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Dogged Rivalry

April 18, 2015

Sharing Computer

Dogged Rivalry

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.” 
― Terry Pratchett

She knew already she’d never be cool–
he didn’t have to tell her–though he did constantly–
that her saliva pooled mid-tongue
and that she drooled
at tongue–
though truly she drooled
at any food whose fat glistened
on a platter;
or for that matter, how plebian she was
to actually listen
for the Man, then wiggle in that low squiggle, literally em-bare-assing–(he said)
even when the Man didn’t
dish out meat, or – yawn -some dry-mouth
treat–

No, he did not need to insinuate
by moue–um–
meow–
for she knew–
um–knew-ow–
from her tail that could never curvily fold
to that nose that was typically more or less cold,
but not, somehow, cool–
that she was in no way hip, hep, or any
kind of jewel-eyed cat, and that that
was simply that–

still, as the Man scratched her ear vigorously enough
to make her face tilt towards his hand
and one band of canines grin,
she somehow couldn’t care if he up there
watching from an arch in
the sofa where only the fabric
was scratched (and not, she thought,
his head) wished her dead,
if only he would someday please
just play.

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

A rather silly poem for Kerry O’ Connor’s prompt on With Real Toads to write something inspired by quotes from Terry Pratchett or Leonard Nimoy.  Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors ever, and has so many very inspiring quotes that have nothing to do with cats.  I was working on something more serious but finally felt maybe I’d had enough of seriousness by this 18th day of April. 

Really, it should be the dog on the computer for purposes of this poem, but the cat took over.  


Ps I have edited since first posting.  

Categories: dog, poetry
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Comments: 9 Comments

Outsider Artist (Prosish!)

April 16, 2015

WattsTowers-1

Outsider Artist

She said, “but you are from New York.”

He didn’t say anything, though his sharpie continued
to squeak: long stroke, short short/
short short again–maybe, she thought,
shading in–which brought with it
a deepening stench of acetone that he was probably not even smelling
since he usually breathed though his mouth, drawing–

short short stench stench LONG LONG–
but which she certainly smelled, only—
and now she had to be fair, it was really too sweet
to be called stench–

It was a smell in fact that made her feel almost blue
at the edges–not like the sharpie, which, this time, was a horrible
navy–but the teal of remembered nights, Fridays
when their folks would actually drive them somewhere, and
the minute they crossed the bridge her Dad would stop, her mom complain–
gasoline never the same in the City–they talked of price and lines,
but for her it was all about
exhaust–the smell of Jersey, vaporized spill and not
just taxi–

“So,” she said, “you can’t be from New York City and be
an outsider artist.”

“It’s just,” she clumped over to the window
since he still refused to look up, “a nonstarter,”

and the street poured in even through the couple of inches she pushed
with a sunlike-hum, a more-more roar, warming
her inner arms–

and he said (squeak squeak), “so what, if live
in New York?”

“City,” she added.

“City, he said, still staring
into the page.

“All what,” she said.

Then, slowly, he began to laugh, big,
his eyes as he stood from the steno pad throwing
green-gold flecks into the air
of all the inner drawings he could already feel
pushing against his finger tips,
and he flipped the page back as if the paper were just
one more set of his long, soft bangs, and shook each pant’s leg in its turn
as if his limbs too were part of that
pad (paper wasn’t important,
he’d been explaining for months),
“exactly,” he said–

And she, hating him who knew everything–everything he ever wanted to know
or didn’t care, said, “so?”

And he, smirking, said, “so, Watts.”

Only he said Watts not ‘what’, and she knew that was important
but not why, so kept her face blank as she could so he would not know
her not knowing–

and he said (so know-it-all)–”Watt’s Towers, to be precise, which is the absolute greatest outsider art installation ever built in this country and is what I think about all day, every day–and if that doesn’t make me an outsider artist–”

“You sleep all day,” she said.

“Same difference,” he grinned.

************************
Yes, I know this is not a real poem!  It is broken into lines, but is really prose I have just written thinking about a novel I have been working on (off and on) for a bit.  I am linking it to Lolamouse’s prompt on visionary art With Real Toads.  It is my 16th writing–and I’ll call it a poem for these purposes–for April, 2015 National Poetry Month.  (I have a couple in progress that I may post late!)

Lolamouse posts cool pictures of visionary art from the Baltimore Museum, but I have gone with Watts Towers, by Simon Rodia, a great visionary artist, who built these very cool towers in his little yard.  The picture is courtesy of LA County Museum of Art,  and is supposed to be available for free use. 

So sorry to be late with commenting!  Good luck to all doing Napowrimo!  I’ll be around! 

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Early April – Mountain Spring

April 14, 2015


Early April – Mountain Spring

We’re in that slip
of the year in which spring
looks briefly like fall
in the same way that a baby
looks like a little old man,
wizened and reddish at the tips (no matter
the ultimate leaf or skin)
as if illuminated by a light
that just catches edged reach.

The grass lies flat
in long stretches,
and it is hard to imagine,
walking its wilted sprawl,
all the growth going on;
harder to imagine how
if a season can seem like a baby
that is also an old man, we must seem
to that white light high in the sky just now–
the one that each of us is supposed
to see so close some day, come
what may.

*************************
Here we go–number 14!  For April, this 2015 National Poetry Month, posted for With Real Toads Tuesday Open Platform.   (Sadly, I am in the City right now, so this pic is from last April!)  k.

 

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Out of the Box

April 13, 2015

screenshot 2015-04-12 11.25.54.png

Out of the Box

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.”  Joan Didion.

Blood will out.
Maybe not as anticipated.
To date, DNA has exonerated
over 300 people post-
conviction in the U.S.,
more than twenty on
death row.
The total of time wrongly served–
4,505 years.

“Out out damn spot,”
the police shout,
though they use
other terminology:  “Fuck
your breath.”

Death ensues.
People try
to sue.
The black cat bricked up behind the wall,
while quick,
snarls, yowls.
Thank God for cell phone cameras.

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

Here’s a sort of poem for the 13th (I’m guessing) day of April, 2015 National Poetry Month.  This is for Susie Clevenger’s prompt on With Real Toads to write about a Joan Didion quotation.  My figures are taken from the “Innocence Project,” which is a charitable organization in the U.S. that devotes itself to the exoneration of persons wrongfully incarcerated. The quote “fuck your breath” comes from the case of a  recent shooting death in Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated by a “deputy” to the Tulsa Police Department, who is a man who donated large amounts of money to that police department and was allowed to serve as a reserve police member.  He ended up shooting Eric Harris, claiming the death was accidental; that he had only meant to taser Mr. Harris.  (Question–why would he taser the guy anyway?)  The case is reminiscent of the Eric Garner case in Staten Island, New York, in which an African-American man who was suspected of selling loose cigarettes without paying the sales tax on the cigarettes was pressed down into the sidewalk until he died, all the way protesting, I can’t breathe.    

Honestly, I should write a poem about how I’ve bricked all this up myself, really not conscience of all that has been going on in the criminal “justice” world and the war on drugs, despite my childhood in what was then the South – D.C. and Maryland.  Another poem when I can stomach it. 

Screen shot is from the New York Daily News. 

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Thirteen Ways of Remembering Red Baby Shoes

April 12, 2015

Thirteen Ways of Remembering Red Baby Shoes

I.
His head was a sunny hill that knelt before her
and also (though he was the emperor of children’s footwear)
before the beautiful red shoes.

II.
Garnets hold no lights
nor darknesses
compared to the deep
red shoes.

III.
Her feet were little clumps of dough
made human by
red shoes.

IV.
The red shoes stared up
at the world; the world
could not stop
looking back.

V.
There are red shoes with sharp
heels; there are red shoes cut
on a bias like one
lipsticked lip; there are shoes
that movies are made of, that spin
ruby-starred dreams.

Such shoes are perfectly valid; they too
mark their rosy rhythms
on the street.

But these are not the red shoes
of which I speak.

VI.
The voice of even small red shoes
cannot be silenced.

VII.
The pulse in a young child’s thumbs,
fingertips, fits one moment into the next
like the stitching
of first ever shoes, threaded red. 

VIII.
Some joke that big shoes mean
a good understanding,

But to understand little shoes that are the dark red of even
the unbitter heart, the wearer must bend
to their very soles.

IX.
What steer gave its life
for the red shoes? What bull, what sweet-eyed
long-lashed cow?  their tongues as tuneful as any offered
to Ulysses’s gods–

The aiglets of the red shoes
are as dark with sorrow
as sorrow.
The laces try to tie off those vacuums
in a weave
of ox blood.

X.
How is the heart so heavy
when somewhere walk
red shoes?

XI.
The red shoes were not cherry red, which is not the red
of cherries, meaning that the red shoes
were cherry; the rest of the world
their stone.

The red shoes seemed to
understand this, or maybe they just
didn’t worry about it.

XII.
Oh red shoes even tied tight
you were as soft as a hand crossing the street,
as firm as a hand
crossing.  

XIII.
In the whole of life,
there was only one pair
of red shoes.
Somewhere a sunny hill still kneels before them
one or both knees bent.

 

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

Another drafty poem with my drafty drawing, my 12th for this April 2016 National Poetry Month.  This one was written for Grace’s wonderful prompt on With Real Toads to write something inspired by Wallace Stevens.  Some of the Stevens’ poems that I thought of writing this was “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” and, of course, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”  Again so sorry for the length.   Thanks for your patience!

PS have edited slightly since first posting. 

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Under the Apple

April 11, 2015

IMG_5119

Under the Apple

I lay under an apple tree,
Susie, my neighbor, next to me,
the boughs so low we would collide
with green knobs but for backward slide.

It was more or less 1964,
and I was worrying about world war–
twenty years since numbers One and Two
it felt like we were surely due,
while Susie fiddled with her bangs
which over her headband (orange) did hang.
also stood about her face
stuck in a growing-out weird phase.

Later that summer, my dear dog died,
beneath a much much taller tree
my missed catch, the bounced throw bent-
killed by me by accident–
In my weeping, all my woe,
I don’t think I thought any more
about world wars.

So, we veer, we career,
between the world’s cares
and our own–

I walk a hill now, mostly brown,
slip on ice slips that splice the ground,
stop to look at mists across,
the fog that at the top takes pause,
rests its arms on mountain’s brow
or perhaps the fog’s the sky’s low bough,
as the slopes, they lay themselves down.

And how beautiful even what keeps us from seeing can be,
I think,
if we really look.

I realize then that I have booked
fifty years since that low tree,
and despite the fears of Susie, me,
there hasn’t been that conflagration,
that cataclysm of every nation,
rather a series of smaller spasms–
though I suspect I would reflect
differently on all that loss
if I’d been one of those full tossed,
dismembered in those red divisions;
my head low bowed by deadly schisms.

I push my hair back walking home,
my other hand touching milk weed down–
last year’s stalks, without seed pod,
I hardly touch them, do not prod-
but they’re so hollow, black with rot
they just fall as like as not–
that’s just what they do–
fall–

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

A very very drafty poem for the prompt by Sherry Blue Sky on With Real Toads to write about balance and what helps you get through a world of chaos.   (I swear this was inspired by the prompt though I appreciate that it is a very strange take on it. )  This is also my 11th poem of April for this 2015 National Poetry Month.  Sorry for the length! 

PS – the photo is taken in the fall, not now–so there’s a different quality of light and milk weed!  Sorry!  Also have edited since first posting. 

 

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To a Forefather

April 10, 2015

IMG_3767

To a Forefather

Dear Nameless Here,

She always says you could tell a joke–
not the canned kind–you know,
something you’d heard–
but the kind you made up to fit
the moment,
there, right on the spot.

She calls it your sharp wit
and speaks of it as
admirable–oh, but yours
must have been
very sharp,
cutting as the pried lid of the can
that you pressed down on her. for it’s sure held her
long enough–
long even
after you’ve gone.

How is such pressure applied
where there also must
be love?
How is it preserved,
passed on?

I think of peaches sunken
in a tin, saved
in a cellar.
Peaches that are no longer exactly
peaches
after their best-use date,
assuming they ever had one,
assuming, too,
that they were once peaches.

But they must have been—oh yes—
only cut perhaps
before they sweetened,
cooked green,
hard,
sharp,
never allowed to be what someone might press
to her own soft cheek, breath in, seeking succor.

***************************
Draft poem 10th in 10 days, for With Real Toads prompt by the truly terrific and always sharp (in the best of ways) Mama Zen who blogs at Another Damn Poetry Blog.   (With a recycled pic of mine.)

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Some things I Admire about Anselm Keifer

April 9, 2015

333-eventpage-keifer_500-2

“When, at the end of the 1960s,I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.”  Anselm Kiefer

Some things I Admire about Anselm Keifer

Words were meant to carry meaning
like a cart or car,
a sigh or song,
but make crude vehicles
when meaning’s gone
or when it’s grown so vast we gasp, crushed as grass,
boot/tank/shrapnel-tramped, seeded
with mortar or mine–

Paint too
has limitations;
even with its leads, its cadmiums,
burnt umber–
how does line define
meaning’s capsize?
catch the copse where the cart collapsed?
the tracks where the trains did not derail?
the field where the sun was buried?

What pallet of straw, stick, gloam can make us see
the world blown down?

Something very big, with a difficult surface,
something we have to get a distance from
to really see,
something we try to get close to
to really see,
something we are seen by–what?
all that we don’t do in the world
all that we have done–
the huge don’t/done, mud
bloodied–

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

A poem of sorts.  9th for this April, 2015 National Poetry Month.  Inspired by a Real Toads Prompt by Ella of Ella’s Edge, to write about the better depictor–as it were–visual art or language–  The artist that came to mind for me is Anselm Kiefer, a great great (I think) German artist who makes extremely large paintings using a variety of materials including, and other than, paint.  He was born in 1945.

I wasn’t actually particularly thinking of the painting above in doing the poem, but this is one I’ve seen in person at an exhibition at Mass Moca (from which I’ve taken this image, without intending any copyright infringement.)  Images of Kiefer’s work can be found here.  Quotes here.

Note that when I first posted this, I did not put in a quote as asked by the prompt. (I forgot about it and only added this morning-Sorry, Ella!)   Kiefer has many great quotes about art and history, and I only chose this because it gives a context to the work .

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Between A Hard Place

April 8, 2015

Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Between a Hard Place

He had not meant to go
for the jugular.
He’d just aimed for the cheap shot,
the kind of thing
that might nick a wing.

The others’ laughter rippled
a shallow pool,
but the face she would not turn to him
was like the face of a stone he’d sometimes kick
the way home, as a child,
the sun burning through his bangs, for he was mad,
mad that he could keep that stone
to his curbed path, but not roll back
the day.

Truly, any rock would do,
but he found his shoe searching
for one of those round smooth stones, that kind that looked long soothed
by blue water, and sometimes, when he found a good one
he’d pick it up at last, rubbing his thumb and forefinger over its coolness, imagining
some soft stroke back.

More often, he’d pick up what he kicked
and throw it at a sign or car until
the rattle spun so loud it shot him
into a flight whose speed alone near petrified him; he tried then
to ape insouciance, but would end
in a side-armed lope that made him
look the nicked one,
the wounded.

Now, he tried
to make her look at him,
but it was like making a stone
look back and the heart that wanted to fly to her
soon wanted to throw something, tightening
like a fist around
what that might be–what beat at him.

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

8th sort-of-poem (yes, I know it’s really a draft story, not a draft poem–sorry! ) for April, 2015 National Poetry Month for Marian’s prompt on With Real Toads to write about a poem one regrets.  I really just could not write about that subject right now but went with words that one regrets. 

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