Archive for February 2015

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Trying to Imprint Some

February 10, 2015

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Trying to Imprint It Some

I simply
have nothing to say.
Experience doesn’t mark me
the way it used to.

The only imprint
of my day
are the ribs
of my sock tops, notching the perimeters
of my calves–

meaning that that they were high
socks–meaning that I must have trudged
out in the snow at some point–okay, that
I remember–the snow that socked
the land
so beautifully,
knitted cloud
to horizon, mountaintop to
field–I will not say in white
wool– long-sleeved the limbs
of trees, gloved their twigged
digits.

And I want–now that I’ve recovered them from
my sock-carved hieroglyphics–to save those trees
in my brain, those snow-fleshed trees,
but my mind is like the bath
I sit in,
growing cold too fast, and a little murky,
caching even less
than the skin of things;

when what I need
for a mind
is a lake, something bigger,
deeper,
truly
reflective.

I know a lake; it holds upon
its glass whole skies; it holds within its depths
whole trunks–you can see it shine back
blue, even cloud, and where shine breaks,
you peer through water that clear, though green
as brine, shows silent racks
of branch and still-barked log, fallen
who knows when, washed since then–
trees you can skate on
in a freeze, swim over
in summer’s ease, careful never to
touch, or dare to–

Not like these ridged rims
I run
my hands over, hurrying
their fade as mind already
trickles ahead, away–bath draining.
Some light still caught though
as legs step out, in flashes,
wet, warm.

***********************************

Ha.  Scribble, of sorts; or what I could.  (It seems very repetitive to me.)  For Real Toads Open Platform.  I did not get any good pictures of trees in this latest snow, but here is a pic taken from my Metro North train this morning of the Hudson River–the little turret is part of the ruins of a small castle that can usually be seen on an island in the  middle of water, called Bannerman’s Castle.  (Wrongly called by me Gillette’s Castle, when this post first went up.  Thanks for the correction to a very kind reader and one of my oldest and most admired–by me at least–friends.)

 

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Raw Deal (Farmerkin/Pasiphaë)

February 8, 2015

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Raw Deal

The classic story of a wooden frame carpentered
as a comely calf
that stars a man
(and also involves
a cow hide)
was memorialized
by the Brothers Grimm and follows
the trickster Farmerkin, who parleys his wooden calf
with its painted black eyelashes, and his cow hide
with its hidden raven, into, eventually,
the drowning of nearly everybody in his town, one
in a nail-driven barrel (so it will  leak), leaving Farmerkin
as mayor of sorts, with pots and pots
of gold.

The tale of a wooden cow frame featuring
a woman
is the myth of Pasiphaë, who, as punishment
for her husband’s greed,
is God-besotted
by a beautiful white bull
(meaning that Poseidon, mad
at Minos, made
her do it.)

It being the fitting of herself into
a heifer frame, sides hidden
by cow hide,
her genitalia carefully slotted
against applicable vents,
then taken out to pasture,
as it were.

One can’t exactly say Pasiphaë,
got the short end
of the stick,
yet Farmerkin, through sleight of paint brush
and pinch of hide-clotted raven, separated
his compatriots
from both their money and
their lives, ensuring his own,
according to the Grimms,
happily ever after,
while Pasiphaë ended up
as archetypal porn queen
and beast mother.

One–if one actually thinks about it–
imagines her wracked
with pain, pregnant, a leaking, gored, barrel.

“Hmmm,” some might say,
who do not understand
what I am getting at.

*********************************************

Here’s an odd sort of poem.  I have been thinking about Pasiphaë (which for some reason I think is pronounced Pacify–ay, rhyming with Pacify- day) since seeing a Jackson Pollock painting of that name a week ago at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.  The painting is part of an exhibit about Thomas Hart Benton, who was Pollock’s mentor.  I happened by it while a lecture was going on in which the docent asked the tourists what they saw on the canvas, and several talked of little stick figures at the middle or top, but no one mentioned the large phallus in the bottom right hand corner!  (Needless to say, I did not point it out, and I couldn’t then remember the story of Pasiphaë, but the whole incident made me look it up later.  I would note that there are many many very graphic illustrations of Pasiphaë made throughout art history and beyond.)

There are several stories based on Pasiphaë but the main one is that she was the daughter of Helios (the Sun), married to King Minos of Crete.  Poseidon gave Minos a beautiful white bull (his altar ego), with the understanding that Minos would sacrifice it back to Poseidon, but Minos instead kept the valuable bull (probably to use as a stud)  which in turn led Poseidon to bewitch Pasiphaë into falling desperately in love/lust with the bull (resulting in the cow frame discussed in the poem.) The beast child born from the union of Pasiphaë and the bull was the Minotaur, which later was kept in Minos’ labyrinth.  Pasiphaë was also mother of Phaedre and Ariadne, and interestingly, it was the great craftsman, Daedelus (the guy who made the wax wings to get out of that same labyrinth with his son, Icarus), who devised the cow frame used by Pasiphaë, to seduce the bull.  (Several poems there perhaps.)    

The  Brothers Grimm Farmerkin story is a story of a classic trickster, who without a cow of his own, uses a wooden frame of a calf to trick a herder into thinking he has lost Farmerkin’s cow and must give him one.  Farmerkin than uses that cow hide for further trickery, ending up with a drowned town and a great deal of moola.  Phillip Pullman who has authored a wonderful retelling of the Grimm stories says that it was originally told to the Grimm brothers by the Hassenpflug family and Dorothea Viehmann. 

Below is Pollock’s Pasiphaë, painted in 1943.  (Unfortunately, I could find no reproduction that does justice to the wonderful palette of the actual painting. )  Above is a painting of Pasiphaë and Daedelus by Giulio Romano, painted in Mantua sometime between 1525-1535.  (No copyright infringement intended in the photos.) 

I was not sure where, if anywhere, I would link this odd poem, but I will try the Poetry Pantry on Poets’ United, since I know they are very accepting people over there!   

 

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Uphill Climb

February 7, 2015

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Uphill Climb

The snow holds no planks
unlike the floor we couldn’t walk clothed
when you first came,
and I move slowly through it, thinking
of sex and missiles,
poems and my head
by the TV table–sometimes we’d get all the way
to the kitchen and I’d grip the width of wall
of the doorless door, warmth spilling
over the fridge, its magnetic words
cock-eyed–

But wait–I trudge the snow-heavy
hill, good exercise
for a Lutheran–and remember how I had to shut
all the windows at a certain point
in that apartment, for weeks
after 9/11, there in downtown
NYC, trying to keep the seep of smoke out of
the old jambs, and the service at the church down the street
the first Sunday after, so crowded we had
to sit behind the altar, shaded
by the pomegranates, the ultramarines,
the too-stark whites
of that anglo-american
stained glass–so much brighter
than the wax pages of hymnal, ash of notes, blurred words
that we sang–
that we all  sang–though we trailed the melody
like the heft of the organ,
only it was not a mishmash of chords
that held us back
but the difficulty of singing
weeping–

and I’m not really sure I’m still writing
about 9/11 but about some generalized
feeling of pain–the problem somehow being that I, you, we
have tasted
the apple and that it tasted so very sweet
we even bit
again, and somehow we, must all pay
for this–especially we, who are women–
with our breasts so capable of
pleasure and
of tears,
with our breasts that breath hard
uphills and tighten
touched, with our mouths
that taste and give
sweetness.

The sky turns dark
overhead except where there
are clouds that seem to carry light
along with fresh snow, and this burdened brilliance, I think,
is something to remember.

 

************************************

A draft/scribble/what you will for Real Toads, inspired by Grace’s (a/k/a Heaven’s) prompt on With Real Toads about the wonderful Cuban poet, Carilda Olivar Labra.

 

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Competing Drafts — “Sometime After the Anniversary of a Dog’s Death”

February 7, 2015

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I often call freshly posted poems drafts, which can bring up a certain digital laughter among readers/fellow poets.  I don’t mean to be falsely modest–but to emphasize my indecisiveness in writing/posting.  Sometimes I’ll go back into a freshly posted draft to repeatedly change it–other times (more often), I can hardly stand to look at something after it’s posted.  (I suffer a kind of backlash, I suppose, at having had the audacity to put something out in the world–it manifests itself as acute embarrassment.) 

One solution, of course, would be to just post less–hang on to something until I am absolutely sure it’s done.  But, to be honest, I get a huge amount of comfort and energy from moving ahead in my work, so I am selfish (or audacious) enough to put something out before it may be ready, hoping that the caveat of calling it a “draft,” will protect me on the embarrassment side. 

At any rate, here’s a poem/draft that I wrote last night, and re-wrote this morning, and I thought it might be interesting to post both, since it shows how difficult it can be to make decisions about these things.  (Please only bother to read if you are interested in these kinds of issues–)  I tend to think the original shorter one (posted first) may be better, but I also like this morning’s longer version.   Thoughts of others are welcome, as always–

 

Sometime After the Anniversary of A Dog’s Death
(Glad of the Deep Snow)

I always worried
that some animal
would dig you up,
knowing that I myself
was not a great digger,
though also an animal;

even knowing
that I’d dug deep enough
only my thighs
reached the earth’s surface
and that, later, I secured your top soil
with a host
of stones.

But how the heart is snagged
by loss, that barbed
catch-all–

Loss, you finder
of all we no longer can,
you keeper.

*********************

Sometime After the Anniversary of a Dog’s Death

I always worried
that some animal
would dig you up,
knowing that I myself, like you,
was not a great digger,
though also an animal;

yet knowing too
that I’d dug deep enough
only my thighs
reached the earth’s surface
and that I’d secured your top soil
with a host of stones;

still, glad
when the ground froze
and when even those stones
were buried; glad when the snow too
froze, and I was absolutely sure of your safety
from the claws of some harder-scrabbler–

but how the heart is snagged
by loss, that barbed
catch-all–

Loss, that finder
of all we no longer hold,
Loss, that keeper,
who does not care
how deep we dig,
how thick snow falls,
what freezes, what thaws–
*******************************

Categories: dog, poetry, Uncategorized
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Before Writing It Down

February 5, 2015

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Before Writing It Down

The view I get
might be described
by the word glimmer
if the word glimmer
were the word flicker
and if the view were a glance
and glance was dance and a dance
was a poem.

There it is–glimmering, flickering, viewed
at a glance
as it dances past
the corner of
my eye,
and though my pen
certainly extends my reach
by a good six inches,
it is never enough to truly pen
that view,
to hem it in
that corner,
so I might actually be able
to exhibit it–
if exhibit meant press
to the page
like a flower or leaf
so that even years later
it still brings with it
as pages split
either spring
or fall.

***************************************

Another drafty one for With Real Toads, for Ella’s prompt on the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian prayer chant, asking for poems about one’s creative process.  The picture is mine taken at a beach outside Seattle, Washington.

I think I inadvertently posted the picture before I meant to post and then I deleted that premature post!  Sorry for any confusion.  Also, I’m not sure if the picture is posting properly–so if you can’t see the whole thing (it is a very sweet pic) just click on it.

PS – I am calling everything a draft lately because I feel like I am writing much more quickly than normal (when I finally do get down to writing), which always leaves me with a feeling of some insecurity about what I am posting.  This one I’ve edited since first posting.

 

 

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Forgetting/Letting Go

February 4, 2015

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Forgetting/Letting go

Before letting go,
forego letting be–

at least for me,
that’s how it had
to be.

I needed to knead
what had gone
before–
I could not let it alone,
alone.

Forlorn, I foraged for a lore, some tale
that I could wag,
some tale that would make me
a teller (taller),
a wagger (wage-earner)
a mover and shaker
and not
the moved-out, shaken–

I told this tale
as my own bedtime story,
until I just didn’t
anymore,
until–it seems to me now–
I arched my neck back
and saw through the window at my bed’s head,
all those shines
the glass reflected, genuflecting
to the laws
of perspective,
bright rounds that outglowed the moon, though but
the disks of desk lamp no bigger
than my fist–
mere street lights,
red, green, white–
no bigger than
my head but seeming more monumental
than even dwarf stars–

and as my eyes noosed
those outsized glares, some grip loosened
in my brain–

Of course, it helped
that you also lay beside me
your skin too glowing,
but not glass.

*******************************

Another drafty poem.  (People make fun of my term, but when something is fresh off the brain press with relatively little re-writing, the word “draft” feels right to me.)   This one owes a debt to the wonderful writer, Kerry O’Connor, who posts at Skywriting and Skylover, for a poem she has called “Gotta Go” in which she talks about the difficulties of forgetting letting go. ”

The pictures are from NYC, taken the other night.  In both cases, the moon is the smaller orb in the top left.

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Categories: New York City, poetry, Uncategorized
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Ode to Hello

February 3, 2015

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Ode to Hello

You sound, to my flat-tired mind,
like Jello,
and I try to gather
some bounce from that,
a vision of myself
as a stainless steel spoon tapping
an uncracked ruby sheen,

and I try to look through
that rubyiat lens
as I say hello
to aloneness
(he goes and I
do not)
but Jello
is a rather artificial
construct
that I long ago omitted
from life, and I can’t quite come up
with faked cheer either,
so I don’t say goodbye
gracefully
and past hellos sound,
as they echo,
hollow,
though the burn behind my eyes
feels real enough–
It is not red;
it is not shiny;
it does not bounce.

And how is it, I wonder,
that love can fold in upon itself
so sharply,
when all it wants
is to lie like two hellos
in soft sequence, each fitting
the other’s hollows as flesh
pillows bone, as if we were each made
of whispered vowels, consonants,
as if we could be held
by a word.

*******************

Another super drafty poem.  Still away from home, and not thinking so clearly!  Am posting for With Real Toads Open Forum.  The pic is an older one–  sorry for any lateness in returning comments.

Also, I’ve not made a pitch in a long time, but here’s one–check out if you have a chance my books!  Serious novel–Nice— Comic novel, NOSE DIVE,  book of poetry, GOING ON SOMEWHERE, or children’s counting book 1 MISSISSIPPI.       

Also, I want to express deep gratitude to Marian Kent of Runaway Sentence for her very kind review of Nice on Amazon.  I am too shy/embarrassed to ever check my books on Amazon and so did not see the review until just now.  Thank you so much, Marian.

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