem that confronts this aspect of interaction, and I think it’s brave, elegantly handled, and unique for that.

A few more random bits:
- The title is overall just confusing me too much about the nature of the people in the poem, I think.
- Tell me more about the ginseng in a bottle! I want to know more!
- A couple repetitions that I think could be excised: that “why” of surprise, the second “when” in the first stanza, the “and” at the top of the third.
- There are a couple points where the grammar seems to break a little bit, particularly in the second stanza; I’m looking for a main verb clause after that “and when”…
- Despite everything I’ve just said, don’t kill the mystery. There’s an air of peeping into someone else’s family life that demands a little bit of standoffishness from the reader. Have you read Aimee Nezhukumatathil? Several of her poems create this sense in me when she discusses her sons.

So, Irene: I hope this helped! And everyone else: I think what I’ve been leaning towards (and shamelessly stealing from Donna Vorreyer a little bit with this) is crafting a prompt based on the poem here and my reactions to it. Let’s do it in italics:

Write a poem focusing on aspects of a family relationship that are rarely discussed, which are neither positive nor negative. Obfuscate your narrative a bit with some very carefully-crafted symbols; instead of leading us by the hand or eye, try leading us by the ear or nose, but always stay just around the corner. Bonus points for kicking off with a question, rhetorical or otherwise.

Happy writing!

Still Life

See? I told you I wouldn’t be gone long.

This one is kind of morose and morbid. We Write Poems wanted a piece that took something often seen as ugly and made it beautiful; I dislike getting too macabre and melancholy (god, so many good m-adjectives) with the beautification of death, I am no Baudelaire. But this was the first thing that popped into my head. There’s a reason I think we keep coming back to tragedy in our culture, and I suppose this was an attempt to pick that apart a little bit. I promise I’ll be back to my usual cheerful observational self with the next one.

This is post 1001, which has all kinds of pleasing Scheherezade undertones. That’s it for the milestones today, though.

Still Life

He froze to death, right there, on a bench under the pine
sloping westward. Police come to Jackson Square, all black gloves
and yellow tape, searching his pockets for a name. We stare

through the iron gates, thinking, out here is all pumping blood
and carrying voices, and in there is all hush and cessation.
One of his hands claws forever at the sky. There are crystals

decorating his beard. Police sip coffee and take their notes,
and we want to peer over their shoulders. We circle. The man,
posed at every angle: accusing, forlorn, merely sleeping.

We haven’t seen him before, in that rustling coat worn colorless,
those chewed-up boots. They’ll label him Unknown, lay him out
on Hart Island in earth too solid to accept a single crocus,

despite our best intentions. He is brushed with blue.
Police refuse to tell us anything, so we detach and float,
Orphean, afraid to turn away. All art is a merciless teacher

we can’t resist. It comes suddenly: a dead man grows sculptural
and sorrowful; police murmur like flies; and we drift home,
where we will hold each other in silence by the fire.

The Refinery: misky

By chance, I am again free this evening. (That cold weather just keeps people from honoring their plans.) And since I’m not feeling particularly inspired by the cold — mostly just grumpy — I thought I would get around to doing that Refinery I owe you, at last. The thought of not having something for Margo’s roundup tomorrow just pushed me over the edge. As a result of the delay, the next one might be later in the weekend as well, just so they’re not super close together. This time around, I give you…

“Mere Reflections of Dust” by Misky

By the by, I’m preserving the pen name for this one; last weekend was a testament to the thrill and effort of keeping one intact, and I like to honor that. I hope you will all do the same! Misk is a fixture on the poetry blogosphere scene, a participant in… well, I don’t even know how many websites and prompt-houses, but several of them. Her work tends to have a delicate feel to me, something to be handled with deft fingers, and is often thoughtful about particular observations. This time, she has offered up a sestina for our perusal.

It’s time. We open lace-frosted windows.
We shake memories from your duvet.
We straighten and pinch pleats into curtains.
We brush away bits of you flaked to dust,
but we leave your shoes paired and lined
as neatly moored boats in the closet.

And three bullfinches watch us, closeting
away their want to flight. Spiegelled to windows,
sat there on lichen-crusted branches, lined-
up like clothes pegs, feathers fluffed into duvets
against December’s chill. Their songs as light as dust.
Long frills of song that silt through closed curtains.

Forever I’ll think of winter smoky smells curling in curtains,
a rush of summer scents at the church doors. Priestly closets
of ritual water, lit wax tapers, and prayers. Roses that dust
cold stone aisles. You tucked up in heaven, our hearts windows
opened to every changeable storm as cold winter sun lines
crosses from lead panes. Shadowy clouds of tumbling duvets.

Forever I’ll remember summer winds and spinnaker duvet-
soft sails filled with holidays. The boat’s lip drinking curtains
of sea, tipped like a chalice filling with blind joy and lined
with the twinkle of your eye. These. Locked away. Closeted.
Protected where air won’t dilute our memories. A window
where we see you, recalling more than today’s sparkling dust.

Forever I’ll remember your hands mending dry walls. Stone dust
dancing with your smile that spilled into a laugh, soft as a duvet
and just as light. You watching weather passing by the window,
your shadow lingers on the floor, your fingers still curl the curtains
and a brown spiced scent spills through my thoughts from your closet.
Our safe harbour. A sanctuary of memories. We’re anchored and lined.

This morning we woke. Your shirts and shoes tidy. In line.
Your old gold watch and bedside clock wound. Dusted.
A hanger keeps your wedding suit of 60-years ago. Closeted.
The past holds our cherished memories — suddenly your duvet
swirls dizzying scents of you as I open your bedroom curtains that
still curl where your fingers held them open against the window.

Your cologne lines your closet with a lifetime of rich memories.
A bright scent freshened by an open window and sun-filled curtains.
I shake your duvet, dust sprinkled with sunshine. I’m filled with you.

…whew. Sestinas always take me through half a mug of cocoa. I hope you all had a beverage as well; it’s thirsty work to read them, and even thirstier to write them. So, because it’s so long, I really have to try and find general things: I could be pulling specific likes and dislikes out of a sestina all day. Also, I have to ask: is it better or worse to start with things that are liked or disliked? In the poetry workshops I did last weekend, we started with the positive before moving on to what could use improvement; I’m really ambivalent about it, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or anything.

Anyway, I’ll stick with the usual method for now:
- Visually, the thing that stands out to me most is the gradual lengthening of the lines, which is the prerogative of the poet, but doesn’t endear itself to me. Unless you are trying to do something specific with the language and/or structure, I do feel that a poem should establish its shape pretty early on: don’t tease your reader! If you start with a rhyming couplet, and then go all e.e. cummings on us, it will be jarring, which is an effect you may not want. This isn’t to say that all of your lines should be of equal length, but part of the attraction of most formal verse is that it has a regularity which comforts the reader and keeps them going. (Seeing the expansion of this poem could scare a reader away.) Free verse, or forms without fixed meter, need to pay careful attention to this because they’re unconstrained. Unless you’re attempting to give a sense of imbalance, try to actively give a sense of balance.
- So, how to make the lines shorter, in that case? What springs to mind for me is that the details could be denser. There are some truly lovely images scattered through the sestina, that I think would be even more powerful if they were compacted. Take a line like, “Our safe harbor. A sanctuary of memories. We’re anchored and lined.” (I chose this because it’s the one that can’t even fit on my admittedly narrow blog display.) In a poem that is so image-rich — essentially it’s a list poem, of sensory memories — you can do away with most prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and even verbs, relying on nouns, adjectives, gerunds, and punctuation to do your dirty work. Try: “Our harbor of memories anchored, lined.” The language becomes a lot dreamier. Or take, “[your duvet / ] swirls dizzying scents of you as I open your bedroom curtains that“, and try, “swirls your scent in the opening curtains“. Look for where to trim the fat: your instead of of you; does something that swirls also need to be described as dizzying; aren’t we already in the bedroom; and so on.
- I know this poem was written to a prompt, but (and bear with me) I don’t think this needed to be a sestina. It’s fine in the execution, but there are two things that a sestina needs to truly keep the reader’s attention: versatility in its repetitions, and a compelling narrative. I am not disputing the beauty of the images, the richness of the emotions behind them (which I’ll get to below!), or the success of the endwords; however, each stanza should hook the reader into the next one, or they start to lose interest. Any one of these stanzas could be a complete poem in and of itself, so to put them all together, we need more connective tissue. And about prompts: sometimes you have a poem where there’s just one nagging thing that isn’t working, which turns out to be the prompt direction itself. When in doubt, axe it and follow your own guidance!

With the things I’d like to see change come the things I’d like to see kept:
- That first stanza is dyn-o-mite. I get the feeling that it was the initial poem, and the attempt here was to expand a poem that already worked into a sestina, with mixed results. The first two words – It’s time – we immediately know we’re dealing with a significant moments. We and you establish the personae, the windows and the bedroom trappings establish the setting, and the actions – bits of you flaked to dust is marvelous — tell us what’s going on. And those shoes at the end are a wonderful complication to the mood. Reminds me of Joan Didion’s memoir, where she talks about clearing out her dead husband’s things, but can’t bring herself to touch his shoes (because her grief-rationale is that when he comes back, he’ll need them).
- As I mentioned, I really dig the imagery overall, even if I think some of the lines could be shorter. Some of them do clever things with the endword repetition, a must in the sestina: the birds fluffing up their own little duvets was adorable, though I don’t know if adorable was the mood that should’ve come across to the reader. There is a nice assortment of recurring motifs throughout the piece: smell, nautical themes, winter, the home and domesticity. I want even more detail: are the bullfinches murmuring laments or crooning hymns, what kind of cologne and spices are we talking about, etc. But there is already a wonderful richness to the description.
- Memorial poems are tough to do overall, both to write and to critique: after wrenching the emotion out of you onto the paper, the worst thing is when someone is indifferent to it, or finds it trite. Trust me that I’m not being disingenuous when I say the theme is handled well here, with the list of images: I usually think this is the best way to do a loss poem. Think of W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”, with its commands to dismantle the sun; at no point does the author say, “oh my god i am so sad and life is terrible”. He shows it. This sestina is more wistful than melancholy, but it has that same reaction to a person who’s gone, leaving some kind of presence behind. We do not need to be told how the author feels, we see it already.

That’s the overview and all. Some extra thoughts!
- The sestina already has enough repetition; I wouldn’t do more than you need to. “Forever” and “memories” and “clouds” and all can be replaced with something else. The repetition should be subtle.
- I’m not back-pedaling when I say that at a few points, some of the punctuation is strange. I know I said use it to your advantage, but always read it back to yourself to see how it sounds. The full stop. Can. Be. Too. Choppy.
- Nice ending. Often, sestina writers get to the envoi and say, “oh damn, what do I do with these six words,” but I don’t have a sense of that (though again, the lines could be tightened a bit, like violin strings).
- The vocabulary is rich, but I don’t know how to feel about spiegelled. It’s a beautiful word, but the meaning is getting a little bit lost on me. (All I know is that it’s German for “mirror”.)
- At a couple points, the verb tense changes, and I can’t tell if it’s intentional…
- If this does stay a sestina, I have to congratulate Misky on the internal lists that don’t grow stale, and (usually) conceal the endwords nicely. (Be careful of getting too clever, though; don’t force those lists for the sake of making an endword fit in!)

Thus concludes this edition. Misky, take to heart what you will for this one, but you get the JH Seal of Approval on this one; the attempt itself is worthy of praise. And to all the other sestineers out there, I hope you take some of this advice to heart if you’re writing 39-line behemoths of your own: give them the time and attention they deserve! See you all next time around…

Milagrymos

Friday! And everything that comes with it.

To add to the melancholia of this week, it’s Nicholas’ birthday today; and I can’t remember the exact day, but it was this week four years ago that I lost one of the motherly figures in my life (a manager at work when I was living in Philadelphia, thieving food and living wild) in a car crash. Still no funeral plans for my brother’s godfather, but I’m sure they’ll be on the horizon soon.

I heard this song today for the first time:

The lyrics are just, “(No,) I can’t stop it,” over and over, with a constant heartbeat underneath. But somehow the singer’s voice just seems to soar from hesitant to resigned to mournful to awestruck to exultant to enraged in four short minutes. That seems to echo how I feel about the inertia of this week(/month, really), and I worked those feelings into this piece. There’s something haunting and macabre, but beautiful and peaceful about the whole thing. Form-wise, this is Khara House original, called the settennet, sort of a shadormish form. It’s also for her challenge to coin a word for a feeling that doesn’t have a single word to represent it. So, I offer this, in whatever language will have it:

milagrymos (n) (derivation: milagro, Spanish, “miracle” + lachrymosus, Greek via Latin, “tearful”) — the feeling of being helpless to resist being carried along by the events in one’s life, which all seem to be beautiful and devastating at the same time

I also offered Khara a form in response, so I’ll re-iterate my kyrioum that I made for the poem Botany, Shmotany a while back. It’s a kyrielle/pantoum combo: iambic tetrameter (rare for me!), and the lines go A1A2B1B2 // A2A3B2B3 // A3A4B3B2 // A4A5B2B4 // … // AxA1B2B1 at the end. Check it out, see how it’s constructed, give it a whirl if you’ve a mind to.

After posting this, I’m going to type up my long poem and send it to a few choice people for their feedback. Then I’m going to take every feeling that’s in me right now and pour it into the mould of another poem I’ve been thinking about for Nicholas, for weeks. And a poem of mine is up at Red Fez this issue, so you should check it out!

Milagrymos

Who would not want to stop
time
dead– examine it
crawling
the seafloor rocks,
searching for
its venomed barbs, its slow sting?

Who has never balanced
rhyme
against reason– been
falling
in love with that
helplessness
raging with wonder and fear?

Who can speak the utter
name
for it– realizing
this beat,
forward motion,
the long tide
littered with our thousand shells?

Who is seduced by the
same
thing twice– swept off
their feet
by saltwater,
caught off guard,
dazzled with one perfect tear?

The Wake

This has not been a good summer for anyone, it seems like. Today we lost a family friend (my brother’s godfather), who had been struggling with illness for a long time. It’s unsettling when there just seems to be nothing but death and misfortune in your life and the lives of others that you know, but I suppose we must reach the bottom of things before they can improve, sometimes. Anyway, DVerse asked for a sonnet, so this was on my mind today. I think that really, no one is good at funerals, but some people are just better at faking it than me. A happier one tomorrow, I hope…

The Wake

I don’t know what to say at funerals;
I have no words of remedy, no cures.
(The ancients wrote them somewhere, to be sure,
in sea-drowned tomes or black incunables.)
I know the minute’s worth in numerals,
how necessary that each hour endures.
I know the things to say to sound mature;
but nothing easy, nothing beautiful.
So silence is the haven where I go:
dealt out with hands, drawn in with memory.
I know my observations: husbands, wives,
this dim grey peace, this timeless undertow.
I know enough to know this treasury,
these things that fill our dreamless afterlives.