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For My Mother, Who Always Wears Blue

March 24, 2014

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For My Mother, Who Always Wears Blue

You insist on blue
even when all your azures
are in the wash
and all you can find
is one of his old ties,
which you knot about your waist as if it were a sash and not
an amulet,
in the same way that you wrapped,
after unwrapping,
the foil robin shell around his Easter egg
a whole year afterwards,
pondering what to do with it frozen,
the chocolate marled
like a cataract blind
to aluminated sky, isoceles crimped
to cirrus,
because he’d enjoyed it so
a couple bites a time, nights,
savoring small sweetnesses–

Though your blues harbor luck.
It’s the kind that’s found even
through the cracks of loss,
like stripes in frayed
silk, and that pale Prussian that mirrors ‘up’
around the ice floes
just there, outside the window of this train,
my arms warmed, as I look,
by navy sleeves.

******************************
Here’s a poem for the poetics prompt by Abhra Pal posted in honor of the Indian festival of Holi, about imagining coloring people, at http:dVersepoets.com. (My “linker” not working.)

Also, this is a picture outside my train window looking out over the Hudson River, but it is not a picture taken today, and it doesn’t really show the fragmented ice floes now there.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 19 Comments

Update on Noveling – Pitch

March 23, 2014

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It is March 23.  The fields are icy; where there is no crust of snow there is glazed mud.  In between slips and slides–I ran into a tree yesterday trying to cross-country ski–(ouch! said bleeding shin–trees are hard!)–I am also trying to publish a novel.

It is difficult.  First, it’s a difficult novel.  (In other words, I’m not even sure IF I like it.)  This makes it extremely hard to foist off on others.

Secondly, I genuinely have plenty of other stuff to do.

Which means I give all that other stuff priority!

And yet…and yet… I know if I let too much time go by, I really will not be able to stand to look at this novel for a few more years–

Also, I would like to be able to start writing poetry again.

And so… and so… in a fit of nerves and depression, I uploaded the novel today.  Meaning I submitted for self-publication.  Meaning that I’ll probably have to edit one more time when I get the proofs, but I am nearly there.

(Agh.)

I also went through a bunch of extremely musty old magazines that I have from the 1960s (and have been storing in boxes outside)  to try to begin putting together a cover.  (Yes, I know I could get people with actual knowledge of these things to  design it!)

In the meantime, although I’m not sure why–given that it embarrasses me so much, given that it truly mortifies me–I set forth below the “pitch” for the novel that I wrote and that just passed the first round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.  (The book is called “Nice.”) :

It is summer, 1968, and Les has been trained to be nice.  

When she was really little, they played the Star Spangled Banner in movie theaters before the show; she could feel her chest ripple just like the flag on the screen.

But it is summer, 1968–Martin Luther King Jr. shot in April and now Bobby Kennedy.    

“What in the world is happening to this country?” her mother says as they stay up after the shooting, watching the TV people try to decide whether he’ll have brain damage.  

Les wonders what she, a kid, a girl, can do about any of it.  Other than hold firm to the idea that people are good, that if everyone would just be nice enough, they could impart some of that niceness to others–

Though, in the meantime, she would also like to be just a little more cool–

Then Duke comes to visit, a cool cat, a natural charmer, and something happens to Les that is not nice– 

Who can she tell?  How, afterwards, can she un-tell them? 

Her older brother, Arne, lives his own side of the story that summer as he tries angrily, in the midst of suburban family life and the escalating Vietnam War, to become a young man. 

But “what in the world is happening?” he wonders as his sister changes, his sister who has always been the nice one–

Their story traverses the landscape of country, family, heart.

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

Thank God, I don’t think the pitch counts for anything but getting into the second round!  And I have no expectations of the contest.  And the book is not written like the pitch!  And I don’t think that was even the final pitch as I edited it on the website!

I think I am posting this to keep up my commitment!  Thanks for your kindness!

Categories: Uncategorized, writing
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Comments: 14 Comments

To the G-Man – Friday Flash 55

March 21, 2014

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Re Tempus Fu(Mr.G)it- (It’s Latin, so it’s okay!)

Why does time have to march
even in March?

Why can’t we keep the spring
Springs?

Our hips stay
hip?  Our black clothing only
mean coolness?
Our wrinkles lipsynch
how oooh we are laid-back,
our lovehandles
that we
are love-
handled?

And why, oh why,
are our poems not everlastingly
kick-ass?

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

55 for the G-Man!  This is his second-to-last week of hosting Friday Flash 55.  He’s had a long and honorable run and needs to concentrate on his Harley–best to him always.

PS – the photo is outside a plane window.  Yes, I know planes don’t march!  But they do something else that time does — fly!

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 13 Comments

Just Hiding

March 18, 2014

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Just Hiding

Sometimes, I could just hide
in some lined wood,
my fingertips fitting bark prints
as if I were
all fingertip,
a chosen trunk my belly’s back
as if I were only spine,
flattening myself against growth’s bounds
as if vertical were how I always laid me down,
as if hiding turned me into treasure one might seek,
asking, like the mourning dove, who I was–
though you already know that
through and through,
and, like the mourning dove,
ask only because the call sounds
of water,
like a swallow of water,
like the soft swoop/rise of water,
and trees need
water.

*****************************
Here’s a poem of sorts not written for any prompt! Though I will link, belatedly, to With Real toads Open Link Night. The picture is an old one, and doesn’t really go with the poem (as I meant to describe someone hiding behind a tree, not in one.) (I like the picture though!)

P.S. I’m so sorry I’ve been slow to return comments. I’ve been away from home close to two weeks and I’m a bit off-schedule. (And I think I may have posted this poem inadvertently when going to sleep!)

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 13 Comments

To Homer

March 13, 2014


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To Homer

You sang of Achilles
with wingéd words,
which makes me suspect
you knew the sounds of anger
as well as birds.

You sang of the wine dark sea
before many-benched ships,
which makes me feel your lips,
dried out upon long lines,
pining for the tang
of retsina.

You sang of a hero
who, calling himself “nobody”,
seared the Cyclops’ eye,
the giant then crying that he’d been blinded
by nobody–
which makes me sigh
at your sense of humor–

but also makes me sure–
that “man of resource” forced
to wander ten long years
that even the grey-eyed goddess could not
steer him through,
not with her night-sharp owl–
that, yes, you knew a thing
or two
about anger.

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

Here’s a draft and possibly cheating poem for Brian Miller’s challenge to write like a “blind poet” on dVerse Poets Pub.  

Process Notes–Homer, the allegedly blind alleged poet of the great Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, wrote of Achilles, the angry hero, of the Iliad.  In the Odyssey, Odysseus, that “man of resource”, blinds Polyphemus, the Cyclops son of Poseidon, the God of the Sea, with a sharpened heated log, then is essentially punished by Poseidon and made to wander years before reaching home, while Athena, the grey-eyed goddess devoted to Odysseus, watches, unable to save him from this fate. 

Retsina is Greek wine, which is, I believe, aged in pine barrels and has a taste of pine resin. Some scholars now say that ancient greek did not have a separate word for blue and that the wine-dark sea should be translated wine-blue sea, and even that there may have been something alkaline in the water that made ancient greek wine blue.  Everyone seems to still like that phrase though–wine-dark sea–which is used many many times in Homeric texts.  I was reminded of it in a recent poem by Joy Ann Jones, Hedgewitch.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 21 Comments

NYC – Late Seventies

March 12, 2014
Old painting by me (supposed to be Broadway in Thick Snow!)

Old painting/collage by me (supposed to be Broadway in Thick Snow!)

New York City – Late 70s

Dear City, you were just so grey
sometimes, sky more sidewalk, building-paved–
how we loved it, the grit,
standing outside
the Pioneer Market,
up to the neck
with the two towers, pomodoro and fowl
on sale proclaimed the peeling
placards–

How great
that anywhere you were,
whatever tiled cavern you climbed out from,
you only need look up
to find out “down”–
downtown where we lived, like the guys
in the Village Voice who hadn’t been above
14th Street sporting beards–

Sleezy Deli to the East, nights, with
its bullet-proof HoHos,
but to the West by day
we could dash into the refracted brass
of the Broken Kilometer, or up a Soho blankfront
to breathe the air of a white room grounded
with the blackest earth–

Of course there was dirt
everywhere, the kind that kvetched in
our pores, even seeped inside the
cupboards as if our dishes too
wanted to wear black–

colanders upturned for star light
on the clothdroop ceilings of Sixth Street India;
“and what else” kippered the Orthodox counterguys
over brined sweetness,
the crash of Chinese opera (we always
thought) at the Lai Gong, some stringed instrument
mimicking struck cat, pork buns 25 cents–

At the bean curd factory on Broome,
the men wore
rubber boots and the guy who retrieved mine
from the blue buckets that smelled
so strongly of soy always smiling eventually
his smooth face lined with creases fine
as a pressed leaf–
when I felt low there was nothing
like that face and the pure
white cakes–

Everyone’s studio worth a visit and time to do it
with the right gig–
men not yet dying
in droves–red lights we could see forever
if we held our heads right–the night never wholly black
except sometimes on a side street
when I tried for my
hands, feet–or when I looked
for your answering gaze–
though when I moved
I could find my swish
sure enough–and sometimes you would
turn back to me–

and we could always just
look up–

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

A draft poem about New York in the 70’s posted for the wonderful Margaret Bednar’s prompt on With Real Toads–my computer is iffy so will be brief with process notes, but the Broken Kilometer and the Earth Room are two longterm art installations  by Walter De Maria at the Dia Art Foundation in Soho.  The men dying in droves refers to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic.   The two towers of course the World Trade Center towers, which being at the very Southern tip of the City provided a directional landmark.   (Painting by me, doesn’t quite fit, sorry.  Margaret has some great photos on the prompt.)

PS – I realize after posting that I have misunderstood all prompts!  My brain is going as well as computer.  I am linking this to Kerry O’Connor’s  prompt on flashbacks–I will try for one with genuine present as well .  (I did at least write this in NYC in 2014, so a bit of a flashback, I guess.) 

Categories: New York City, poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 26 Comments

Colony Collapsed

March 11, 2014

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Colony Collapsed

To bee or not to bee?
That’s a question
we seem to have answered here
where there is no sting,
where our victory is
so grave and where
we buzz buzz buzz.

*******************
Sadly my computer is on the blink (or not blink–it’s dark) so posting from iPhone. Luckily, the challenge is to write something with less than 140 characters excluding spaces–micro-poetry for a macro photograph. This is for Shanyn Silinski at dverse poets pub. Shanyn has beautiful pictures of bees which I could not get to load on my phone so I’m using one of my own pics. Check out dverse for Shanyn’s beautiful albums.

PS Poor bees.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 17 Comments

Poppies ( Excerpt From “Nice” – Flash Fiction? )

March 9, 2014

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Poppies

It seemed forever.  It was forever.  Through the cornfields and the gas stations and the Stuckey signs, and, as the sky darkened, the occasional smell of skunk.

He felt very sad beneath the darkening sky, certain that love was not for him.

It wasn’t the pimples.

(A doctor pulls a string from a woman’s ear, the string tighter and tighter until the doctor has to strain, until  plop–a large bouquet of roses tumbles out.

“I say,” the doctor says, “where did those come from?”

“How should I know?” the woman says.  “Show me the card.”)

What he felt was that he would never be that woman.

How could he think such things?  Stupid riddles, women, flowers.  It made him furious.  It wasn’t what he meant.  It had nothing to do with any of it.

This is what he doubted–that anyone–a girl–would just take him, put his head upon her lap–he pictured an ad for a Swedish movie:  the man pretending to rest, his hair stroked back, his head cradled, loved, it seemed, just for laying there like a log.

The turquoise upholstery scraped the backs of his arms like fish scales; maybe he was allergic to something, his chest a too-tight balloon.

He looked at Les who looked out the window.  The forever flat wings of the turnpike.

In France, there were poppies along the roadsides.  He’d seen pictures of them, a kid in his class who’d gone to France and posed, one in her hair–

Les would be like that, he thought.  No matter what happened, she’d put this big red poppy in her hair, smile for the camera.

No, it was really his mother who’d be like that, his mother with Les, gathering poppies for her hair, sticking one behind Les’ ear, fixing it, repeatedly.

He imagined himself pitching out of the car, bopping around between tires with his hands up over his face as they stood there, practicing their poses.

He smiled.

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

I was inspired by the wonderful (and completely different) poem Sleepsong Of the Poppies by Hedgewitch/Joy Anne Jones, and the beautiful picture she posted by Vandy Massey, to think of poppies.  This brought up this short excerpt from the novel I’ve been working on called Nice.   This is an excerpt from right smack in the middle (I’m sorry never to start in the beginning! )  It is told from the voice of a teenage boy, at this point on a car trip with his family, and disturbed about certain thoughts about his sister.  The story takes place in the summer of 1968.   (I am hoping this qualifies as “flash fiction.”)

The picture above was actually made by my mother, Phyllis M. Gustafson, on my iPad.  She is 90 years old.

 

Categories: Uncategorized, writing
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Comments: 8 Comments

Giving a Minute Its Five Cents Worth

March 7, 2014

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Giving a Minute Its Five Cents Worth

We try so hard to save the day,
might better worry
how to spend it.

Me, I’ve stored too many–
days projected dry
lain away against the rainy;
hours wadded
like the folded storm bonnets
women used to keep
in their snapped-shut bags;

imagine hosts
of halcyon years–sheaves of wheat
that bow beneath warm skies–
freedom still to come, always–
while I’m feeding this here minute
into a slot cold
as a nickel.

Manifesto: roam fingers
over sides
before slotting;
feel for buffalo.

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

Here’s a belated poem for Gay Reiser Cannon’s post on dVerse Poets Pub to write a poetic manifesto–mine is not exactly about poetry, but good, perhaps, for a coin collector.  (Ha.)

For those who are not from the U.S., a buffalo nickel is an old style nickel–with a buffalo on one side–they often tend to be fairly valuable. 

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 21 Comments

Awake to Mistakes, Post-Midnight (and Friday Flash 55)

March 6, 2014

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Awake to Mistakes, Post-Midnight

I’ve done it
all wrong.
Everything–and that–
and, Jesus–that too–
How could I be
such an idiot–
They will know, see–

Sky and night,
God, ceiling,
just take me now–
You who’ve let me ape
a somehow someone,
make earth my new mask,
its cold clay clods
my cover.

***********************
Here’s a poem for Mama Zen’s Word’s Count on With Real Toads–the prompt to write something under 60 words about insomnia–or what you think of when insomniac– Since this is exactly 55 words, I am also posting for the wonderful G-Man–it is never a mistake to do that–

PS–I appreciate that the drawing/photo is best thing about this post! Poor elephant! (As always, all rights reserved.)

Categories: elephants, poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 13 Comments

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