Triolet and Cascade in a Hanging Garden

I had the writer/artist salon tonight, which was nice; we ended up playing with duct tape and talking this-and-that. I don’t know what I’ll do once the poetry workshop ends in six weeks (although there may be another in the fall I can hop in), but I hope the salon will keep the social side of me going. Either that or I’ll have to find some kind of group to get involved with that appeals to my sensibilities and isn’t too bitchy.

As I (just!) remarked on Facebook(!), I keep finding myself drawn to the persona of Amytis, Nebuchadnezzar’s wife for whom the Hanging Gardens were supposedly built. A quick rundown of the appealing bits: she was a Persian queen married to a Babylonian king for political reasons (and quite late in her life, apparently), she moved from a wild mountainous place to hot plains slowly becoming desert, and she struggled with that homesickness. But then, he must have loved her, to build her this massive reminder of her homeland; and then, she (and the gardens) might be totally mythological, combined with all the other mythology/history surrounding Babylon/Persia, Iraq/Iran. On top of that you have all this potential for the lush descriptions of nature and class politics of absolute religious monarchy. I don’t know if this will turn into anything substantial (like Donna‘s Pioneer Woman), but hey, I’ll roll with it for now.

Also, this is for both the NaPoWriMo and Miz Quickly prompts, both of whom asked for repeating forms. Ugh, at least I got one in before bed.

Triolet and Cascade in a Hanging Garden

The servants turning water screws
discuss me and my wedding-gift.
Who spawned this dismal woman?, muse
the servants. Turning water-screws
makes bitter work. I didn’t choose
this waste, this continental drift.
You servants turning water screws,
discuss me. I’m the wedding-gift.

…

The queen is softly weeping in the garden,
not from sorrow, but from that barren species of joy
full of mirage. And still she must love it:

a river is made to bleed up into the temple to water
her memory-land carried as dowry. So who knows why
the queen is softly weeping in the garden?

Persian grass and mountain pinks beard comets
down the walls. She breathes air sweet and heavy
not from sorrow, but from that barren species of joy

that knows at last the truth of things. Cities are prisons:
this beloved hill hides mechanics, its petty desert
full of mirage. And still: she must love it.

Vädersolstavlan

Another Miz Quickly prompt! (The rain has picked up considerably, and I am finished with dinner and all, so there is really nothing more to do tonight except writing poems and some freelance translation; I’ll be up a while anyway.) Yesterday’s was to pick a day in history and key off that for a poem. There were a couple options, spread over April 18, 19, and 20 (since it’s already April 20 everywhere east of here), but I settled on the Sun Dog Phenomenon of 1535 (thanks Wikipedia) over Stockholm. It was the inspiration for the famous, apparently “Swedish pride” kind of painting whose title this poem has borrowed. See below:

Pretty beautiful, no? Look at all them little sundogs and parhelia! And since the 1500s were a good time for seeing meaning in astronomical events, I thought I’d do a cute little paean to the painting and the nation of Sweden, as it’s a pretty cool nation. Well, most of the time. I’m sure some others might disagree.

Vädersolstavlan

After the birth of a city
comes the idea of the city

gloried like a construct saint:
miracle of the raised beam,

miracle of the placed stone.
And good as any flag comes

this vision of a ringing sun,
as if it were a great bell tone

and the city the echo
upon echo, all the sun’s noise

rippling around a hopeful bay.
The idea drinks, takes root:

miracle of a nation
spoken into one place.

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.

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.

Gauguin’s Washerwomen

One more before I quit the café, seeing as they close in twenty minutes, and I need to cook myself some wholesome food. Poets and Writers has some good-looking prompts this month, and as I am a subscriber and everything, I thought I’d give their ekphrastic prompt a try (from Day 2). The suggestion was to go to the MoMa website, where I found the Gauguin painting referenced in the title:

At the workshop on Monday, I brought an ekphrastic poem, and I do want to share a few musings that came up in that discussion. First and foremost, it is terribly important to move outside the frame of the painting; the poem should stand on its own. Pretend that the person has no way of seeing the painting, or even the title, for a clue. If you’re too focused on the images and things going on in the image, you may lose some of the power, and an ekphrastic poem should never diminish a poem’s power, only enhance or at least complement it. Secondmost, do this as soon as possible within the poem! In this piece, I got a little bit meta, talking about the artist as much as the poem itself, and the importance of both, which may not have been the best tack. Do what you have to do to immediately indicate to the reader that this is a poem about the poet considering art, not necessarily a narrative or exploration inside the painting itself. (You can do that too, but they tend to be more peculiar than the former.) And lastly, any references you do make to what’s inside the frame should be as universal as possible. Therefore, this poem ended up being a praise poem about ladies! And not in a romantic or objectifying way, or at least, I hope it doesn’t come across that way: it’s half a blazon-poem for the mothers (and I suppose wives), sisters, aunts, grandmothers, etc., without whom (and without whose Herculean efforts) none of us would be here.

Perhaps you would like to try this prompt as well…?

Gauguin’s Washerwomen

Praise be to the ones who take us, lightly,
by the chin, and turn our heads around
to see the history of labor laid out in our wake.
Praise be to those languages where machine
is a feminine noun, worn through as it is
with a thousand thousand pairs of careful arms
so used to the weight of a child and hands
that have memorized every inch of every home:
praise be to the ones who show us that.
Praise be to a woman’s work, which is never
finished, and to a woman’s strength, and to
the life-weavers whose names and faces
we cannot know, without whose loving patience
we would not exist to praise them now.
Praise be to the tired back and stooped neck.
Praise be to the ones who hold us
around the shoulders as they lay the angles
over each crooked bone, saying, look,
this is what you are the fortunate heirs to.
Praise be to the parade of history; praise be
to those who peel off hay-green squares of it
thin as gold leaf, slowing down time enough
for water to turn to stone and grow moss
as the first crisp of autumn forever folds
a woman’s apron into pleats, then lift the whole
river with its line of women and write on a wall
with a language that is all color: praise,
praise, praise.

A Warm Day on Titan

This wasn’t at all the poem I set out to write, but there you go. It started with this idea of science and religion, and turned into some thoughts on a Wiki article I stumbled across about the theory of ancient astronauts, and some notes were taken for it on a train ride, and… well, it just went bonkers from there. In workshop, our moderator often writes these rambling musings, so some of that style got in there too, but I wasn’t sure what to do with this one. So I’m just going to pitch it up here unaltered and see what happens.

A Warm Day on Titan

I was reading about the theory of ancient astronauts:
how our human ingenuity was not enough for fire-making,
or Great Pyramids, or the invention of gods– and so some
figures must have descended like Prometheus, all light,
to prick us in the consciousness. And maybe an old priest
came up from Thebes, climbed to meet the travelers

who told him (like I-AM to Moses) how Venus, the traveler
star of the evening, was sulfuric, molten, any astronauts
foolish enough to land killed instantly. Then from the priest
spread an idea of Hell along the red Nile and beyond, making
its miserable rounds. I don’t know if I believe it. If the light
switches off, and I’m only left with terror, maybe. Some

familiar bell is rung. But here’s what I wonder: would some
other extraterrestrials have first granted them that traveler’s
spirit? When faced with the impossible, do they make light
of it, say, “it’ll be a cold day on Venus,” forgetting astronauts
crushed to death before them? Here’s the point I’m making:
there is a place for the scientist, and a place for the priest,

and I don’t think you can do without either. In Babylon, “priest”
meant “king”; it follows that the analytical mind rules in some
inverted place. And we’re abandoned in between, making
do with half-stories, half-logic. We’re the worst sort of travelers:
Orphean, necks twisted. We could be the ancient astronauts
to someone else, explaining the truths and mechanics of light

with mythology. (The Eagle Nebula’s Virgin and her light-
year Child; Orion buckling a blue-white belt.) We’re high priests
of the full circle. But I’m telling you this, not some astronaut,
because I’m on a train feeling earthbound, seeking some
capacity for kinship. This is the curse of everyday travelers:
to always be dissatisfied, the drab surroundings making

you wish for some magic. Leaving Secaucus, we’re making
slow time past graffiti levees, brown marshes decaying light.
Can you blame me for dreaming? And my fellow travelers
stare unsatisfied out the windows, too, each one a priest
given the chance. Me, I’d preach the moon called Titan (some
ancient giant), orbiting Saturn, where (according to astronauts)

oceans of ethane boil cold. I’d get there uncertain, priest
making science out of legend-names, traveler carving religion
from light. Some astronaut! But being what we are– I could do
no less.

Whitman’s Kiss

I don’t read enough Whitman. I know there’s a copy of Leaves of Grass at the old homestead somewhere, I just have never gotten around to sitting down and reading the whole thing. Maybe that will be an April goal. But I have read my fair share of Whitman, and I do have that note of South Jersey/Manhattan Whitman pride. DVerse wanted to hear about people we’d like to meet, and I would absolutely love to have met Whitman. Relatively little of that has to do with his status of Great American Poet (for I can think of few contenders for the title), but rather because his verse is just so ecstatic and liberated and self-aware without being self-conscious. This poem keyed a little bit off “I Sing the Body Electric”, but mostly it’s just a little dash of exuberance about the man and his work; I could keep going on this all night, though I think it’s best to quit the poem before too long.

Whitman’s Kiss

We would be breathing the dust of an unpaved street
deep in the ventricles of the Village, those New York parts
pumping city traffic north-south, heady, honeyed, dazed;
for this would be Walt Whitman of Manhattan and
not the shy Long Island boy smoldering with pale light
or the Prince of Camden ragged-breathed by a slow river.
This is that nameless Whitman from the engraving
where at one angle he looks ready to rip off his shirt
and pop off trouser buttons one by one, perfectly lithe,
tanned, bit of grey, and yet from another angle
considering something just over your shoulder, head tilted,
eyebrow raised, deciding on the right thing to say.
He is half pornographer and half philosopher, thatched
but polished, and we would hang from the iron railings
still steaming from summer rain as he describes
muscles releasing under crinoline or gingham
easy as syllables, pointing out every twitch and holler,
movement language multiplied ten thousandfold.
This is that certain Whitman bursting from his upbringing
as the first crocus does from its snow-covered bud,
all hymn and wonder, the wildfire crying for peace! peace!
and the masculine soil praising love, the blood delta
swimming with bardic ancestry, anatomist practiced
in descending the marvelous body as a drop of water.
Here, he would say, feel my smoothness and my
careful percolation, how I can work my way into each
hairsbreadth, each capillary, and see, how underneath
the earthy flesh grows so narrow that it turns to fire;
and I say, yes, it’s like touching a battery to your tongue,
it’s like singing an unknotted firework, at last, at last.

Glacial Erratic

Bored out of my wits as work wraps up today; I suppose it’s better than being going crazy busy, but still, some activity would be nice. I had time to crank out this little piece for DVerse, where they are asking for poems from the point of view of an object, or otherwise giving it, I don’t know, sympathy might be the word. I enjoy animating and mythologizing things, but I don’t quite like to make the leap into first-person (as in the example poem by Gregory Corso, “The Mad Yak”, that was given). I do like the concept of kami in Japanese tradition, the spirits of nature inhabiting even the smallest bits of the world around us, because it generates respect and thoughtfulness for your surroundings. Anyway, that’s that.

Glacial Erratic

By accident, it arrived
when the ice at last became water again
and left it there on a stripped plain.
Soon, grass, shrubland, megafauna.
Then, the inhabiting spirit
spoken like a spell by roving tribes
touching its face. It learned scrape
and slow erosion from the ice
that wandered it down the mountain.
For one brief eon it knew
change and motion; and does it mourn
that loss, its mentor element melted
to populate some river. Some sea
whose salt is too distant.
What possible thoughts does the sun
knock loose as it flickers
minimal gold through the pores.
And do they pass into we who sprawl
marveling in its shade, like the stories
lost parents used to tell.

Three Lunes in a Hanging Garden

I’ve been playing a lot of this board game 7 Wonders lately, with the premise being inspired by the wonders of the ancient world. Babylon has always been my favorite, even though it might be mythical: it was the only one that required constant intervention to still be wondrous, with living pieces of its mechanism, it was built not because of religion or a show of power or utilitarian uses, but because of love, and it just has the greatest name. The Hanging Gardens: how cool is that? I would love to write a series of poems, or at least a long-ish one, on the mythology behind it.

They stand at an interesting nexus, too. I think of water, gardens, Babylon, and a noble woman when I think of them, and all the combinations: water and Babylon (which makes me think of the Flood), water and a noble woman (which makes me think of Ophelia), gardens and Babylon (which makes me think of the dawn of agriculture), gardens and a noble woman (which is a mythic trope you find again and again in literature), etc. I thought about trying to work a lot of that into this piece, but it is intended to be short form, so… not so much.

DVerse is asking for short form pieces. I’ve also been into the Imagists lately (by which I mean this weekend), so Ezra Pound (for all his faults) and WCW have been on the mind. I haven’t really done much with the lune, the 5/3/5 “American haiku” that has been bandied about from time to time, so here’s three of them on the vine. Kept very passive and Imagist, I think. There’s some little sound device treats mixed in as well, but I think the deeper narrative stuff will have to wait for another, longer poem.

Three Lunes in a Hanging Garden

Tea roses hung from
the terrace
drip a slow, red braid.
Screws turn the rainfall
whenever
darkness is named shade.
Fire on the roof and
a flood dream
make a decent trade.

A Bend in the Sound

I know I owe you guys a Refinery post and a Curio post. My schedule is fairly clear this evening (though I am forcing the Fellow to watch Twin Peaks, because honestly, how could I not?, so maybe that will take time), and I am hoping that I can get that done at least. Goodness knows the absolute last thing I’ll want to do is brave the elements, with wind chill reaching negative numbers. Ugh.

I am at work right now, writing poetry. This is a normal and everyday thing when I have downtime, and it doesn’t really impact my job. But, lately I’ve been getting very disenchanted with things around here, which (for a reason I won’t get into) was cemented yesterday. I’ve set a number of plans in motion to go with, and in a few months we’ll see how bad things get with the job. The other thing is, at the Winter Getaway this weekend and at the monthly writer-artists’ salon last night, I had occasion to talk to a number of people about life: bottom line, what good is a little bit more financial security and schedule regularity if you’re miserable? I would rather work three part-time jobs at odd hours and enjoy them, with writing in the free spaces, than struggle through the workday. Especially last night, when I was discussing all the non-text storytelling ideas I’ve had in the arts realm, and receiving enthusiastic support from the group, I felt that urge. So we’ll see how that develops, I suppose.

Swapped chapbooks with another poet, Tara, last night, since we’ve promising to do that for months. And one of the other attendees (who is an author I grew up reading and admiring and get tongue-tied around) took a peek at my book, and said, “These are really good!” Chuffed to bits, I was. That got me thinking about the weekend all over again, and thinking about how to make more room for the creative in 2013. So: there is a weekly workshop by Douglas Goetsch (who I met at the Getaway, and who was way cool), starting next Monday. It is, for me, a pretty penny; but it could be worth the expense? I would rather wait until I have some cash saved up, but I’m not sure if there will be another workshop in the near future which I can attend. Also, it’s five minutes from my apartment, so that’s a nice touch. What do you guys think?

And at last, a poem. Donna‘s prompt to write about a place (but focus on the people) was filed in the back of my head all last week, and I finally finished this beast of a thing about it. Most of you are aware that this name of mine is a pen name, but you might not know that it is an old family name, and there is an island in North Carolina from the same ancestral roots. (The first section is the gospel truth.) I’ve thought about visiting, though I could’ve written more stanzas about how I expect it would be rather different from anything in my experience, and actually I might not get along with the people there. But there is something indescribable about the connection of family, and name, and language, that meshes with the vision of the sea and the land at war like that. It’s a concrete little pebble buried deep inside that isn’t going anywhere.

A Bend in the Sound

1.
My professor says she was enchanted by this
postage stamp of an island, down the Carolina coast
where Back Sound squares its shoulders
against the loom of a hurricane. She says,
it’s the vowels.
The way a long ah will be half-swallowed,
caught under the tongue with pious humility,
while the flimsy ih is given a light shriek,
the long ee of the seashore
and the storm at night.
I’m writing a book on it, she says, and I feel
misplaced pride when I tell her half a lie, saying,
yes, I know, that is my island.

2.
The body is a museum with a hundred wings
devoted to every genetic stitch: and I’d like to think
there is a fingerbone or narrow bile duct
that I could say, here is the part I share with you,
great-grandmother, counting back growth rings,
finding a name and three lines of a story.
I cling to that when the water
rises. And some well-gardened ancestor
split into pieces, one of them carried southward
thanks to longshore drift, to this place
I have never been.
He planted our name in the reeds and marl,
unfurled it to wave in a stranger salt breeze.
Sometimes, a ghost comes to each of us
to whisper heirloom ideas when we do not
expect it. Then, we must decide
which histories matter to us the most.

3.
Somewhere, I have a cousin
who gets up before dawn to smear white paint
across the prow of a splintered boat, dragging
patchwork nets to the beach and stumbling
when the wind kicks down the dune.
I remember reading that we are all related,
if you count back far enough:
aunts and uncles, terribly removed.
But blood-iron is magnetic too, twitching direction
towards its kin. If I stood among the marram grass
watched the lanterns wink on the choppy sound,
I would lean forward, heartfirst.
Somewhere, I have a cousin
with the same right iris, the same tender rib.
She is smoking a cigarette and reading Elijah;
she is cutting up cucumbers for a midday snack;
we put consonants at the ends of our names.

4.
Cape Lookout could be gone in a hundred years.
No predictions: but that wildcat water gets crazy,
drinks deep in the summer.
Then, the dock piles and the church doors
and the stacked creels and the power lines
will know oceanic mercy. I dream of rock people
eroded, resigned, carrying on floating.
But I worry about how maps change at that bend
in the sound. Who will share my named body
when the storms split the living room walls?
At sunset, the wind threatens
an orange light speaking exodus, watermark
change, things that are inescapable.
The only glimmer in my dream is that the past,
having happened, is inescapable, too.

5.
If you stand at the mouth of the inlet
that digs into the southernmost cape, you can
see the barrier shoals, the ocean just beyond.
Hollowed-out vowels and old, old stories
bob in the slosh like big-bellied pottery,
laughing their mouths up just once
before they tip, fill, and hide from view.