ManicDDaily

In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed a poetry exercise for the inspirationally-challenged.  (See prior posts for the inspirationally-challenged for detailed instructions.)  The exercise basically involves choosing a craft or occupation, and listing the verbs associated with that craft or occupation.  These tend to be strong, particular, and colorful words and verbs.  These are then used in the drafting of  your exercise poem.

Here is another set of examples, which again, I’ve grouped as a single poem since they were all based on the same exercise.  This one involved the craft of carpentry.  (See e.g. “level,” “sand,” “smooth,” “measure,” “adorn,” “glue,” “hammer,” “file,” “nail,” “shape,” “cut,” “drill,” etc.)   I haven’t been able to locate the list of exercise nouns in my disorganized notebooks, but I know I included certain good generics like “mother”, as well as the nice specific tangible words “tulips” and “stickiness.”

Family Finishes

I.

The perfect mother sands the child down to her image, or
an image, filing away the
unsightly, the angry, the unspeakable.
She drills in a face fit for a pageant, as
smooth as balsam, as modeled as
the keel of a canoe.
Cutting the child to measure, she
ignores the stickness of any unseamed tar.

II.

A family levels itself to just folks with enough distance,
an occasional pageant – picnic or funeral – joins the blood again,
a bienniel application of glue.
The occasions are muddled with the stickiness of the blood, the
mother hammering away at the grandmother, the son
nailing the father, the family portrait gathering a  sullen patina.

III.

Steeped in tradition, the young mother thought
to measure out love in spoonfuls,
smoothing away excess and screwing it into a tied-up sock.

Blasphemy to mount to ecstasy over your child.  No.  Passion
was to be hammered down to fit the furniture, adorn the home,
like a bowl of tulips shaped to
its interval.  But the small white
fist that gripped her finger leveled her training,
proper restraint transmuted from an aged wine to water,
casks burst to loose a stream, river, flow barely banked,
clear, sparkling.

All rights reserved.  Karin  Gustafson

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