Archive for the ‘poetry’ category

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Pick-Up Poem (Not what it sounds like)

September 14, 2011

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Sorry, sorry, the title of this post is a bit misleading. The poem is about picking up the phone, not picking up in a bar. However, bloggers like stats; provocativeness improves stats; and well, I’m sure you are picking up the gist of this.

All that said, here’s the poem:

When you don’t pick up

One reason I hate so much

the times you don’t pick up

is that they throw me into

a certain (but I hope distant)

moment in which you are truly gone

or I am gone, when whichever

of us is left will have

no one to call, though perhaps

we will still call–knowing me, I won’t

be able to stop–but we

will have no one to answer, though certainly
you will try out of steadfast love

to answer, and me because I can never

shut up–but still, it will not

be an answer that says,”I’m coming,

I’m almost there,” or if it does, it will

be that rather tricky coming of

the nearly departed, which, of course,

is not what either of us want exactly,
at least 
not at this present moment,
which 
is why I really do wish

you’d stay near a phone always

so that I could gather up

your sweet hello

every single time I call and know, yes,

that you are coming, yes,

that you are still here.

(All rights reserved.)

Categories: Blogging, iPad art, poetry
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Comments: 4 Comments

9/9/11, Helicopters in Lower Manhattan, Poem

September 9, 2011

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9/9/11

I wake this morning in lower
Manhattan to the broken
record roar of helicopter hover,
finding my heartbeat synchronous–
pa-nic-nic-nic-nic-nic,
not wanting to be here
anymore right now
September 9, 2011.

Remember a woman, blonde,
with a blue knit cap, December 2001,
caught at the edge
of the slope, her skis sideways, stuck aslant,
afraid to just slide down, to
stay still too; she’d brought
her kids for fun, her husband
gone, they’d only found his
hand, itself lucky. My own
husband reached out his
across the cold,
coaxing her restart.

Away today, he tells me,
over the phone, not to worry
about participating in any event, hoopla,
no disrespect intended.

(As always all rights reserved.)

Categories: 9/11, poetry
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A Small Dog Is To A Large Zucchini

September 2, 2011

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A Small Dog Is To A Large Zucchini

A small dog is to a large zucchini
what a bungalow is to a road (six lane),
what a tadpole is to a Peach Bellini
made from a magnum of Champagne,
what a thimble is to a Fred Fellini
and miso soup was to Charlemagne–
the nexus, to some, seems very teeny,
to others, perhaps, it’s simple, plain.
All I know is that my large zucchini
and my small dog just aren’t the same.

(As always, all rights reserved.)

Categories: dog, poetry
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Comments: 10 Comments

Wishing to Say “Goodnight Irene”, Instead Goodbye-Hello – The Evacuee’s Plaint

August 28, 2011

Above is the place where a driveway used to be.  This driveway belonged to an upstate house to which we fled when evacuated from Zone A of NYC before Hurricane Irene.

Which brings me to:

The Evacuee’s Plaint

From the frying pan into the fire,
the saltine into the soup,
the thick to the thin, the baby in the bathwater to the baby thrown-out
with the bath water–make that roiling water–
from puddled embankment to muddy rapids,
dim to dark,
maybe to absolutely,
the flooding to the washed-out.

It’s still raining here
where we’ve come
to be high
and dry.  All feet
are cold
and damp,
but with
five toes wriggling.
Make that ten.

Categories: Country weekend, news, poetry
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Comments: 6 Comments

Light/Refraction/Rainbows!

August 5, 2011

Sometimes it’s good to get a little help from one’s friends, even when blogging.  Below, for today’s post, is a video of an art piece made with light (and other things) by my husband, Jay Martin.

Categories: iPad art, poetry
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Comments: 1 Comment

Public/Private disconnect (Sonnet) (With Elephant)

June 21, 2011

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I hate to admit it but I’m kind of a solipsistic person.  It’s not that I don’t like people–I take a strong interest in trying to help others (particularly if it involves telling them what to do.)

But I am just awful in social situations – parties, gatherings, even sometimes work settings.  To some degree, this may have something to do with not being completely at ease with either my “public” persona or private persona.

At any rate, here’s a kind of gloomy sonnet about this kind of public/private disconnect.

Because I am now linking this post to dVerse Poets Pub Raising the Bar for critiquing, I am going to put up two versions of this poem, an older and newer.  (I think the older may be better, but it’s also the one with which I am more familiar.)   They are both a bit self-pitying, although that may be something that makes them universal.

The first is the older  version:

Pretending

 After years, pretending to be what you’re not
becomes a nature;  a second skin
coating you like a kind of make-up, caught
in your pores, nestled in your grooves, a twin
of features, caked, you need not reapply.
But habits, faces, fail and it wears thin,
until, worn through, you can hardly try
anymore.  Too wary, weary, the word
“cagey” describes so much of what you’ve been,
the opposite of free-flying bird,
while unheard, and hardly there within,
is all you’ve been saving, what you hid, why
you did this, what wasn’t supposed to die.

Newer:

Pretending

After years, pretending to be what you’re not
becomes a nature;  a second skin
coating you like a heavy make-up, caught
in your pores, nestled in your grooves, a twin
of features, caked, you need not reapply.
Sometimes the habit fails, pretense wears thin,
that face that clung is suddenly wrung dry–
you don’t want to re-affix, but the word
“cagey” catches so much of what you’ve been–
the opposite of free-flying bird–
that, though you wish more than anything
to be seen, take wing; fretful, you still try
to keep tight all within.  Oh me.  Oh my.

If you are interested in my poetry, check out my poetry book, Going on Somewhere (by Karin Gustafson, illustrated by Diana Barco, cover by Jason Martin) on Amazon.

If you are interested in my elephants, check out my children’s book, 1 Mississippi,  on Amazon.

Categories: elephants, iPad art, poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 13 Comments

Poem For Father’s Day (Baby Birds)

June 19, 2011

I’ve posted this poem before, and it doesn’t really go with the picture above, but Father’s Day is almost over, and I would really like to commemorate both it (and my wonderful father), so here goes:

My Father (baby birds)

My father’s voice
when he sang
was deep and cragged and
reminded me of a froggie
gone a’courting.
But this was baby birds.

It was not even a person
who had died.
It was not even a particularly noble dog,
though like all of its species, it was capable
of a self-debasing attachment that could
seem Arthurian.

But after the accident, the rush,
the sad blur home,
my father’s back faced me in my room
with a sound
of birds.
It silenced all gone wrong,
turned me back into a person
who could do things in the world.

(All rights reserved.)

Categories: parenting, poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 5 Comments

Memorized poetry poem

June 18, 2011

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New experiment today: seeing if I can write a poem on the iPad! (And on the train.)

I love writing poetry by hand. But it is interesting to stretch one’s brain, and, frankly, it’s always terrific to write in a way that does not require transcription.

So here’s my attempt. What I was thinking of was another current interest–memorizing poetry. Followers of this blog know that I was very impressed by memory techniques outlined in Joshua Foer’s recent book Moonwalking With Einstein. My own memorization efforts have slackened recently, but the way in which the memorized poems have stayed with me has been kind of interesting. See below.

The Bits I’ve Got By Heart

In my head the women come and go
talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time, time for
the lines to formulate in the brain,
and when they are formulated, to drop like gentle rain
from a heaven that’s not quite consciousness;
to break, but soft, into a waking dream,
to be each morning morning’s minion,
as my head turns from the pillow,
plucking, before day is quite begun,
the golden apples from what might otherwise be
a simple rag and bone shop–too bland for foul,
scuttled by ragged part-my-hair-behind prosaicness.
Instead, those half-remembered verses,
gleaned from a teeming brain,
roll up into one ball all I ken
of poets’ strength
and sweetness, and the
dancer, who is part dance,
pirouettes, keeping time
with a beat that echoes
on the inside.

Categories: iPad art, poetry
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Happy Birthday Walt Whitman! (Again!)

May 31, 2011

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It is the 192nd birthday today of the incomparable “Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son.” (Born May 31, 1819.)

I love Whitman and confess to being inordinately proud of the drawing of him above, though I admittedly cheated by doing it with the iPad, the Brushes App, and also the Comic Life App (to insert the quote from “Song of Myself”). These lines come from the section in which Whitman talks of grass as the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

One of the things I love about Whitman is his flow. His surge. His abundance. Sometimes, the current can be a bit overwhelming. (One can feel an almost flotsam-and-jetsam rush about the ears.) Other times–(as in most of “Song of Myself”, “The Sleepers”, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, “Out of the Cradle Endless Rocking”, “As I Ebbed With the Ocean of Life”, “This Compost”, “When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloomes”–actually most of the time), the flow is absolutely crystalline, every droplet sparkling. Happy Birthday Walt!

(This is a re-post of earlier post to be sure to make a correction to typo in Whitman text. Sorry for any inconvenience.)

Categories: iPad art, poetry
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Comments: 2 Comments

Spring At Last (And Also In My Head!) (The Re-Awakening of Memory)

May 27, 2011

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As followers of this blog know, in the last couple of days I’ve been inspired by Joshua Foer’s book MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN to try to memorize poetry. I’ve pushed my reluctant brain to adopt some goofy age-old mnemonic techniques, imagining characters from my past in absurd, or even obscene, positions, as visual cues for certain poetic lines and segues. And, lo and behold, it has worked! I’ve learned four or five long poems!

Last night, though, something even more amazing began to happen. Poems that I had learned years ago (there are only a few) but that I’d forgotten, that I’d consigned to the dustbin of “what I used to know,” were suddenly revolving around my head like old jingles from chewing gum commercials. Things like the prologue from the Canterbury Tales and bits of Yeats and Shakespeare.

It was like I’d hotwired some big memory circuits in my brain, and that, in turn, had burned the gunk off a lot of old funky fuses.

Remembering those old poems has felt like spring (up in my head)–not a full blown May perhaps, but at least a bit of aprill. (“With its shoures soot.”)

P.S. the above picture is a photograph of an apple tree filtered with the Photogene app on the iPad. Have a lovely weekend.

Categories: iPad art, memory, poetry
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