I hope to do something better this weekend than just recycle memories.
The "hubris" sentence doesn't make sense. This is just a first draft, off the cuff, in a hurry.
New Construction
Nine trees don’t make a wood,
just a builder’s folly. This house, while new,
is unsound: warped shingles, burst lines,
sinkholes, snare after snare. The hubris
in having something built for you
and having it be a disaster
reminds me of being seventeen
in a shabby Victorian conversion:
five apartments where one upstanding
Republican family once lived. Noises
in the night, inside my walls; I thought
I was dreaming of devils. One night, as I read,
a small black hand burst through the plaster.
It was a raccoon. The landlord
screwed a square of paneling over it.
I taped a Rockwell in the middle. Soon,
the death smell began, worsened, ended.
And I was still happier there
than on this train-set cul de sac
where the birds never come back.
Friday, March 5, 2010
yesterday
I wrote a poem yesterday afternoon, but I left it on my work computer, so I couldn't post it last night. It isn't very good. It's the result of a class assignment to write a poem with specific line lengths. I picked a pattern of syllables: 7-5-7-5-4-5. This is what I got (first draft). You can see how I just started playing with words that occurred to me; as the first two stanzas progressed, I found a direction. The title came last.
Washington in Fall
the telegram arrived
faster than a kite
bearing the news of peril
purple and discreet
Who sent that box?
His name extinguished
powder, sick perfume, alarm
rising like the moon
safe alabaster chambers
now cold fortresses
sweat on the brow
check is in the mail
I remember when they fell
I was sleeping well
someone woke me with a shout
all was turned around
How could this be?
Don’t know where to run
Mom, in the mountains, begged me
Come home now, honey
The mountains were not my home
City born and raised
Daddy’s daughter
Eyes closed to the sun
Papers falling, people I can’t
talk about, years later.
Just months hence, the sniper attacks
Zigzag to the car
Death at the Depot
No one has a home
Washington in Fall
the telegram arrived
faster than a kite
bearing the news of peril
purple and discreet
Who sent that box?
His name extinguished
powder, sick perfume, alarm
rising like the moon
safe alabaster chambers
now cold fortresses
sweat on the brow
check is in the mail
I remember when they fell
I was sleeping well
someone woke me with a shout
all was turned around
How could this be?
Don’t know where to run
Mom, in the mountains, begged me
Come home now, honey
The mountains were not my home
City born and raised
Daddy’s daughter
Eyes closed to the sun
Papers falling, people I can’t
talk about, years later.
Just months hence, the sniper attacks
Zigzag to the car
Death at the Depot
No one has a home
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Sodalis, or Jackknife, or Symbiosis...a first draft
Sodalis
I do not know what Sodalis means.
It puts me in mind of a combination watch/compass, some device that tells you where and when to go.
I envision it at the pivot of a double-bladed jackknife, its edges cutting their own stories into the air, setting their own beginnings and endings.
I am trying to edit a microbiological manuscript.
I have a four-day headache.
I grow distracted and look at an old story, the one about the two filmmakers who, face to face, shot each other.
It’s an irresistible riddle: how they managed to die together, one earthshaking grand mort.
I lie.
A play on words is kinder than the truth: how she swallowed enough drugstore pills to die, how he went missing a week later, clothes and wallet on the beach.
How many days alive without her? Six? Seven?
Too many to fathom.
I knew him by name. By face.
I see him in my memory, walking down Philadelphia Avenue by the Takoma Park Library, a ten-year-old curly-headed boy in a peacoat, so solemn, dark-eyed.
Going to bed early--did I play with him?--and leaving me, his sitter, to ponder his mother’s bookshelves, read the books the library wouldn’t let me have, wonder whether the thin, bearded man in the poster with “ZIG ZAG” under it was her single-mom, agnostic Jesus.
I lie again. Who thinks of such things? I remember
that he was an uncannily handsome child. That is a surface, and I never got to see anything deeper. Maybe in his art. Maybe in that final stroke of tragedy. Did he walk out like Virginia Woolf, or did he find some height
and jackknife into the waves? And what of where I started,
with Sodalis? “Sodalis glossinidius is a maternally transmitted endosymbiont of tsetse flies,” says Google.
I could make a metaphor, but it would mean nothing. A mother, who loved him. A lover with a sickness, who slept. Image after image of colors merging; room after room of the Winchester Mystery House,
the folly of a woman who lost everyone and built room after room, a maze to stave off the reaper’s staff. A bug in the gut of a fly that can be caught easily with an electric-blue net. How do I make it mean anything?
I do not know what Sodalis means.
It puts me in mind of a combination watch/compass, some device that tells you where and when to go.
I envision it at the pivot of a double-bladed jackknife, its edges cutting their own stories into the air, setting their own beginnings and endings.
I am trying to edit a microbiological manuscript.
I have a four-day headache.
I grow distracted and look at an old story, the one about the two filmmakers who, face to face, shot each other.
It’s an irresistible riddle: how they managed to die together, one earthshaking grand mort.
I lie.
A play on words is kinder than the truth: how she swallowed enough drugstore pills to die, how he went missing a week later, clothes and wallet on the beach.
How many days alive without her? Six? Seven?
Too many to fathom.
I knew him by name. By face.
I see him in my memory, walking down Philadelphia Avenue by the Takoma Park Library, a ten-year-old curly-headed boy in a peacoat, so solemn, dark-eyed.
Going to bed early--did I play with him?--and leaving me, his sitter, to ponder his mother’s bookshelves, read the books the library wouldn’t let me have, wonder whether the thin, bearded man in the poster with “ZIG ZAG” under it was her single-mom, agnostic Jesus.
I lie again. Who thinks of such things? I remember
that he was an uncannily handsome child. That is a surface, and I never got to see anything deeper. Maybe in his art. Maybe in that final stroke of tragedy. Did he walk out like Virginia Woolf, or did he find some height
and jackknife into the waves? And what of where I started,
with Sodalis? “Sodalis glossinidius is a maternally transmitted endosymbiont of tsetse flies,” says Google.
I could make a metaphor, but it would mean nothing. A mother, who loved him. A lover with a sickness, who slept. Image after image of colors merging; room after room of the Winchester Mystery House,
the folly of a woman who lost everyone and built room after room, a maze to stave off the reaper’s staff. A bug in the gut of a fly that can be caught easily with an electric-blue net. How do I make it mean anything?
Mostly a true story
Inefficiency
At fifty-two, he washed the company out of his life
with Gilbey’s. I never met him, just heard of his adventures:
the budgets padded to soften the clatter of minibar bottles
into gray wastebaskets, forming sticky glass mountains
from San Jose to Wichita to Charlotte, atop one of which
his body was bent, two days dead, a week before the
quarterly report.
Three years later,
the 2003 Pontiac Bonneville still hunkers in the corner
of the lot: gold-green with pollen, its windows
pigeon-dotted, its front vanity plate slightly dented.
I’m going to dent it again. I feel no pity
for the plaid scarf that droops over
the passenger headrest where a head
never rested, the jowly tires, the yellow ribbon
glued on the back glass. This sad man,
given the company passed from son to son,
left it dispirited, twitching. The underling
who hired me was fired a week later.
The work is too disorderly to pack into
a boulder to push up the hill.
I was promised parking. Five years dead,
this fallen leader
still takes up space.
At fifty-two, he washed the company out of his life
with Gilbey’s. I never met him, just heard of his adventures:
the budgets padded to soften the clatter of minibar bottles
into gray wastebaskets, forming sticky glass mountains
from San Jose to Wichita to Charlotte, atop one of which
his body was bent, two days dead, a week before the
quarterly report.
Three years later,
the 2003 Pontiac Bonneville still hunkers in the corner
of the lot: gold-green with pollen, its windows
pigeon-dotted, its front vanity plate slightly dented.
I’m going to dent it again. I feel no pity
for the plaid scarf that droops over
the passenger headrest where a head
never rested, the jowly tires, the yellow ribbon
glued on the back glass. This sad man,
given the company passed from son to son,
left it dispirited, twitching. The underling
who hired me was fired a week later.
The work is too disorderly to pack into
a boulder to push up the hill.
I was promised parking. Five years dead,
this fallen leader
still takes up space.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Pro Forma
This is a tiny bit of reverie, mostly here to keep me honest, in case I don't get back here later today with something better.
pieces of the plan
scattered on the cellar floor
covered with a box or two
never go away
all the little horses
running through your head
feel the rafters shake
sizes of seismic selection
shake out a shard or two
somehow that broken piece
will emerge
and you’ll trip
with an armful of sheets
you’ll fall into your own
old dreams
pieces of the plan
scattered on the cellar floor
covered with a box or two
never go away
all the little horses
running through your head
feel the rafters shake
sizes of seismic selection
shake out a shard or two
somehow that broken piece
will emerge
and you’ll trip
with an armful of sheets
you’ll fall into your own
old dreams
Monday, March 1, 2010
Not MST3K
The Bad Movie
Why choose it, when you know it’ll suck
the intellect, the compassion, the gravy goodness
out of you? Why trade two hours of life
for this? It’s not a trip you take alone,
or sober: in the night’s wee smalls you gather
at the screen, jabber like soothsayers, all the while
watching, hoping your laugh
meets theirs in a piss-take
that passeth understanding.
Why choose it, when you know it’ll suck
the intellect, the compassion, the gravy goodness
out of you? Why trade two hours of life
for this? It’s not a trip you take alone,
or sober: in the night’s wee smalls you gather
at the screen, jabber like soothsayers, all the while
watching, hoping your laugh
meets theirs in a piss-take
that passeth understanding.
Coming back
I'm hoping to do this exercise again in March and April. I don't know whether it helps me succeed or merely gives me willow switches for flagellation when I fail.
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