I first posted this for the DVerse Poets Pub “form for all” challenge, hosted by Gay Reiser Cannon, of making a “Shaped” or “Concrete Poem,” and now I am linking to Poetry Rally.
Agh. For me, making a concrete poem feels like hitting my head against a wall. (I’m just not a concrete kind of gal.) I should try it for exactly that reason, I suppose, but instead I’ve opted for more of an illustrated poem. (Yes, it’s a bit silly. I am, I guess, a silly kind of a gal.)
One of my (many) faults is a tendency to second guess myself. In the world of online poetry sites, this tends to arise in the context of ‘why did I post that poem, link, story, or picture?’ when I should have posted a completely different one. (The different one, of course, would have been much more cool, likeable, wowie-zowie.)
This past weekend, dVerse Poets Pub, a wonderful online poetry site, urged poets to post something taboo or provocative. Needless to say, I spent all weekend castigating myself for the poem I put up (about an important seaside activity.)
So, here it’s Tuesday, dVerse Poets “open link” night, and instead of moving on, I’m going to post another “taboo” poem, a sonnet, in, I think, a Spenserian format. I am also posting this poem for the Poetry Palace’s poetry rally. Here goes:
Spy Games
We played spy games galore in the basement.
Running spy games with the boys, our bent hands
guns, till sweating we lay down on cold cement,
shirts pulled up, chests hard. Not much withstands
the leaching chill of earth, the buried sands
beneath a downstairs’ room, except perhaps
the burn of nipple, the future woman’s
breasts. Our spy games just for girls had traps—
some of us played femmes fatales, poor saps,
while the leader girl was Bond—0-0-7.
She hung us ropeless from the bathroom taps,
then tortured us in ways that felt like heaven,
the basement bed our rack, what spies we were,
confessing neither to ourselves nor her.
The poem is published in Going On Somewhere. (The header is a detail from the cover by Jason Martin.) Check it out!
In my ongoing exploration of online writing and poetry sites, I am participating today in Magpie Tales, a site, hosted by Tess Kincaid, that sets up an interesting picture prompt. The picture was a photograph of skewered ducks hanging in a Chinese restaurant, before a slightly smiling cook. (I like to use my own art work where possible so have done my own copy of it above.)
Here’s the poem:
At a Restaurant On Mott
There is something about the Chinese,
at least when it comes to
restaurants, that does not consider
Ping (the little white duck
of my childhood who wafted
paper-lantern-like down an
unscrolled Yangtze river, among
junks of pen, ink, watercolor.)
There is something that smiles
as wide as a ladle, that
gleams with anticipatory,
and unmitigated,
satisfaction
at the sight, for example, of a chicken’s foot
streaming with small galaxies
of golden globules.
There is something that doggedly
digests the dog-eat-dogness of this
world in a way that the limp cartilage of
my vegetarian fingers simply cannot grasp;
a realism as rooted as
galic/ginger/turnips/webbed feet/hooves,
which my Ping-popping
anemia could probably profit from.
Nonetheless, I’ll stick to the tofu.
Woman Needing To.... (image by Diana Barco)
The below poem is posted as part of dVerse Poets Pub, Saturday Poetics prompt, hosted today by Kellie Elmore. The prompt was for a poem that is provocative or deals with a subject that’s taboo. As a (believe it or not!) slightly shy person, I find it very hard to post something both new and taboo, so am posting an older poem (one, that I’ve had time to get used to.)
A Woman Needing to Pee
A woman needing to pee,
she steps into the sea, knees
salt, a piercing balm, her
shaved legs grimace, gasp
cold, still she strolls thighward,
as far as she is able, needing to pee,
squats needing to hide it,
rubs water over her arms to hide it better,
acting out a woman too timid
to go out far, a woman
needing to cool herself. But
she craves warmth and secretes it,
a secret warmth, wet-warming
all the sea.
Stretching tall
and cold now only where air
licks skin, she dives
into the afterglow,
a woman who swims.
A little background: the poem was originally written as part of a “magnetic poetry exercise,” a kind of arbitrary but freeing exercise. It can be found in my first book of poetry, Going on Somewhere, poems by Karin Gustafson, pictures by Diana Barco, cover by Jason Martin. Check it out!
(PS – the new header above is from the cover of Going on Somewhere, by Jason Martin.)
The wonderful and very supportive dVerse Poets Pub suggests as a poetics prompt today that one imitate an admired poet. As host to the prompt, Victoria gives a great personalized version of the wonderful Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird. I would love to try my hand at Wallace Stevens, but shortness of time and several days into the long distance part of a long-distance relationship lead me instead to Christopher Marlowe, a poet whom I love and whose work I’ve already imitated. This is based on the wonderful “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”. (“Come live with me and be my love.”)
A Passionate Long-Distance Caller To Her Love
Come live with me, my sweet, my dear,
and we shall never echoes hear
of anxious longing, fearful cries,
of ‘why me?‘ woes or angry lies–
our ears won’t burn with cellphone’s ray,
our brains won’t morph their matters gray
into tumors fed by conversations
that only serve to try our patience.
Oh please come here; stay right by me
so I can see you when I see
the sky, the window, the chair, the bed.
the pillow there beside my head,
for you are all to me and more,
my sun, my moon, my ceiling, floor,
the one I talk to, the one
for whom I’d be still–sweet Hon,
I know my silence is not much known–
I can’t quite manage it on the phone–
but come here soon and stay forever
and we’ll lay quietly together.
(Apologies to those who’ve read this poem before; it is edited a bit! I will try some Wallace Stevens soon.)
I am posting the new poem below for the dVerse Poets Pub “Open Link” night and also for Gooseberry Garden’s poetry picnic.
Adult Child
It seemed to her walking on a beachside street
near the home of aging parents
that she saw in the five feet
of a young palm, the slightly goofy grace
of a fawn or baby giraffe:
in the ridges of green trunk–
knock-knees; in the froth of
lime green frond–the soft bristle of
first-sprout hair; overall a sense of oversized
hooves, paws, the floppy underfooting of
fledgling wonder.
Yet even as she held the young palm
in the back of her mind, another childishness
crept to the forefront–a child’s
fear of death–not fear of the unknown, or
even loss, but of moist brown earth,
clods of non-human
clay, the closing-in of lonely terrible cold; a fear of death that does not
truly believe in death but does know darkness.
It clung to her through the visit
until, at the shore itself, after they had tossed in
a rough sea, which, in the power of that fear, was
almost intolerable to her, and her husband passed
a towel over the brilliance beading their skin,
she could not stop herself from reaching back to him
and whispering, oh please
don’t let me be buried, and he, confused,
wrapped strong limbs (a Northern person, he is so unlike a palm) around
her trunk, softly kissing and trying jokes, till she said again, please and
promise, and he did.
Then, determined to cast off the still-stalking fear, she darted awkwardly
to the surf and willed herself into a cartwheel
at the edge of the ocean-firmed sand, and when that one worked, another, and
another again, knowing that one cannot will ebullience, but also
that there is nothing
like turning upside down for clearing a head, and
another one, until blinking in the shine, they marveled, before
the next wave, at
the clarity of the palm prints, there, in the wedge of sand and sea,
spread wide, five-fingered.
As always, all rights reserved.
What is real? What is
reflection? One way to know
for sure: take a plunge.
This is a fresh-off-the-brain-press poem written for dVerse Poets Pub poetics prompt. Today, it is to write something inspired by a bumper sticker.
So What if You Really Did Live in Germany in the 1930’s?
‘Live free or die’
easy enough to sigh
‘let me be me’
when it’s not really a choice
of to be or not to be,
but the voicing of
a complaint, the price
of sainted gas
is too damn–
(kind of half-assed,
if important in its way),
but what if your neighbor,
even the guy you’re sore at,
who plays the tuba at two,
and happens to be a Jew,
is dragged off in the night?
In your window, the light
of a seering torch;
on your porch
the pound of booted step;
and your wife has wept
with fear, your
children so very near,
and you know,
yes, although you know,
it’s terribly wrong,
and you long
(somewhere)
(somehow)
to dare
not to bow
to whatever inner voice
now says, the choice
is not your own.
Okay, you’ve got a gun
but you’ve also got
a son, and
they’ve taken his,
that neighbor–who–
he had one too–
not yours,
yours, who purrs
as he sleeps,
you see the peeps
of dreams beneath his eyelids–
what do you do then?
DVerse Poets Pub (dversepoets.com) is hosting a “form for all” night on the haiku and senryu forms (meaning that they are encouraging participant bloggers to write and post their individual efforts with these forms.) DVerse host, Gay Reiser Cannon also has a wonderful exposition on the differences of the forms.
Haikus are not somehow my favorite form. (I tend towards the wordy.) Still, I had a few old ones (or maybe they are really senryu) that I thought of posting for this event, but, well, they were written in Florida in the springtime, and I am currently in New York in Autumn, and haiku are by their nature rather seasonal. As a result, here are some new ones. These are not truly autumnal, but there were all written today at least, on a commuter train going up the Hudson River.
It was a long train ride so I wrote a lot of variations of each, but will spare you all the experiments.
Looking Out/In
In the train window,
night shades into looking glass;
a stranger peers in.
Brain Trap
Brain flutters against
bone. Firefly in a jar
is mainly thorax.
Like You Somehow
Mountains darker than
nightfall. Your warmth like, and not
like, a sun-licked stone.
P.S. – I’m not sure you should title haikus–it feels a bit like cheating (extra syllables) but I threw those titles in at the last minute. Hope you like them and thanks, as always, for your time and kindness.
I’ve had a very busy few days visiting aged/aging parents. This is always both wonderful and a bit exhausting, and because of both of these aspects, I am posting an older poem today. It’s about a similar visit, made with my mother to visit my grandmother.
We flew out there, then drove.
My mother, who despised gum chewers,
snapped hers loudly, pushing herself up
to the wheel as if it were the chin rest
at an eye exam.
Though my grandmother lived in Minnesota, the hospital
was in Iowa. When the rental car crossed state lines—
another source of amazement—
my mother, who only drove set routes, had rented a car—
the road narrowed and curved and my mother
cursed all Republicans.
She took the thin gravelly shoulder as
a personal affront; the lip the tires
skidded against was even worse,
an insult to FDR.
At the hospital, my grandmother’s hair cast
about her face like a bridal veil blown back.
She was better already, she said, just
at the sight of us (but we sure shouldn’t have come;
it was too darn hard).
Then pointed to a cup of jello,
which was as crimson, faceted, as a ruby,
and, at first, resisted my spoon.
“Mama,” my mother said.
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