Posted tagged ‘Karin Gustafson poetry’

« ManicDDaily home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Also For Father’s Day – “My Father (baby birds)” Poem

June 20, 2010

Earlier today wrote a post, which, despite the elephants, approached Father’s Day from the sociological side (sort of).  My true bent is more towards the poetic, so here’s another post (draft poem) in honor of the day.

My Father (baby birds)

When he sang,
which was only in church,
my father’s voice
was deep and cragged and
reminded me of a froggie
gone a’courting.
But this was baby birds.

It was not even a person
who had died.
It was not even a particularly noble dog,
though like all of its species, it was capable
of a self-debasing attachment that could seem
Arthurian.

But after the accident, the rush,
the sad blur home,
my father’s back faced me in my room
with a sound
of birds.
It silenced all gone wrong,
turned me back into a person
who could do things in the world.

Categories: poetry
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Prom Season (With Elephants)

June 4, 2010

June Prom

The skies take a short break, waiting for the hair.
In one case, it is fine, sleek hair
which will only stay up till
the photo’s click, less than the time
I’ve stood behind the girl, working with
bobby pins.  “Wispy is good,” I say as
she fumbles in the back for smooth.
The make-up is smooth; two-toned
eyes converge with Egyptian directness
onto the shade of dress’s shine.

Skies grumble.  “Maybe
you better hurry,” I say.
“Why did I squeeze it?” one wails.
I palpate tint and powder onto a spot on
her breastbone, repeating a mantra
of don’t worry, it won’t show.

Another wants to keep the price tag on, tucked
inside the dress’s backless back
because it’s the most expensive she’s
ever owned.   Mid-twirl, she cries, “oh no!  It smells
like smoked fish.  Why does it smell like smoked fish?”
I tell her it’s fine, but offer perfume.  The one with the squeezed pimple
leans in supportively:  “I can’t smell it.”
“Oh God,” the twirler moans, “I
can smell it from here.”

Lips stretch shimmer
onto smiles perfected
over eighteen years.   And then, the camera
down, they really smile, not bemoaning
their lack of dates, only—and that less
and less–the possible scent
of smoked fish.

Darkness greets them with what sounds like applause.
I chase down a cab, then, umbrella in
each hand, ferry them one at a time,
hovering over hair, shoulders, skirt.
Slippered feet glisten through the tarred, watery drumroll,
as if made partly of glass,
the other part celluloid.
I laugh with the doorman as the taxi pulls away,
taillights as bright as Christmas in this storm,
the mother, the friend’s mother,
the one left to put away
the little jars, hangers, bobby pins,
to scoop from the floor the finally cast-off
tag, happy to be needed
by these large, beautiful, creatures,
happy to be out of the rain.

Categories: elephants, parenting, poetry, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Sixth Day of National Poetry Month – Swept Away

April 6, 2010

Sweeping Before Trip

Here’s a poem that I originally wrote for the Sixth Day of National Poetry Month (April 2010), a month in which I write a draft poem a day.  This one was about the urge to clean before taking a trip.  ( I am linking it now in December 2011 to Bluebell books’ prompt about Cinderella taking a tea break. )

Swept Away

Sometimes you just have to clean.
Yes, you have a plane to catch.
But you notice, even as you should be zipping up
your carry-on, specks–whole clumps–dust
that you tell yourself you just can’t bear
to come back to–but that you really just can’t bear
to leave behind.

In the moment of departure, in the grip
of tearing yourself away,
the familiar web-swathed corners call out to you;
all those crumbs below the table, their genealogies
so readily traceable; that rug that catches
every single thing; all of it holds on,
until the act of sweeping gently rocks you
across worn paths, cradles
you in your own low arc, scrapes
the home plate clean and, somehow,
sets you free.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, writing exercises
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: 12 Comments

Orange, Foot, Chickpeas – Poem For the Busy – Labor Leader in Ahmadabad

March 16, 2010

Orange, foot, chick peas

The getting-more-sleep venture that I discussed in yesterday’s post isn’t really working, but the driven, drinking-lots-of-strong-tea, business is going gangbusters.  Tonight, I make the overly-busy person’s hummus;  this consisted of leftover (canned) chick peas poured into a seemingly-clean mug, topped with a couple of spoonfuls of tahini, sprinkled with roughly minced garlic.  Yes, it sounds pathetic, but was actually very good, the mug turning out not to have been truly cleaned but instead to contain a very thin residue of  Emergen-C (a Vitamin C drink).  Okay, that too sounds kind of awful–even I was a little grossed out when I connected the mug to my morning’s Emergen-C–but it turned out to impart the whole combination with a delicious citrus-y flavor.

It is important, when stressed, to maintain a cheerful attitude.   Here’s a poem at least tangentially about that:

Have I learned anything?

Ah this is better.
This is sitting down.
This is getting some tea.
This is biting into an orange peel, just slightly, before peeling.
This is biting into the orange.
I think about the labor leader I knew in Ahmadabad.
How they would bring him his coffee
in the morning, me my tea.
He had given up tea, he said,
when Gandhi said to, and ever since,
taking a hot slurp,
he had never drunk it.
Because of the British.

In the same way, in the car,
he took out all his toiletries, one by one, handing
them to me for examination:
a small soap still wrapped in its green labeled paper,
collected from an Indian hotel,
his razor, his comb—he combed
his close cropped hair before handing it to me as if
to show its use—a small towel–
he really didn’t have very much–a small
scissors.  His feet were up
on the seat.  Now
he brought one to his knee, shifting
his white cloth dhoti, and
clipped the toe nails quickly, first
one foot then the other.
He collected as he clipped
the small white crusts of nail, then
opened the window a bit wider
to toss them out.

“You see how I am always busy,” he said.  “Never
a moment idle, wasted.  I am busy all the time,
you see how I am doing it.”
He took the toiletries back from me.

I finish my breakfast slowly,
just sitting.

All rights reserved.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Snow Today – Villanelle to Aging Brain

February 26, 2010

Aging Brain in Snow Drift

Snow today.  A ton of it.  Many tons.

Snow is pretty great in Manhattan–there’s most of the magic, little of the mess.  No, that’s not right.  How about ‘there’s most of the incandescence, little of the inconvenience’?

What I’m really trying to say here is that most of us here don’t have to shovel our driveways, or clean off our cars.  (We just don’t have ’em.)

And the City is clean!  At least, looks clean.  For a few hours anyway.  (Before the dogs have had their day.)

In a really big snow storm, like today, all the things that you thought were so important, the deadlines, the bustle, go on hold for a little while.   Nature takes over, unusual in itself in the City.

Of course, Nature took over in kind of shocking way this snowstorm when a man from Brooklyn man was killed by a falling tree limb in Central Park.

Although I truly think New Yorkers were shocked and saddened by the incident, many still ventured into Central Park today to enjoy its heavy blanket of snow.   With the typical New Yorker’s can-do attitude, one woman commented that, after yesterday’s accident,  she’d decided not to stay long under any tall trees.  (Good thinking.)   (It reminded me of my far less careful planning,  when I bought a used inflatable rubber dinghy on the street sometime after 9/11 with the thought that if terrorism hit again, I could float my children and myself across the Hudson.  Unfortunately, because I bought the very heavy raft in a little shopping cart (the area had no taxi cabs), I abraded several holes in the rubber by the time I dragged it home.)

Today, I tried to use the quiet aftermath of the snow storm to write a Petrarchan sonnet.  I managed the form, but not a very good poem, which immediately sent me into a tailspin about brain deterioration.  (Although thinking about the incident with the rubber dinghy, I’m not sure that my brain really has deteriorated in the last several years.)  At any rate, as a result, I’m posting instead an older villanelle (already posted some months ago, but without illustration):

Villanelle to Wandering Brain

Sometimes my mind feels like it’s lost its way
and must make do with words that are in reach
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day,

when what it craves is crimson, noon in May,
the unscathed verb or complex forms of speech.
But sometimes my mind feels like it’s lost its way

and calls the egg a lightbulb, plan a tray,
and no matter how it search or how beseech
is pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

I try to make a joke of my decay
or say that busy-ness acts as the leech
that makes my mind feel like it’s lost its way,

but whole years seem as spent as last month’s pay,
lost in unmet dares to eat a peach
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

There is so much I think I still should say,
so press poor words like linens to heart’s breach,
but find my mind has somehow lost its way
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

All rights reserved.

Categories: New York City, poetry, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Sunday Poem (Mother, Daughter, in Father-Son Realm)

February 21, 2010

Script (Poem for Sundays)

A poem for Sundays–perhaps more of a story than poem.  Thanks as always for reading.

Script

Pictures hung in the Sunday School downstairs:
men mostly, whose long-haired, but not hippified, heads
were highlit with gold, clouds, doves,
and, hovering above, goatee-shaped
wisps of flame.

In the actual nave hung
only a spare metal cross,
lit by shafts of dust-mote-
dropping day.

Whenever the minister made an important point, he cupped
his hands together,
the fingers separate but clenched, the pinkies nearly throbbing
with tautness.  He used the gesture
to symbolize a knot.  But also growth.
Tense knotty growth.  How hard
it all was, how simple.

I watched the terse bend of knuckle closely, the extended
half-wound fists.  But, as the sermon droned, I turned to
other hands:  my own inside short white gloves, the worn seam
tracing their perimeter,
like a railroad track en route to itself;
my mother’s, bare, cool, soft.
I picked up her fingers,
one by one, as if to find beneath them,
a way of passing time.

Then, just as my father’s shaved crust of chin
nodded over the crisp edge of Sunday shirt collar,
she quietly rotated
the bulletin on top of a hymnal and
modeled my name in script.
She used one of the short pencils stored in the pews
for new parishioners.  I, taking off one glove
to firmly grip the wood,
copied her letters slowly,
feeling each curve
as a blessing, a secret blessing,
for we were interlopers in that
realm of fathers/sons/ghosts,
the ones who snuck beneath the shafts of light,
then basked in them,
we women.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

Categories: children's illustration, daughtering, poetry
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

In Honor Of Unromantic Love – Pre-Valentine’s Day Poem

February 12, 2010

Valentine Sweetie

For kids, Valentine’s Day is not a completely romantic holiday (at least it wasn’t back in the stone age when I was a child.)   In the spirit of total inclusion, little Valentine’s Day cards were given to every member of one’s elementary school class by every other member.   (They weren’t exactly cards, more like little pieces of paper filled with hearts and silly slogans.)  A more elegant heart (of chocolate) was given to the elementary school teacher, and those little chalky fortune-cookie message candy hearts, the ones with the red print embedded in their pastel sides, were eaten (or saved and studied)  by everyone else.   I say fortune-cookie message hearts in that their messages, like fortunes, were sometimes a bit difficult to understand.  “Be Mine” was obvious.  But “Sure Thing” seemed a little odd to a six-year old.

(Apologies for the heart candy painted above, by the way.  I’m not sure those chalk hearts had punctuation.)

The point of all this is that Valentine’s Day was about love and not just romantic love.  In that spirit, I’m posting a non-romantic love poem.

Going in to look at my daughter asleep

When I walk into your room
I try to sneak
beneath your soft
small breaths like
hiding inside the
lilac bush, trying not to laugh, like
the dreams in which I
sit with my dead
grandmother, so happy to
have her back.  It’s a rebirth
each time I see you after
not seeing you, it’s
as if you had made
the dead rise.

All rights reserved.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Pre-Valentine’s (Maybe Post-Valentine’s) Villanelle

February 11, 2010

"He Talked" (Villanelle)

I have to confess that this is not 0ne of my best villanelles, but it’s fun for the season.  (Note that it has been edited for public consumption!)

For instructions on writing a villanelle, click here for the gist, here for the specific mechanics.

He talked

He talked in ways I’d never heard before,
huskiness clustered around “ma’am” and “sir.”
I thought I knew a lot, till he taught more,

which was great, at first–school’d become a bore–
his Georgian sweetness an exotic lure–
he talked in ways I’d never heard before.

Buckskin oxfords too, that he truly wore–
a suede white, yes, still white they were.
(I thought I knew so much till he taught more.)

Soon every night would find him at my door,
I’d pull him in, mind blushing, face a blur,
as he talked in ways I’d never heard before.

With skin, with hands, but, above all, speech, he swore
such love to my parts, oh so cocksure.
I thought I knew a lot, till he taught more,

and could not hear enough, till new words bore
down hard—”visiting,” “girlfriend,” a nameless “her.”
He talked in ways I’d never heard before.
I thought I knew a lot, till he taught more.

All rights reserved.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, villanelle
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 2 Comments

“Truest Love” Poem – Dog is What Spelled Backwards?

February 5, 2010

More in honor of trust and dogs.

Truest Love

The little dog lay on its back
in the semblance of
truest love.
The woman, leaning in from above, ignored
stained whiskers and breath like fish,
in the semblance of truest love.

The little dog exalted when she came home
as if she were its dearest wish,
the answer to heart’s prayer.
She said, ‘hey there,’ and stooped
to capture some wriggle.

The little dog saw her as
itself spelled backwards;  she
accepted the role, thankful that
some being had finally taken
due note of her
existence, ignoring
breath like fish.

All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson

Categories: dog, poetry
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: 8 Comments

Monday Doldrums – West Side Story Sonnet on the East Side Train

January 25, 2010

Opening of "Somewhere", Music by Leonard Bernstein, Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

A certain damp dullness hangs over the subway car this morning, the Number 5, Lexington Avenue express.  We diversified New Yorkers are unified here, in our experience of rain-moistened Monday fatigue.  The hems of our pants are limp.  More than half of our eyes are closed.  (By this, I mean, both of the eyes on more than one half of the passengers.)   The guy next to me has a uniquely beady intensity;  he definitely stares at something.  But when I follow his gaze, I find the blank window on the other side of the car.  I notice then too that the corner of his baseball cap also actual drips whole gobs of unheeded moisture, so I’d just as soon not vouch for his alertness.

The girl opposite also has both eyes open, but her mouth is open too.  The movement of her tongue can be seen under her lips, the skin of chin and cheeks; she appears to search the insides of her mouth, though she is not eating, nor is she noticeably carrying food.  These factors tend to put into question her “on-top-of-things-ness.”

The only person who can truly qualify as “engaged” is a tall young African-American man who reads the Daily News analysis of the collapse of the Jets.  So, engaged, yes, but not exactly cheerful.

Seriously.  What shines here is not a single “morning face”, but only the wet spots on the train’s dark linoleum floor shine, and an occasional crumple of cellophane.

All this makes me think that it’s really too bad I wasn’t on the local;  the No. 6 specifically, leaving from Spring Street.  I used to take that train frequently and noticed that a curious configuration of curve and track caused it to sound out a specific musical interval each time it left the platform.   Although it’s an East Side train, the interval corresponds to one  of the song openings from West Side Story. (Which brings up a completely different kind of Jets.)

So, in honor of those three notes, I set forth below a kind of silly, kind of “Shakespearean” sonnet:

Subway Song

The subway sings its broken refrain,
the opening bars of “There’s a Place
For Us” from West Side Story.  The train
croons the first three notes leaving the dais
of the platform, the tune subsiding
to squeak and wind and roar as train races
to a-harmonic levels, providing
speed without Bernsteinian traces,
those tragic lovers defiant of fate
and enmity. Yet, at every station,
they sing again.  Who of those who wait
hear the song of that yearned-for destination,
that lyrical place, beyond how, beyond where,
amazed that the Six Train nearly takes them there?

 

I am linking this post to Victoria C. Slotto’s Liv2write2day blog, for her prompt on Sacred Music.  The sounds of the Number 6 are not exactly sacred, but they are pretty lovely when you are standing in a grey tunnel.

All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson

For a more serious subway sonnet, click here.

P.S.  No copyright infringement of “Somewhere” intended, beautiful song.  (Btw, I haven’t noticed that any credit is given to Bernstein by the IRT.)

Categories: New York City, poetry
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 14 Comments

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »