Musette

Poem o' the day #13

This is the view through the window I had in mind., one I'll never tire of. It is, of course, from NASA and the Apollo 17 guys, the ones who changed our picture of ourselves.

#13. Earthbound

Guilt weighs at their fragile necks, pulls them
closer to the ground, the old women
bent, the men pressed back like astronauts,
immobile in their seats as they try
to escape Earth’s gravity. Release comes
with distance, recasting the familiar
world, its wholeness finally visible
beneath the swirling clouds, a gentle
turning. But few look back through the small
window to glimpse the sight that would free them.
Tonight, walking into the cold, we are
caught in the pull of the small—a cough,
a bill, the approaching storm. The sky
shatters around us. We forget to look up.

4/17/07

Poem o' the day #12

A workaday poem, made in the workshop from what was at hand. I don't claim inspiration, but I do think about these things...

#12. Surfaces

This is the hollow world: clear-cut edged by
phantom stands of trees, view from asphalt
lush until the summit, T-shirt lifted
to reveal the wound—extraction and the
hasty, gaping scar. The ground’s gone rocky,
dust rasping in ravines once hushed with
moss, though the land is still imprinted
with pine shadow, cracked clay holding in
the heat, all yielding burned away. Softness
disappears, from air, from us, from all we
breathe and touch, a loss so deep we run
back to illusion—the outline of
a forest, imagining the part
to be the whole, and, like us, safe.

4/16/07

Poem o' the day #11

So National Poetry Month is also NaPoWriMo, that is to say national poetry writing month, which,I discovered late in the game, has dozens of people writing a poem a day for the 30 days of April. At some point I'll look them up, maybe even link to them. I'll be lucky to pull a full 30 out of the hat. I'm still aiming for something more like a regular practice, and currently am looking to poetry as lifeline. When all else fails, the imagination throws down some thread to grasp, weaves it into a world, offers shelter.

Spent the afternoon with the Grains of Sand, just a few of us today, doing riffy writing off each other's lines, delighting in the beautiful strangeness. So this one is dedicated to Brett, who offered the title and said "Go." There's probably another 14-line stanza that would complete this...

#11. Eve was framed

The tree was only blooming then, the wasps
not yet inside the fruit, the asp bent
round her gorgeous bicep like a vine.
She had no need for more, had long since
dreamed the names of every living thing,
slipping the libretto back to God, who
sang it—crib notes—for his lowly man. Not
that it sat well. A smart girl can be
insufferable. So you ruin her with
whispers, spill red wine on her unstained rep.
Perfect knowledge is no guarantee of
bliss—that she understood. Still she was shocked
to be duality’s queen. Good/evil?
She didn’t lust for that. No. She spat it out.

4/15/07

Poem o' the day #10

More war. And yet I have faith in us to see it and choose something else. This video is a good one, and if it goes away, here's the link to "Bombs" by Faithless.

And here's the 3rd of the poems from April 11th's news:

#10. Wake

The elements have gone bitter—fire
to ash, air to smoke, earth to split flesh,
blood to rust water. A man’s sick mother
dies and there is no safe place to grieve,
the way home blocked by burning trucks, burning
bodies in the street. Still the son goes out
for groceries—cardamom and raisins,
a live sheep for slaughter. Ordinary,
the tastes of loss. Mourners come in singly.
Any clutch of men will look like soldiers,
though these friends gather in the garden
to smoke, to pray. Explosions near the house
cut short the wake on this ordinary
day. Bullets in the kitchen walls. Time runs out.

4/13/07

Poem o' the day #9

More news from Iraq, second of the April 11th trio. A "taking in the war" diary.

#9. The only road left

The dead were among at least 55 Iraqis killed in violence Tuesday….
                 --Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2007

Woman in a black abaya, clutching
a plastic bag. In the corner of his
eye the merchant sees her, lone woman
adrift amid 200 men. Someone’s
wife, the guard is thinking, someone’s mother,
watching as they mill outside the station,
these would-be new police of last resort.
She listens as they bluster, the idled
farmers, reaches her fine hand inside her
gown. Becomes fireball, severed limbs,
the bloody shower, gunfire aiming
for her dust and smoke. Another 19
die, just here, on this day. Nearby, it’s
boys playing ball. One is only six.

4/12/07

A step back

Another moment of perspective from our inspiring friends at Astronomy picture of the day. It's the Cone Nebula neighborhood, and the credit and copyright belong to Adam Block and Tm Puckett.

Poem o' the day #8

Today's paper had three stories from the war, each one devastating in its own way. I thought I'd write a piece based on each of them, and call the trio "The news, April 11." Here's a second draft of the first one.

#8. The next lost boys

Each blast makes a brain bounce like a yolk,
fragility hidden in the unscathed
shell. No one sees the ruin till it’s clear:
A football star who now can’t catch a ball.
He can't parse a play in a pick-up game,
can’t get a grip on words. What’s a cherry?
He couldn’t tell you, can’t conjure the
blossom, the color, even a shape.
The sound of it just floats until he
sees it: Cherry, that’s the street where he
got shot. When he’s better he’ll return,
still a Marine, to show more boys like him
how to survive. That’s what he clings to--
evidence of damage, of forgetting.

4/11/07

Poem o' the day #7

With no reference at all to Dylan Thomas, I played with the Tupelo Press poetry contest title: "A process of weather in the heart." Of course, it did not keep its place as a title. This is basically a sketch, but it interests me. Took Sunday off. Looking for ways to make this process feel sustainable, and perhaps a day of rest is one.

#7. What moved through

i. the coaxing
A process of weather in the heart--
some tendril unwinds, probes, curves back in.

ii. augury
I plant the seedling whose first buds never
opened. Perhaps, damaged, it will not tempt birds.

iii. wishful thinking
If only meteorology
were the study of falling stars. I
imagine the maps, streaked white with lights, with
the Leonids’ swarming insistence.

iv. knowledge of absence
All we want is the pelting storm that
will not come. A desert in Chile
has been waiting for a thousand years.
Empty so long, the beds forget their meaning.

v. air masses, their moisture almost human
Fog reaches into the thin canopies,
strokes the spring leaves. They shift like thoughts, lovers.

4/9

Poem o' the day

Sat with Sarah playing with this. Sometimes frivolity seems like just the thing...

#6. Dream endings you never remember

The mannequins in store windows are nude,
which makes sense since you are naked too.
In fact, no one wears a stitch as they
run to finals in the classes they skipped.
One by one they look up, recognize
the answers written there in colored chalk,
string theory parsed in essay-question prose,
Joyce's mystic symbols clear at last.
Luggage, purses, wallets reappear,
and public speaking's gone, replaced by
telepathy. Even bodies streaking
to their doom rebound in thrilling bungeed
loop de loops. The repressed truth of night:
Just past terror is the hidden delight.

4/7/07

Poem o' the day

Started this one almost a month ago. Or met the idea then, anyhow. And maybe next month I'll still be tinkering. To get to the bourgeois pig tonight we walked from foothill to canyon, unlit streets where the air is thick with boxwood and jasmine, and the trees are thick with pale green leaves. I wondered if the trees were flowering, the air was so fragrant, the leaves so bright, their color concealed under the backlit fog. Spring in L.A.

5. Miracle Mile

When the man at the bus stop asks me
about the name, I have nothing to
offer but the memory of vanished
wealth, the swank and strut of well-fed men,
their cowbird love of gleam. But he is
looking for milagros, a sudden scent
of roses, the floors around a bed
littered with the shells of broken fevers,
cast-off pain. Neither of us would discount,
say, a sinkhole that engulfed a house
but filled, in time, with lotus, egrets.
Loss can bring its own potent miracles.
Nothing yet, but we are patient. So
much can happen in the space of a block.

4/6/07