Poetry Gong - Poem 28

What Are You Afraid Of?


Socks with no mates
Belts that uncoil like snakes
Hats with strands of hair hanging inside
Underwear on the sidewalk
Wet sidewalks on otherwise dry days
Days that end before the sun goes down
Going down dark stairs
Staring for too long--
making a deal with your eyes for them to move
Moving too fast
Moving too slow
Never moving
Treading water in a bed of milfoil
Losing your socks in bed
Socks with no mates, rising up
walking down the aisle
together.

Things You Should Put on a Dress For

Your first
date. Your first death.

Clandestine liasons at dusk.
Upon meeting a bear.
Upon meeting a bear
in wolf’s clothing. When you are naked.
When you are hungry. The first time.
The last time. Once upon a morning
when you wake
to find you are a skeleton.

When you don’t know
what to say. To the pastor’s
house for tea and cakes.
Pull a tight one over your head
in the car on the way to the hospital
while you are in labor.

Do not work too hard.

While your bare feet trundle
the sewing machine pedal.
Mind the silk it is fragile.

Hunting the midday woods
with a bow and arrow. Fishing
for the one that got away. Rise
to the surface in black satin.

Learning to fly.
Learning to speak
another language
while standing
in a dark alley.
When you learn
the awful truth, the cleaner
shrunk your superhero cape.

When there is nothing left
for you to do but stand
up and dress yourself
ask someone else to pull the zipper.

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

My poetry pal Carolee and I are trying to motivate each other. Crack the whip. So we are reading The Poet's Companion (Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux) and doing every single exercise. Yup. Every one. If we weren't best friends with our hair dressers, we might go gray attempting this task.

The first exercise, in a nutshell: Make a list of the most memorable events in your life...start a poem about one of the events.

I cheated. I didn't make a list. I looked on the floor and saw the red leather bible I got at my confirmation when I was about 10. I thought, hmmm..., that is an event. And I started to write. Actually, I looked at another spot on the floor (my bedroom is a mess) and saw Girl Meets God, a book in my to-read pile. From there, a poem began to emerge. That's as far as I got. A poem not quite out of the oven. So, I resorted to a list poem.

It is like my poem-er, my muse, my creativity, is on vacation.

I will persevere. I will.

What the Rain Does Not Wash Away

Old terrycloth robes
matted and flecked with cat hair.

Last night's sharp words
cutting wet grass
that sticks to our ankles.

A rusted scythe, each blade
tinged with old blood.

Smallest cat's paw blood
draining in a winding path
through cracks in new sidewalk.

Trust.
Hours-old, week-long
melted by one wrong move.

Melted popsicle juice,
leftover lemonaid,
hot puddles teeming
with mosquito larvae.

Hopes and dreams of raising tadpoles
even if the wiggling paisley spots
turn out to be frogs after all.

The last kiss
of the last frog prince.

Dark wet leaves
heavy with daytime dusk.

One hundred green maple leaves
wrapped around your body
in one last attempt
at staying warm in a cold summer.

Heat,
radiating from wayward firemen,
black suited policemen,
men armed with mail,
men with bulging arms.

Rain washes nothing away.
Even dead bodies remain
anchored in the ground.

NaPoWriMo #22 - just yukky

Ugly Things That Might, If Smoothed, Ironed, or Flattened, Fit Well In a Frame

Your first failing grade.

Your first failed romance,
complete with sticky tears,
sticky notes,
sticky thighs.

Your first image, burned
into adolescent memory
of an enormous tom cat
conquering a slight kitten.

The shine of the wax
make-up on your grandfather’s
funeral face.

Labored breath.
Anyone’s.

A barking dog alone
outside in the middle of the neighborhood
in the middle of the night.
His two short barks,
his one shrill whine.
The slamming door.

The mother who walks so fast,
hand-to-hand with her children,
their feet seem to fly
beside her varicose legs.

The mother who snarls.

The mother who draws
the water too hot.

The iron after-taste on your tongue
because you drank the scalding water.
Because you did not want to be burned.

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


I really likd the title of this poem. I like the concept. I'm not crazy about the content. Here is a fine example of writing even whe you don't feel like it, when you think you have nothing in you, when your muse all but says, screw you.

Who knows? Maybe I'll come back to this one day and do something good with it.

To add to my foul mood, I got a rejection from Big Ugly Review today. Bah. Humbug. Hey! That's ironic! I had the idea for this poem, the title, at least, in my mind but decided to check my e-mail before I wrote (naughty, naughty...such a time waster!). So my ugly poem was not inspired by my rejection from the ugly review, but it is another ugly thing to add to my list.

So tired. So cranky. Must spare readers...

NaPoWriMo #7

Beautiful Objects, Out of Reach

The chandelier you can not draw without erasing
a hole in the center of lightbulb number two.

The tiniest frog in the bay.
Small is not always easy.

The glossy black water snake
slipping between thick strands of milfoil.

Heaven.

The memory of your first fish,
the simple quick tug. Then nothing.

The top of the mountain. There is always further
to go. The top of the last pine, for instance.

Heaven.
Even the gate.

The glorious heft of your father's shoulder
when you were three and he, half of now.

If you are lost, the key. If found,
the map with a red line leading away from home.

Heaven.
I hear it is beautiful.


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


Today was a tough day, poetry-wise. I had many starts in my head, all tossed aside. Even a couple starts in the journal. Also tossed. Thought about posting something I wrote a coulpe weeks ago, still rough, but decided against it. Went for new. Glad I did. My mental muscles thank me.

Tomorrow my dad goes to the dr. to discuss possibilty of surgery for aneuryism. Talking to my mother last night, I had a brief moment of clarity--this is serious. The man has to decide his fate. I know our fate is ultimately in God's hands. I know. But they will be asking him to make a decision. It was all so clear for a moment, as if my mother was sending me a message. Then, just as quickly as the fog lifted, it settled back in. My make-it-all-better cloud settled in and I resumed thinking, well, he will just say no thanks. Don't cut me open and I will go on living. As if the time-bomb couldn't go off at any moment. And it could. But I csn't think of it.

Why mention all this? Well, for one thing, it's my blog! Ha. And for another, I think this is why I am having trouble writing today. I have never been one to write during times of crisis or unrest. I write for the beauty of words and the images and to create a word picture. For all that I write, not for catharsis or for meaning or for answers. So when I have this "thing" looming that is heavy and awful and demands answers, my muse says, sorry, dude. Not my problem. Thus, the list poem.

Things of Note, Beyond the Casual Glance: NaPo #3

Squirrels smart enough to turn around.
A cat with three legs,
teaching you how to climb a massive silver maple.
A lone blond child, spinning in wet leaves to a song
sung with words only she knows.
Making up your own language.
The poem whispered to a gray squirrel,
an old robin
and a fresh nuthatch
from the other side of a window.
Invitations to a party
written in crayon, two pennies taped inside.
How the seamless glide of new scissors on old fabric
renders a hand weightless, without muscle.
A morning spent counting dust motes in a sunbeam.
Gathering dust motes like fireflies in a jar.
Lighting a room with a canning jar full of nothing.
Leaving your front door wide open while you shop for groceries.
Feeding strangers bananas straight from a brown paper grocery sack.
Slipping through a crowd of familiars
without saying a word.
A simple sigh of relief on the other side.

American Pillow Book

Things I Have Forgotten

The smell of my grandmother’s orange sweater.
The taste of homemade soup.
How it feels to have my hair split
into six sections, three on each side,
pulled tight and twisted,
pulled tight and twisted.
How to make chili relejos.
The proper temperature for heating oil.
The heat of the moment.
The fire of a foreign tongue sliding across my teeth.
The names of all the Italian soccer players
who fell in love with the girls from America,
all seven of us, pale, blond, fading
in the stale airport air.
How to travel alone.
How to memorize a three-minute jazz dance.
Where my feet belong when I am standing
in a long, long line.
When to stop listening.
Who first told me I am beautiful.
The smell of my first perfume.
The first Christmas my father didn’t buy
my mother new underwear.
The embrace of my first bra.
How it feels
to do something for the first time.


***


There was a wildly imaginative list poem up at This Is All Your Fault yesterday. Turns out it was based on a pillow book, a traditional, still popular Japanese form. That reminded me of a book I read when I was pregnant with my first child. It was by a young Japanese author and it was full of lists. I had great plans for my own list poems, then I had a baby, I had another, I lost some brain cells, I forgot about list poems. Boy, am I glad I remembered. They're very freeing. Very inspiring.

PS: You should buy Christine's books. They're great.