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.

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.

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.

Karma

One more before I go make dinner and then proceed to a friend’s graduation-from-acting-school show. (I know, look at me, such the social butterfly today.) Miz Quickly is asking for sonnets. The thing with me and sonnets — and I may have given this story before — is that, back in high school (during the first era of poetry, when I was a high school poet like everyone else), I used to be part of, and eventually run, this online poetry group thing on Saturday evenings, because I was totally one of the Cool Kids. And one of the challenges we used to do was Seven-Minute Sonnets (sometimes Six-), where you were given a line/a theme/three specific words, and had that length of time to do a sonnet. So I got very practiced at doing rapid rhyme and pentameter, and when lucky, a volta (as every good sonnet should have).

The downside is that I can almost never think of a theme for sonnets. Every sonnet prompt I’ve seen is, I think, simply “write a sonnet”, because that’s usually enough. Which means I have to go hunting for ideas; I refuse, point-blank, to default to doing a love sonnet. I cruised over to Verse Daily and ended up at the Charles Simic poem “Roadside Stand”; I only read the first line before immediately rushing back to write the sonnet, after an experience from childhood I’m probably mis-remembering. The sonnet is about as regular and exactas I get with them; the narrative is pretty self-explanatory. And this is one of my rare actual narrative poems, with very little else going on it (except for maybe a too-subtle allusion here or there), so… enjoy!

Karma

My mother swings off-course and cries, fresh corn!
The sign hangs awkward, painted red and white:
she knows the market. We are sometimes born-
again to local farms, lapsed converts sworn
then swayed and swayed again. A secret right,
an unpaved road, the farmer’s gingham wife
up to our window. Taste this, have a bite–
but we crave corn. The wife sighs, money’s tight,
we had to sell. Instead, she has black plums
like far-off planets ready for the knife.
Of course, desire denied is hard-replaced:
but see the yard, the house. My mother thumbs
through dollars: we’ll make cobbler, or still-life.
The fruit is passed; my mother’s hand, embraced.

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.

Three Magnolia Tanka

After the long mess of a day at work, I carried on to the yoga studio to do my shift, cleaning and things. Pretty exhausted by this point, and probably about to hit the hay, but I didn’t want to pass up the tanka-writing challenge set by NaPoWriMo, particularly as I’ve been noticing the magnolias lately, ready to burst in bloom. Bury me under a magnolia when my time comes. So, this is three tanka for those marvelous trees. (Although, they are pushing the envelope of what I consider best practices for writing tanka/haiku/other waka forms. Mea culpa.) Maybe I’ll manage one more before I pass out…

Three Magnolia Tanka

What is the sentence
spelled by the magnolia branch,
each bud a comma?
Your hand, the full stop, tugs it:
you cannot tell me either.

…

A coin thrown on earth
does not ring like fountain-coins
tossed in the water;
I will continue to wish
into the magnolia’s dirt.

…

In your hair you wore
the purple-kissed magnolia
until it went brown.
Now, it’s so awful to walk
these tree-lined streets in April.

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.

Recursion Five: water borders

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, German Existentialist philosopher

I can’t believe we’ve made it through this week already. Aside from two meal events on Sunday, I intend to spend my weekend doing very little of anything except reading and writing, drumming up some poetic inspiration. It might be self-evident, but if you find yourself getting blocked up in the ideas, just try surfing poetry websites and exploring as diverse a collection of stuff you love and hate as you can muster. I was on Poetry Foundation till 1 in the morning; I’m only operating now thanks to coffee. That’s how I get through my day: caffeine, and poetry, and a double helping of chutzpah and gumption. Anyway.

In keeping with our notions of re-examining the random fodder of inspiration flowing our way, let’s change perspective (woo three dimensions again!) and think of the river not as a course to be ridden down, but as a border. Step to the side a bit, or rise into the air, and you’ll see that even a small creek changes the nature of the land it runs across. The environment that grows around is different from what it would be were the water absent (which we’ll talk about tomorrow), and as the water picks up speed and volume, the strength of the border increases. I grew up in New Jersey, which always seemed to me one of the most island-y of states (except for Hawaii). Along one side is the Delaware River; along two of the others are the ocean and the Hudson. Only on the north is there a land border with New York, maybe 50 miles at best, out of a perimeter of (according to the Internet) either 440, 480, or 516 miles. So at about 90% of the state border, you need a boat or bridge to leave, and while that percentage may be approached or exceeded by other non-Hawaiian states (Alaska, Louisiana, Michigan, Maine?), certainly NJ has the overall shortest of the land borders. Something to be proud of!

A lot of my friends growing up had small creeks running through gullies dividing their property from the next suburbanite’s, often tannic things that flowed into underground pipes rather than any larger body of water. Outside of the little copses surrounding the streams, the landscape appears to be a pretty seamless quilt of houses and manicured yards, so even those miniscule (in the grand hydrological scheme) flows held significance to us. (So did highways and strip farmland and undeveloped ridges, of course, but that’s not the metaphor this month.) Even at this point in the writing process, it is possible to move laterally and observe the ideas and images you’ve been summoning up as something to be battled across, or at least as a wall that separates you from something else. Try this: first, gather up some images the same way we’ve been doing all week. Pick random objects, words stolen from conversations, phrases you come across in reading in other poems, and make a list. Try to get at least ten, more if possible; you can recycle unused ones from freewriting in other prompts if desired.

Now, on either side of that column, try to come up with two connected images/concepts/whatever such that the central item is an obstacle. This can either be a logical relationship (if I have rusted car on my list, I could put traveling to and baby shower on either side), or one that requires some thought (how does sewing basket separate game of marbles and a friend who died young? get creative!). You can challenge yourself by making the pairs separately, and assigning them at random to the central list: you never know who your neighbors in a new place will be, after all. And you can think of any given triplet like this: “How is the connection between X and Y interrupted/complicated by Z?” Don’t allow yourself to build easy bridges or wade shallow fords: you must work to move across those ideas. As you explore these relationships between people, objects, and events, you can chain them together into a poem, pick one to explore deeply and emotionally, or just muse overall (as though you were suspended overhead) on the nature of what separates us.

I hope that’s not too arcane, and that you get some useful writing out of it. And moreover, I hope you’ll consider coming back and sharing with the group…

The Procession of Saints

Finally back in a place with a stable Internet connection; you never realize how much you miss the little things until they’re gone. I’m playing catch-up on the monthly poems, with two done for the day (only one of which I’m posting, at the moment). This one is for the first Ms. Quickly prompt, to use seven words in a poem of at least ten lines. Mine were cherry, dagger, saint, accept, tug, unfold, buoyant, in that order, chosen pretty much at random as I thought of them. Going to try and polish up one more before leaving the cafe…

The Procession of Saints

For after all, every shed lover is
the patron of one thing
or another, even the ones who bind
daggers to their names, the dead
or at least, the easily denied.
There is the blessed boy-next-door
wearing your cherry stone on a ring,
and the three-night martyr
burning with his chemical gospel.
Saints are buoyant in spring air,
each with his own proper Feast Day
and icon: the crow feather and
the jade turtle and the gingko fruit.
Like puffs of milk thistle seed
they drift, waiting for when
you need to unfold their memory,
tug loose those kisses tucked in
one cheek, each following the next
as though you were a magician
spitting a timeline of colorful flags.

Three Metaphors for Alex’s Kiss

We Write Poems wants poems about the first kiss. If I’m going to be truthful, there were lots of first kisses: the first one was probably in sixth grade, on a dare. There were others in high school with the two girlfriends. There was the first one with a guy, freshman year of college (he was straight and it was at a party and I already wrote a poem about that), and there was the one with the first kind-of-boyfriend. But this is about the first real boyfriend, whose birthday — go figure — is the day before Valentine’s. He’s happy with his guy, I’m happy with mine, and we talk only infrequently; but there is still, and I suspect always will be, that little nugget of love in my heart. I don’t write many poems about Alex (pseudonym! whee), maybe because I’m afraid to do so will corrupt the memory. But everything in the metaphors I tried to craft here — the nature images, the sense of time and doom, the inescapability of things, the hope and dream of it — is all directly related to the memory of my (comparatively whirlwind) romance with him.

I still think Massive Attack (in “Teardrop”) says it best and most simply: love, love is a verb / love is a doing word / fearless on my breath.

Three Metaphors for Alex’s Kiss

The snapdragon’s morning gravity
when it draws in little water-moons
to collect on its shoulders,
an entire hour of paste diamonds
at the ball to be treasured
until the sun arrives,
harsh and honest.

The blank space as the chapter
ends, lone period delicately hung
over a field of snow,
which seems to last forever
before you can find out whether
some antihero or another lives
or dies.

The inevitable wave at midnight,
dirty and blue-brown with foam
as it’s tugged ashore,
quilting the sand, unpainting
scrawled names and prophecies,
leaving only a now, as cold
as it is correct.