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Charlotte On My Mind

October 10, 2014

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Charlotte On My Mind

I miss her.

The legs, sure–
(what a pair, what a pair, what
a pair, what a
pair–)

The spelling–tops–
(not everyone knows when to stop
putting r’s
in “terrific.”)

Of course, the web had
its icky side–
but there’s those out there who can’t abide
a trough–will scoff
at a rim of pancake,
act way too thin
for a tin’s skin of milk (even sweetened, even
condensed),
anything of that ilk–

(Oh, she would have liked, sniff, “ilk”–)

She killed flies,
KILLED
flies, and would have definitely
hurt a flea–

But she saved
me–

And that, I realize, is what life
is all about,
at least, if you’re (snort) living–

having someone in your corner–
in my case, of the barn door–
who listens kindly to your grunts upon the floor,
who wants every whisker on your pork
to wave in the fork
(non-fork)
of tomorrow, I mean, today–
this very morning–
when the moon gleams still
in the great blue hill
of the way beyond me,
just like the memory
of her round grey (whiff)
(blort) orb–

A friend of more than sorts–
that’s a friend who
when you’re immured
in fresh manure, reminds you
of the ineffable being
of being–that even
weeweeing all the way home
is a worthy roam; 

who makes you feel
like you’re “some pig”–
no matter how old, fat, unexciting–
because that’s what she once called you
in writing–

Because there’s something about words
written down
even when they’re written up,
that you hold onto
in your heart
long after the dew’s departed,
even when the paper/ink/web/ silk–
all that ilk–
has frayed to wisps, can only
whisper–
(she, sniff, would
have liked
that–)

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

An overly long poem belatedly for Kerry O’ Connor’s prompt on With Real Toads to write a poem in the voice of an animal.  This one from Wilbur the pig, of Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White.

I have to confess to having aborted other attempts at this prompt especially in the face of some of the wonderfully clever poems others have posted and that I’ve read so far–Kerry O’Connor’s wonderful “Dylan Thomas’s Dog’s Request” and Hedgewitch’s Nevermaiouw.  (Check them out–I’m sure others on Real Toads are also great–I’ve not yet had a chance to check them out !)

And I am so very sorry to be late in returning comments.  This has been an unusually busy week. But I will (eventually) get back to people.  Thanks much for your patience.  And if you are truly patient–prove it by checking out my new book, Nice, or any of my old books!

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

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 17 Comments

Return

September 28, 2014

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Return

They were like peepholes into
a glacial cave; they were like
cabochon jewels mounted one
upon another; the cataract eyes
the sodas slid from, garnets
of melt, yet still so cold the bottles were hard to hold
as we stood there– had to–
to drink them, then return,
sliding each into a chipped
wooden rack

slatted against
the white tiled glare of gas stations
that were themselves shaped, curved
like the cars, flat-topped
like the drivers, hubbed
with burnish–it all comes up
as I sit here trying to meditate away
the sadness, waiting for you,
who packs to go back, while me, I’m staying on,
only sitting in the car to avoid
another ticket, till, as I connect
with the breath, my nose is permeated
with the smell of gasoline, the guy in front, and so sad,
so sad (even though it’s only
a few more days), so sad
that I try to find in that smell
some release–the magic of
way back once
when it was an inhalation both heady
and thumb-smudged, dangerous, male,
oil-creased–a scent backdropped with levitations
of the dark and tubular–

the regular mechanical as reliably mysterious
as the thick lips of glass that circled
those swallows of freeze we
shivered down, never dreaming those bottles built
for re-fills would some day be far
beyond our grasp–

as will be
this moment I wait in,
this moment in which I am so sad
that you are going,
this moment that will not come back, no matter how

I might miss it–

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

Poem of sorts for Margaret Bednar’s post “Play it Again, Sam” on With Real Toads.  Margaret brings back older prompts.  I am returning here to Ella’s prompt about writing something that comes up after sitting quietly, and also Shay’s (Fireblossom) about magic. 

Also posting belatedly to dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night.

Categories: poetry
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Comments: 14 Comments

Clipper

September 27, 2014

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Clipper

It was worse than embarrassing.  It had been bad enough
when he was little, and, now, when they said to him==”hey, you twelve now, boy, almost a man, not
a little bitty baby,”–he wanted to bite it off, sling it onto the highway, cast it into some woods, lose it anywhere there were trucks, trash, tangle. It just wasn’t

something a boy did–stick his tongue out–

and he did it all the time when he was drawing, really just concentrating on anything only that was mainly drawing, like he wanted to just reach out and give whatever he drew

a taste–

Only it didn’t look like that, it just looked

stupid, and so, as he began the hull, he tried to press his lips into a seam, the pencil curving, cause it was

boats he liked to draw mainly–old clipper ships with sails, or else

destroyers–he’d seen them in the library but mainly copied from

a catalogue they’d gotten, wrong-address–

the clipper ships built

in bottles, which seemed to him impossible, bottles something they just threw in the heap out back, a toss of crackling

into cracked, and the destroyer which the catalog said

weighed paper.  He could not understand why someone would want

to weigh paper, but didn’t worry about that part, ’cause what caught him was

that it was ” “just perfect for

that nautical guy

in your household.”

and even though he knew “nautical” had something to do with the sea and maybe even

boats, he pronounced it “now–oo–tical,” in his head, and it always made him think that the guy the destroyer would be just perfect for was someone who got everything right now-oo, and, he thought,

looking at the battleship, that in their house that would be his grandpa though he couldn’t actually imagine him saying “right now–oo,” which sounded like a howl, and may even kind of a joke, while when his grandpa wanted something it was kind of

a sharp right now, sort of like what he imagined to be the crinkles in

a crisp sea, or what they talked about in books
as the slap of the waves, or the cuts he imagined that
destroyer might make

through water, or a broken

bottle, his face even looking

like a destroyer, the thick grey eyebrows like

the bridge, the eyes, those gun tubes, his nose, beaked, prowed–

Which is when he remembered to check, lifting his pencil point towards his lips, and tasting

the graphite.

And cursed himself, using every word he did know how
to pronounce, and opened his mouth widely, though not so widely someone could actually see him opening it, and shut his mouth tight, and then tried to pretend that he was just yawning, in case someone could see, though he was as wired inside

as a straining rope, cause when he pulled his tongue back in his mouth, it burned, touching his pallet,

and after a minute he couldn’t help but try to press it against his teeth, anything, as if teeth

were comforters–

Then shook his head, wiping his pencil hand over the moistness, sweat, and, when he started to draw again, tried to hint at the outline of the planks on the clipper’s side, at the rounding of the wood that shinnied up the mast’s climb,  trying to make something solid

with shading, feeling all along the push of the tongue at his teeth,

though he hated feeling that, thinking of that, and when he got to the top of the mast, and poured himself into
the crow’s nest, he realized it had slid forward and out again, just a little, but furious, he bit it,

and to be honest, he tried not to bite it hard because

it was already so sore, and because

a part of him could not really believe that learning soreness would teach him

to keep it in its place; if learning soreness

kept it in its place, it would have a hide-out in

his stomach by now, maybe even

his big toe,

and he tried hard to laugh at that, the picture of tongue in toe, when it panged, and then, when it kept panging, to think of the pain as pencil points, dotting the heads of birds in his ship’s sky, flipping out their wing spans, and when the pain seemed like

it would not quiet, he tried to picture his mouth like the mouth of Jonah’s fish, which could keep Jonah inside without even hurting him

and then tried, thinking of that not-hurting, to push through
to the sails, his favorite parts, the way they let his pencil capture winds and sky and movement, and he drew their curves carefully, trying to imagine a tongue stuck in his toe, but never somehow the curves of his own cheeks, the slope down to his lips, the breathe stowed in his tight, bent, chest.

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

Here’s a draft something for Herotomost’s prompt on With Real Toads.  Herotomost said it could be anything inspired by a truth seen from a twelve=year old’s eyes=Herotomost creates a great picture of his own twelve-year old in a tangle of jungle, somehow making me imagine this one, and some little truth there–

Sorry for the length–and the picture is also not exactly right, not a clipper but something from NYC (where I am right now.) 

Also, I am not very good at posting sidebar pictures, but I wanted to let you know my new book Nice, written in part from a child’s perspective, is out.  Check it out!  Buy it!  (It’s cheap.)  I would be happy to get one to anyone interested in reviewing!  Thanks.  

PP Native Cover_4696546_Front Cover

 

 

 

Categories: Nice, poetry, writing
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Comments: 17 Comments

What I Was Trying To Write

September 22, 2014

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What I was trying to write

I was trying to write a poem about war.

I was trying to describe
how we are blinded
by certain adherences, whether to faith
or jingo,
how they drag us, one-eyed, into
a Cyclops slog–

how then, I wrote,
we lid our cribbed gaze
in righteousness,
let pride steel love,
train out any tender bend
towards anguish’s white flags, the sclera of
the vanquished (or, just, the scared),
temper mettle
to sword–

then stopped, partly because
I had to look up sclera–it means
the whites of eyes–but more because
I wanted to be clear, not obscure
with slant convolution–

because when I wrote the “training out
of tender bend,” I specifically pictured, men,
ours, so young their skin
shows individual bristles–I think somehow
of piglets but in the sweet sense, long-lashed and
rather soft
behind the neck–
but the necks of these poor men are thickened by
what they’ve learned
to carry; armored as tanks,
they force some dirt-gouted door,
striding cartridges
into a crouch of women, men, folded up
as cranes, bird bones pushed
against creased pulses;

and when I wrote
of “anguish’s white flags,” I saw specifically
the whites of eyes,
the whites of raised palms, the white lines
on the back-sides
of knuckles, and

the soldiers shout a foreign bark
they think means “where?”
or maybe, if it blares on,
“we don’t want to hurt you, just
to search,” but the sounds are din
to the crouched
as if the voices cried for “lobster” in the midst of a desert, and they are
in the midst of the desert,
and the triggered hands look
like great claws,
and the skin that gapes through gaps
in the camo, red,
and the women, their eye whites
flickering now like a terrible game
of shadow against a wall, begin to wail,
and the young solders want
to whale them,
thinking why in the fuck do these people
we’re trying to help keep fucking
with us,
and wish they could kick
something, their boots
so weighted, and their mettle–that is
who they are truly–flaming into something
they can’t temper, and plaster sprays,
cloth tosses, and goats shit skittering,
and the whites of eyes mouth please or no or
something more
unspeakable, and the men hate,
and the soldiers hate,
and the women maybe hate too, left
with nothing, and how
one wonders does this solve
very much.

Which is what I wanted to write, and without homonym,
because no words actually sound
like what war means.

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

Here’s a poem of sorts.  Draft.  I don’t know about the basic frame.  But it started out with Grapeling’s (M’s) “get listed” prompt on With Real Toads, in which he suggested writing a poem based upon words chosen from the Art of War.  I wrote a poem for that prompt, but deleted the italicized stanza at the last moment before posting.  Then later showed to M who expressed interest, and in response–thanks, M–I came up with this. 

I also want to acknowledge Kerry O’ Connor’s wonderful poem “A Poem Is No Place,” which I read recently and which also has to do with the uses of poetry.  

Am linking to With Real Toads open link night.  Sorry for the length and profanity. 

And the picture is one that I took the other day that doesn’t really have much to do with this poem, but am using because of the different frames. 

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 29 Comments

The Young

September 21, 2014

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The Young

How the young curl into themselves
like ferns in early spring,
hard-wired to hold their still-gyred beings,
clasp encircled
by own surfaces,
until, time, as it surely will,
fiddles with heads and bodies–

and, truly, how wondrous is
the unwinding–
fronds loosening like the skin limbs stretch
to encompass,
spores gloriously exposed (if, only
on the undersides),
leaves teething
to get a better bite
of sun
and rainfall–

Terrifying, though, when winds spin
their expanse, when cold
enfolds,
and they can’t coil back
to those clutched self-centers–

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

Here’s a sort of poem, written under the influence of Karin Boye, a Swedish poet, who is the subject of a prompt by Bjorn Rydberg  on With Real Toads.

A couple of process notes–the picture (mine) is of fiddlehead ferns–those are the ones I had in mind, which have that name in the U.S. due to the spiraled shape in early spring.  Also, one word that troubles me is “clasp” in the first stanza that had been  “small fists,” but small fists seemed to sort limit the poem to infants.  If anyone has any thoughts on these words, I’m happy to hear them.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 24 Comments

Circle

September 2, 2014

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Circle

Dear Mother,
I realize now
there was a miscommunication.

We were like children playing “telephone”–
sitting in a circle on the floor, mis-whispering
hand-cupped messages.

So, when you said, or at least meant,
“you are my everything,”
I heard, “you must be everything.”
And when you said, at least meant, “there is nothing
more important,”
I heard, “otherwise, you’re nothing important–”

I don’t know how the wires got crossed.
Maybe you’d misheard the messages yourself–
we were not the only ones
in that circle–

But the words of a song learned wrong
soon belong to the tunes we sing, fit our musics
like a glove.

So, what’s to be done, love?

What comes to mind
is simply kindness–
a kindness that is everything
yet gives itself, too, to nothing important.

It feels–the receiving
of this kindness–like bared hands cupping
one another–
like the breath of palm upon knuckle,
the caress of air’s
tissues–

It feels–the giving
of this kindness–like these hands cupping
a heart
as if it were an infant animal, baby chick,
some ball of warmth whose murmured messages
we think we well understand.

But it’s hard to cup one’s own heart, to reach
inside the cage of one’s formed ribs, twist elbows
against their grooves;
fearsome to stretch fingers
into that deep,
to find the aching beat one can’t see but must just feel for

when we sometimes seem to feel it everywhere,
even in the boards I pace as I call you, now from a cell phone,
as if the heart could be cut and sanded,
made into planks that we might sit upon, you and me,
holding us upright, as back and forth
we whisper, try too, to listen.

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

Here’s a poem for Real Toads Open Link night. And also for Kerry O’Connor’s fortuitous prompt on dichotomy.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 37 Comments

Screen-Free

August 21, 2014

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Screen-free

This is the First Day of the Rest of My Life.
Determined not to live it in the blue light
of a computer screen,
I grab my notebook and
what turns out to be
a leaky pen.

This is the First Day of the Rest of My Life,
but already my fingers are blotted bluer
than the dawnish morn (this being the First Day
of the Rest of My Life, I’ve gotten up early)
and I’ve smudged the down comforter
with indigo.

I tell myself that anyone who will live like I will
in this, the Rest of My Life,
will, of course, have bedclothes stained
with ink and, probably also, tea,
but that feels depressingly like
the rest of my life, that is, the spotty part that came before.

I try to block out the smudge
with my notebook–for even at the Dawn
of this energetic, disciplined, real-world Rest of My Life, I do not have the vim
to get up and wash my hands, much less
the comforter–

Rub my fingers along the white pages,
but their blue-lined grid is stolidly oblivious,
the ink already too embedded in my skin
to rub off.

A lone cow lows
out the window,
somewhere down the valley,
but beneath the same pale sky.

 

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

Here’s a sort of poem posted for two prompts–though I don’t know that it’s quite right for either.  One is from Victoria C. Slotto on dVerse Poets to write about patterns in our life; the other is Susie Clevenger’s post on With Real Toads, to use a Native American springboard–in this case, the line–“Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.” – Tribe Unknown.  I don’t know how this came from that, but I think it arose from the idea that the big change would be just to look out the window in the morning with neither pen nor keyboard.  

The drawing above is an old one, and because in black and white, I did not include the blue smudges!  

Categories: dog, elephants, poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 28 Comments

Blue

August 15, 2014

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Blue

One’s heart is broken.
One’s heart is a well that neighbors call down,
searching for a lost child,
the mother held back
in the house.

It is a white frame house,
where someone paces kitchen
to living room,
a swell below the door sill
where the floors meet.

The heart looks out to the horizon, worrying
as night falls,
worrying
as the lawn that turns to field that turns to sky
turns to cobalt,
though the heart loves
that deep blue;
though the heart, when it can breathe,
loves blue.

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

Here’s very much of a draft poem for Herotomost’s prompt on with real toads in honor of Leo, to write a poem that comes in like a lion, leaves like a lamb.  I’m sorry I’ve been a bit behind returning comments.  This has been a very job-intense summer for me.

P.S. – photo is mine–all rights reserved, as always.

Pps have edited since first posting.

Categories: poetry
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: 17 Comments

Mange

August 1, 2014

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Mange

The mangy fox ranges
field to lawn,as
estranged from his sly skin, worn
thin–

I shout out “get away”
as I’ve been told,
the fox-stare back not bold,
but marble-shot direct
as yellow eyes reflect
a desert in the green,
this fox who shouldn’t be seen
except as stalk
in taller grass,
who pauses where I pass
to gnaw a paw–

All night the same–
the mangy fox who ranges through
my brain, kneading,
needing.

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

Here’s a sort of poem very belatedly offered for Kerry O’Connor’s prompt on With Real Toads about alienation.  I think Kerry was thinking in more space age-y terms, but this came up.  Photo is mine of poor little fox wandering around. 

Sorry to have been so out of touch.  I have been working a great deal at my job and also busy with certain family obligations (and family pleasures.)  Miss miss miss posting poems, but just not possible right now. 

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 12 Comments

Ammonoidea (Fossilized Shells)

July 26, 2014

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Ammonoidea  (Fossilized Shells)

I like to think
that their dendritic prints,
algal caresses beached
in bleached stone, mean
that I will know the nuzzle
of your whisked-white chin long
into the next paradigm;
though even now I’m shaped
by the whorl of your chest
where time’s sand stills
its hands
and I hear in your warmth
the sea.

 

 

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

A very belated offering for Mama Zen’s “Words Count” prompt on With Real Toads to write a poem on fossil in less than sixty words.  I’m sorry to have been quite absent lately, and probably will not be able to post much in the next couple of weeks, due to work and family busy-ness.    Miss you all!

PS – photo from Mama Zen–all rights reserved to her. 

PPS–I am hoping also to link to dVerse Poets OLN, hosted by the wonderful Victoria. 

Categories: poetry
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Comments: 36 Comments

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