Posted tagged ‘dVerse Poetry Pub’

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Somewhat Wandering Ode From Bumbler to Rumbler (Brian Miller)

July 19, 2014

 

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Somewhat Wandering Ode From Bumbler to Rumbler (Me to Brian Miller–NOT a would-be)

Oh you, who wander into trees mumbling,
counting feet on fingers, toed-sort bumbling–
Oh you, you would-be poet, you’re my kind.
Paths crossing, I used to send a secret sign–
a pantomime of Prufrock’s trousers rolled,
a shoulder shrug of Byron’s cloak’s unfold–
only my gesture, never adequately bold–
fell, I fear, quite flat, as you (of my same mold)
chanted unheeding by–pen, like mine, tracing
indecipherable squiggles, eyes facing.
either ground or sky, not even caring for
the proper shape of L’s–Hell, it’s more
than enough to walk, count feet, chew words–
saluting a fellow would-be seemed absurd!

But then all changed! With the coming of
a single line of hair that hovered above
a single head–Okay, Claudia helped too–
Kerry at her end–but he’s the ‘hawked who
manages a bee-line to one and all,
whether they post day or night–who hears the call–
dear Brian Miller–I send this ode to you–
though you don’t wander into trees mumbling,
and don’t like counting feet–(prefer rumbling)–
Thank you, poet, writer, family man–
for feats that far excel what counting can–
giving warmth, balm, light so very freely
even to those who still bump dark and treely. 

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

Here’s a very belated ode to a poet for the dVerse Poets Pub three-year anniversary–

Thanks to Claudia Schoenfeld and Brian Miller for the wonderful dVerse Poets Pub site that has honestly changed my life–  Thanks too to Kerry O’Connor at Real Toads also celebrating three years. 

Thanks to the other poet sites, that I’ve not been such a part of, but that are wonderful resources for bumbling, mumbling solitary poets, like Poets United and Poetry Jam and The Mag.  

But the energy, indefatigability and plain old embrace of Brian Miller, who posts wonderful poetry and prose (at an incomprehensible rate) at Waystation One, are particularly incredible.   Note the would-be poet of the first stanza is someone like me–the Ode moves then to a true life poet–Brian.  (I’m a little worried this part of the poem is unclear, but for now will leave as is!)  

The pic not fully suited–I’m a little jammed to draw and wasn’t sure if Brian would really appreciate a portrait–but was taken by me earlier in the summer.  All rights, as always, reserved. 

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Conflation in Poetry? Hmmmm…. “Far”

October 27, 2011

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As followers of this blog know, I’ve gotten very involved of late with the dVerse Poetry Pub, and poetry in general.  (There is nothing like community for stimulating work. )  The prompt today by Emmet Wheatfall deals with “conflation,” what I think of as piecing things, often disparate, together.  I don’t know if this poem totally qualifies, but it is a poem I’ve had on my mind, and that I re-wrote (and improved) with the idea of conflating themes in mind.   

Far

We pushed from cold night into a Chinese restaurant,
the fluorescents reverberating like the din.  One waitress
wiped the table, burnishing smears into reflection;
 another balanced a rounded pot of tea and a fist’s stack
of cups (their sides glowing, incongruously,
with little seeds of translucence, grains of rice
made glass), the pot so full
that tea brimmed to the edge of its
spout with every shift from level, hip
or wrist, a
glimmering lithe tongue.

A man in my group had, some time before,
lost his adult child.  It had been sudden, she
had been young.
It was hard for me to look at him,
each expression–his patience
with the waitresses, concern about the chairs, even his
cold-reddened skin—a riddled mask
over the shear of loss that had left
the merest sense of face, worn
like the extremity
of an icon, the bronze saint whose foot has been rubbed
to a bare grip, slip
of soap, by petitioners who have
prayed to be washed clean, not of sin, but suffering.

The teapot begged to be poured; the waitress ran its
gulping stream over the beaded cups, steam rising into
air that ached to be warmed, the door, the night, opening
always at our side.

I could almost not look
at the man, as if his pain
might brim over,
scald me too, and yet another part of me,
what I like to think of as a part
that catches light like the curve of
a cup, or perhaps a part that is
dark, swirling, like the grain in the veneer
of even a plastic tabletop, that part that
somehow recalls a tree (or at least, the idea
of a tree), shifted my chair closer, wanting
to  drink with him that
fresh, hot tea, 
anything that could pass for succor.

Categories: iPad art, poetry
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Taboo/Provocative Sonnet? (“Spy Games” )

October 18, 2011

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!

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Bumper Sticker Poem (Live Free or Die?) (Thinking of Germany and Bad Times)

October 8, 2011

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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?

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Another Sestina? Yes! “Seeking”

September 27, 2011

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I have been thinking a lot about poetry lately. This is partly because I’m supposed to be working on a novel! But also because I’ve been in contact with a couple of very supportive websites for online poets. This poem is written for the “open link” night of dVerse Poets Pub, which also inspired the form.

The sestina, for those who don’t know it, is a form consisting of six six-line stanzas whose lines end with the same six words, repeated in a somewhat confusing cycle. The last three-line stanza, called the envoie, also uses all six words.

Seeking

It was heat so hot it cut the air
into panels of swaying bend and warp,
her gaze into off-set swathes of view;
heat so hot that it blotted out the sun,
passing off white noise as summer sky;
heat as hot as any she’d not felt,

for the weather did not burn but lined with felt
her day, her lungs, her movements through the air,
enclothing its tight fist around the sky.
So very hard to breathe a weave and warp
that were weighted not with light but sun,
which, even as it seemed to hide from view–

only a smear in the red-orange view
of dusk, the pink of dawn–made itself felt
as a chemical ball of flame, a sun
of some far planet that in time/space warp
had circumvented the Earth’s true sky.

Oh where, oh where, she wondered, was the sky?
Its hue, its blue, the newness of each view,
the healing that could ease the twist and warp
that tugged at all she thought, at all she felt.
Oh where, oh where, she wondered in dull air,
was he who once was called her only son?

In truth, of course, he still was called her son.
The names of things not found under the sky
remain their names, like lyrics to an air
whose tune is lost, like paintings of a view
long since blocked out (by trees, let’s say, who felt
their limbs took precedence). In the warp

of her wandering mind, even the warp
of branches that curved and craned for sun
was conduct consciously planned and felt–
for all was sentient, live, under the sky,
while also dead. This special point of view
appears to the human for whom to err

has been divine, who’s felt the loss of sky
that held a son, a point of view
so sharp, it limned the warp of missing air.

P.S. For those interested in process–I did not have a clue of what I was going to write when I started only that I wanted to try another sestina. So I focused on a few good repeating words, and started out with a line (more or less) from the novel I am supposed to be working on (which does not have a story anything like this.) Oddly, I did not think about “err” as a homonym till the second or third draft.

(As always, all rights reserved.)

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