I, I, You

Feb 15/12:  So my idea is this:):
you have to complete each of the following 3 lines in the  order they are in.
you have to repeat the process 3 times ( in essence creating 3 verses)
the final 4th verse will have only two lines and these two lines are totally up to you:)

I used to be__________________
but now I am ______________________
If only you could _____________________

I used to be a nymph of the evening tending the western orchard, pollinating golden flowers watching them grow to golden apples, an actor on the earthen stage in orchards of the Hesperides,

but now I am in the agribusiness field, watching monarch butterflies in their mortality, caressing superweeds interbreeding during lawsuits about patent infringements .  Yet, there is still a high wind in the buffer zone. 

If only you could make it better.

I used to be a dominant demi-god in the understory, reaching to touch the sacredness of cedar, breath by breath with the reverence that is animal, staring into eyes of ocean, touching moving glaciers with hands browned by sun, face lightened by moon.

but now I am a pipeline, oblivious, enclosed, encased welded steel, no light, no sound, no taste, no vision, no scent, no touch, defiling and defiled.

if only you could make it all go away.

I used to be entire earth, smooth, solid, curved crescent breathing as one, one sound, one unity, love and dreams together.

but now I am fragmented, shards of colour, sharply defined, hate cutting like a moon-lit scimitar.

if only you could fix it.

what was once can almost never again be as it was

but just after the almost you could draw the dream

window

I know it floats somewhere

like the planet earth

were I an astronomer I would postulate the flatness

the floating

like a dusky brown leaf at twilight in a slow running creek

images provoke the bone

now drugged

now it can’t move

now it can’t feel

but craves drop and drop [Papaver somniferum]  over tongue gums throat other organs

I know this window keeps me in

or is it that like a shoulder to the grindstone it pushes

palms strong

the swirls of air

of breath of people

of words of ringing of bells

I know I won’t let the window be cleaned

it blurs so beautifully

translucent amorphous forms

like diaphanous gowns in a century (but not this one)

dust like petals of poppies rubbing glass

rubbing bone

I know I will untie the cord

let the curtain fall

in place

I know I will not look

at the common

place

leaves of Spring 

water

“It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give  buoyancy to and to float the earth"

      Henry David Thoreau

it was my dream to start with

I see swells

see almost silent breaths upward facing mouths

all was water and no one knew what was a shore

so content was the water in smothering earth that not even the rocks had eyes

and I, (in my dream) dangling like a helicopter with nowhere to land

arms like wings of a white bird

nesting in salted dark swells

legs glued like a mermaid and

finally hair like someone who was drowned

I would give my eyes to the rocks, I said (in my dream), but all the priests said no

each rock said yes, though, (in my dream) even knowing that soon and forever even the highest desert would lose its buoyancy

Nov 22/11

thor's well

Dec 28/11:  I would like us to write something about the second picture "Thor's Well" any length, any form

my lips are under the water

(I dare not taste the salt)

but look

at the new moon             moving to waning crescent

speak

through lightning

listen

through thunder

feel the hammer on my bones

ask

will you lift my face toward the sky

the book I read told me truth is there at the bottom of the well

every well, I assumed

but none are gentle, I found

so I walked the ground to every one, laden with oaken bucket

 to slip into it

the truth

to capture it lying there selfishly in silt

letting those dead speak in

hollow echoes

to shimmer the darkened water with

their eyes

to entice us heavily clothed ones, yoked to buckets

to look for that truth which, as we know, comes naked out of the abyss

but only when the moon is full

and the sky silenced

and the hammer stilled

my eyes are underwater

(I taste only salt, but whether it is my blood or the blood of the sea, is hard to tell)

the moon now is full shaped       so large                , so bright I would say

I ask again

this time in silence

will you lift my face to the sky

primavera

Botticelli’s Primavera

___________________________________________________________________

love is scarce

it must, by decree

manifest at

just the exact convergence         of stars and moon of planets and suns of clouds and wind.

at the touch of frigid palms

look up and behind

 voice choked by

his breath,          then

spew

beauty

on garments

diaphanous and flowing and luscious      strewn gaily with

newness              enough                                for a garland.

and so   l think I may be

with child.

just at the moment of

conception

they must dance

the three

must dance with grace

while he, moving the air with beating wings

holds back the cloud

while love will pierce

with bronze-tipped arrow

the most virginal              then blood

will spring

and all reason dissolve in  slurry

while she born of ocean spray, froth, delicate lace-white,

holds eyes downcast

love isn’t too hard to get these days       like

at the club

this guy was so hot          but

my bff didn’t think so

he had on this beat suit

blue       like his skin

he didn’t say much

actually nothing

but blew on my shoulder

after I looked at him from

across a crowded room

he left

real early

before the moon was gone

even before we could dance

forest

by the 12^th century, they had killed all the shells

 

I think I had a dream of trees

tall, maybe but maybe their tops were severed

forest like a watercolour

a poorly mixed one at that

paper kept too long in sun curling itself at the touch of colour

paper (in my dream) washed over too much sopping

a fetid smell could be organic matter rotting

on the brush

I am sure I had a dream of forest ground

where leaves came from somewhere

but where no one in the city could explain

I am sure that in my dream

the ground

was too hard

to dance on

so I paddled their canoe

slipping through water

brackish and hostile to terrestrial plants

so I could touch the fog

fog like those cones of cotton candy

handfuls of them

at the feet of carneys hawking their games

title

My idea for today's poem is choose one of the following titles and write whatever it brings to mind for you.

Immortal Thoughts     Bernward Koch


From Seed to Leaf       Jane H. Newell


The Surprise Picnic      John S. Goodall  

I felt like I was somewhere in the fifties, mid century where

it is dark at three-fifty-two and I am

small and not of English descent

but it seems I still look at time from an iphone

itime

iescape

imemory

ieverything

and I get the luminous walk sign which was so not needed mid century

when we crossed pavement

not outlined

leering mid century men

rolling down car windows

at pre-pubescent chests

making me wanting to

be by the side of a creek

where

dreams can be floated on leaves or on twigs

to a stream with a cold waterfall

to a larger river

to the ocean forever

dream

I dream in seamless bolts of silk                                slammed

on wooden counters      catching slivered mahogany

unfurled  gallantly with a movement of the wrist

Tyrian purple extracted from sea

snails

greatly prized, said the overseer of dry goods, as it does not fade its colour, but becomes,( in whispers, like your beauty), more intense with stormy wind and rain and heat of  sun

and lime green in folds beside,  to complement                                 a dress

of such proportions

that living things will gratefully die to reach such

immortality 

untitled

Write a poem by filling in the blanks: part of a poem titled “Red” by Gillian Jerome

The purple cloaked angel inhabits the corpse.

Grows in the colon like mushrooms flourishing in darkness:

 obedient and delectable.  Enchanted by prayer, she gazes up

toward the bell tower , prods the heretic and the believer

simultaneously  wanting to become

the equalizer

 of the tortured saints.  Yellowed bone

feeds dirt with its  memorized torment.

Copses of  aralia elata frame what once was the burial spot of bishops.

While larks with angel voices circle eye shaped courtyards

 feeding on night worms.

Buds grow like starved and crippled orphans through the cursed hedgerow.

Shoot the bishop, he commands,

Before he is able to demand penance.   Fall falls soon

 on the  dead bishop’s casket

cold in the frost-heaved earth.  Clouds

repudiate the snow wished for by dead bishops praying

In the busted bell tower, now overgrown.

cats murmur at the feet of gravediggers.  Raptors swirl like men on the death-defying trapeze

at the heads of mourners 

Red doesn’t bother the dearly departed.

 They embrace all the colours of the angels’ frocks and use their newly-grown wings

 To sweep fog off the roads

To man the manholes and freshly filled graves

To relinquish the mitre from the saintly bishop’s head

 then tear it in shreds to meld with blackened clay.

Birds will forever  line their nests, gently

in red and never forsake it for another colour.

They lie awake in anticipation of the leaves on the trees in the copse in the fall, turning red.

Creating, peaceful memories of using wings unfurled and quiet

mostly keeping the sky clear and blue.

Look at all the birds with bits of red: clamped so tightly in beaks rushing to nest.

Birds and the corpses of  bishops are not as unlike as you may think.

fill in the blanks

I liked your "fill in the blanks" idea so....
Here are 3 short poems by Robert Bly and we'll do the same as we did with the poem "Red"

The Conditions

What we have together is, with the greatest deference, a mess.

ever, and forever!

So my sentiments are with someone far less prone to neuroses  moving far into the intangible part of the universe, where

the oats of our regret will seed themselves, daintily and with the greatest pleasure.

I was a black-face Al Jolson!

You were the alabaster fainting magnolia.

I pretended to pretend, sang  on

before I agreed the rift in the centre of us, was irrevocable.




Ferns

It was snake-green  ferns I gathered for you, tossing them about the villa (with glee).

Ignoring your manservant, crushing fern spores in your wardrobe:  ah, there is a _sacred place.

Through you I came to adore snakes where they hide in amongst  the ferns  on that  _day in early June,

and the curve the snakes design during their love-making, the unmistakable mark he  leaves in the  corner of my brain..



Secrets

I climb the aspen, the over-bending suppleness of its branches,

resisting ownership, so that you and I together in the copse, are doomed to failure.

It is an unbearably lovely lintel  of an ancient open door,

a _burden that can  no longer be held close to that space on your sunburned thighs  in the solace that is twilight at the villa.

Are there any portals that can let us through, together, or only the water-soaked oak that keeps us in?

The lovers who dance outside in twilight live through the flood; but to those who install locks, they let  no one enter;  no one comes,

selling diaphanous cloaks at noon in the too-supple  woods....

These gypsies long to tell your fortune, to dance with you by a rising moon, wistfully stared  at by deer eating aspen leaves in the copse..

cup

"she learned to cup ______________ in her _________" so I'm        thinking we need to two things in writing this piece

        1) we have to fill in the blanks

        2) we have to use the line in the poem at least once

she left no footprints

of mud on the kitchen floor,

 she told me, before she died

(it was summer anyway, just before my birthday)

I would have, she told me, kept

that footprint,

encased it in plaster of paris, like an archeologist staring in reverence at the divinity of a brand-new life.

this one, she told me, never leaves footprints.

she is like those shadow people I hear spoken of when I awake at two thirteen in the middle of the night; there must be a kind of comfort in having shadow dogs live

with you, she told me.

they never go away.

they always leave mud

on your kitchen floor

and you can look at it for as long as you want.

and she wanted, I think, to look

but she couldn’t.

I don’t think shadows are real.

when I saw her some years later

we again

spoke of shadows

she told me she learned to cup those shadows in her occipital lobe  and let them out,

 like finely tatted lace,

in the finely carved  light of dawn.

cards

January 19, 2012:  For this poem, use the lines from the 4 cards we picked - I'm sure you took notes.  Use the line right in the middle of the stanza.

1.      search in shadow, rise in the morning

2.     entered space on wings of love

3.     mystical happiness in the ethers

4.     heaviest karma of all

I knew I would lose you as soon

as the rift of earth lay at

my feet.

I knew you couldn’t

follow when

his fingers indented ribs

and thigh.

I made such a show of it,

recalling all

those pricey acting

lessons.

I knew you shouldn’t

damsel-rescue me after

I ate those seeds he handed me

(it was a trick, though, really).

 What can I tell you, but to

search in shadow, rise in the morning,

especially during April and May and you will find me, for sure.

I’ll be captivated by the light

of the heat of the sun

bouncing glistening off

the leaves of the laurel.

if you don’t find me there, try

Leda’s house

we’ll be talking of destiny and rape.

this city is not a place to be

the torturers with their fire

and chaos ramble

streets of shattered stone, softer

gravel, still a

long way from

the foam of the sea.

I can’t walk there anymore, my sandals

are broken and bloodied

only chaos flits between

the column

and the frieze

when layers of adorned magnificent cartilage

gave birth to itself and so

entered space on wings of love

not only that, but he brings to me

new sandals, lets loose

the strings of captured limbs

quashes sense

pampers delight

and so it goes:

stone and gravel memories, gone

a scent of sea-foam lingers in moonlight.

.

lecture, chem. 110: any  class of organic cmpnds where two hydrocrbn groups are linked by O2

atom; volatile flammbl liquid, C₂H₅OC₂H₅, derived distill ethyl alcohol + h2so4 -  used as reagent and solvent used before as anesthetic. Gives such aesthetic dreams that I keep close to the chest and speak of them to no one in that small bed close to the ground.  Also called diethyl ether, ethyl ether. Once the heavens teemed with ether just above Mount Olympus – from there to as far as you could imagine was ether, ether that created the space above the sphere of the moon, composed the stars and planets, ether that we could breathe on the mount if the oracle told us we were worthy, we were stoned on the drugs of sacred gods, ether to transport us to that place between Pluto and the space next to the next star.  An element, elemental, grounding the highway to the heavens.   All-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves.  I shouldn’t have skipped that Physic’s lecture. Or maybe, yes, it was a good thing, leading now to mystical happiness in the ethers (if I understood, the magic would be gone).  Chemists and physicists must dream, I think, anesthetic dreams or even aesthetic dreams, lofty theories of movement propelling to ends of universes where all will meet, out of that one patch of ground in Africa to a place of voluminous ether where all merge in a lecture theatre on top of a mountain.

concept  continuation

movement millennium

recorded reincarnation

small-scale societies

heavenly hedonistic

excising effects

avatar alliance

fight family

heaviest karma of all

maya modes

person performing

deeds destroyed

suffering should

violence violence

pity penance

blow out the candle when day is come

untitled

I suggest two short verses they can be part of one poem or two individual poems but each must include the following and in this order:

"bring me"
"would you be willing?"

doesn't matter how they fit into the verses (ie how many lines before or in between) just as long as they're in that order

bring me to  mountains

at the foot             at early day

                where I will kneel belly and knees like sack-clothed postulants

in dust

in sun

scorch                    skin        

elbows burrow                     caked                     dirt, clay

only heat

only dry                 straw crackles       but still                   no songs

of birds or angels

 bramble afire       I guess at mid-day

but my face I hide in thorns strewn at the foot of mountains

remove, it is said,  sandals (due to the ground being holy).

will my skin  touch holiness without intervention of synthetic material will it cry out will it transform will it dance with the angel in flames will my ear-drums listen to directions as they listen to synthetic voices

would I even, in this twenty-first century, understand how to move with only the body and even more, would I be willing

so, tell me, you who does not hide your face, would you be willing

               

untitled

My friend and I 'assign' topics for writing poems. Following, are some of the ideas and my poems resulting.  Feel free to use the ideas and let me know if you have some, too.

here's my idea for this poem: a 3 verse poem--  style using the following

from: Eating Poetry  by Mark Strand

"The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.


so each verse ends with one of these lines  verse one ends with line one etc.

this shovel

hot rolled chrome nickel alloy steel

resists rusting

stalwart stance

light of sun pressed deep

so I know touching its bowl will be warm, almost past the point of comfort to hold

handle high, smooth, normally comes from ash or hickory, both of which are strong

dig through clay with no effort, this shovel

scrape stones

sifting unearthed words

making

damaged piles

corms exposed

crack like lake ice in late winter

rot to black mush when the rains of April

fall

letter by letter they

dissolve

urgent to find a meaning of some sort at least

there is no shelter as they spill

tumble down from

tongue to lips

to the newly born creek sliding mercilessly to the inlet

my shovel can’t, although it wants, in desperation

to dig sturdy-walled holes

between waves:

the poems are gone

when words fail, it is said, the other senses become more acute

I don’t believe it, not at all

now that the letters are drowned

their tiny corpses ignored by passing kayaks

who hold synthetic words caught in e-ink mesmerized

immortalized for (almost) all time to come

(you can even read in bright sunlight)

you can even pass the mountains unseen

and turn your eyes from water birds beseeching

and scrape your ankle on a mollusk bleeding

and not see bright sun light

and hold words whole in a flat palm never even noticing that

the light is dim

tide is high today wandering

foraging into

immaculate places

it leaves only one strip of sand

like a tattoo stretched on skin of

ankle

bone

deepened tide does not stop my dog

I watch reluctant

to steep

in water in winter

sun shadows give her two heads, as I watch

like Cerberus I think

he, ‘with a voice of bronze, bold and strong’

so too whispered in waves written on this tattoo:  ‘cry havoc and let slip

the dogs of war’

they with their many heads, unspeakable, eaters of flesh, embellished with snakes

so many dogs

even those I would bring to my home

gather letters sunk to the bottom of the inlet

give them words

and when they remember their word

call

and so, kneeling, the words tumble, and so

the dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.