ManicDDaily

DVerse Poets Pub has a prompt today by Gay Reiser Cannnon asking for poems that trade in image, simile, metaphor, allegory, figure.  The poem below was based on an exercise that tended to force one into metaphor (though frankly almost any poem has some basis in these elements.)  The picture, done on my iPad 2, was “filtered” on the Photogene App above.  (Below is the unfiltered image.)

Family Finishes

I.

The perfectionist sands her offspring to her image, or
an image, filing away the
unsightly, the angry, the unspeakable.
Drills a face fit for a pageant, as
smooth as balsam, as modeled as
a keel; then (the child carved
to measure), she steps
down into that keel, careful
of any unseamed tar.

II.

A family levels itself to just folks with enough distance;
an occasional pageant – picnic or funeral – joins the blood,
a biennial application of glue,
occasions muddled with the stickiness of blood;
mother hammering the grandmother, son
nailing father, the family portrait gathering a rich patina.

III.

Steeped in the traditions of the portrait hall,
the young mother thought
to measure out love in spoonfuls,
smoothing away excess, screwing it into a tied-up sock.
Blasphemy to mount to ecstasy over your child.  No.
Passion fit the furniture
like a bowl of tulips or tea set, shaped to
its interval.  But the small white fist that gripped her finger
leveled training,
proper restraint transmuting aged wine to deep wellspring,
casks burst to loose a flow of sparkling clarity.