I thought I wrote this poem,
but looking for it, all the spirals
all the folds and stitches, all the scraps are filled
with other things and empty lines, and this
poem of memory and
geography is nowhere.

It must have been written in bed, where pens hide
between cotton quilt and cheap red acrylic which is
always warm (for the cat). and on dream paper.
In the motel of memory, there is always paper in the drawer,
a phone book too skinny to believe, and the same same bible.
And even when the whole family stays in ajoining rooms
we never unlock the doors and have a party, drifting from
suitcase to suitcase with plastic cups and crushed ice,
we never get to bounce, trying for the ceiling from other beds.

Of course, all the beds are alike, but we don’t know that then.
Someone draws simple line cartoons like this:
There is a world. A globe. A sketchy beachball
ottoman-like circle world. And a man: a sketchy
little thurber-man, standing at about the one o’clock angle.
As we all stand, whatever o’clock our home is.

He has to look toward his feet to see the horizon: it’s small
and all his events are squashed into the energy
entering through his iris, which turns them upside down.
But if he were enough of a speck to fit easily under the desk drawer
or inside the arching dome of a leafless forsythia; and content to sit
for hours on a step of back stairs turned closet, making ladders
of old hose and step-ins, that same horizon is enormously invisible.

Stand on the world, a seal on a beachball,
or crawl, printing crinoids on your knees;
the views differ, but the result is always inexact
cartography.

________________________________

This isn’t what Margo had in mind, but I had odd difficulties with the prompt. Maybe I’m not quite getting the concept, and it’s just something I’ve been doing already. I write my grandmother’s farm quite a bit. (It’s much easier to explore than our own house, which was small and uninteresting. Also, there is the matter of my mother’s anger, which was less likely on more neutral territory.) The house and the farm contain most of my personal myths, but there’s no telling it in a single poem.

I’m a bit bumfuzzled.

Red-tied trash bag on a carry-stick,
Grandfather Laos takes short steps,
no movement transferred to the sack,
still slim with the early morning.

Objective as an old surgeon,
he lifts lids, inspects the contents.
Grandfather Laos takes short steps;
he is precise, professional.

The trucks will scoop up what he leaves
while he sits on his porch, sorting,
red-tied bag after red-tied bag.
Grandfather Laos takes short steps.

________________________________

For Poetic Bloomings, this is a Quatern.  I’m not happy with the name “grandfather laos” (which sounds sort of patronising-cute), but “the old Laotian guy who picks through the trash” doesn’t quite make it, either.

I got your number from Jim.
You don’t mind my calling because
I don’t mind calling you since you’re
politically motivated, or else
Jim wouldn’t have given me
your (I have it someplace oh, yes
on a napkin) number.

I’m writing a recount about the movement
and every individual that I’ve encountered
and want to include you because we never
met and never heard of one another haha.
but seriously we all have coffee once
and plan to write the movement back
come, and bring your copy of the Great Speckled Bird
Jim says you have one for that week we all
stood in the rain outside a fence I don’t recall
but everyone who remembers me was there.

and why am I stuck in her attic?

Sensory Abstraction of a Wooden P-for-Peach

to float within my memory
dis-embody it, and re-baptise,
nice and clean, depriving away tank and all verboten concretions

avoiding love,
deep and sensual or ebullient,
as too complex not to have tactile currents

turning to comfort
it is old as sleep, and warm (even without arms)
white, soothed with yellow, and
dawn-winter-morning-
pinkish, dripping sweet juices from its round fuzz
freshly whittled cedar

oops. did you get a splinter? my bad

_______________

We Write Poems:
Gautami Tripathy offers us this beautiful prompt for this week. She writes, “I wrote a poem out of nothing and everything. We hoard keepsakes of material things apart from our memories. And I tried to create a poem from that memory, keeping out material things.” Her resulting poem stolen moments well demonstrates her prompt suggestion more than can otherwise be easily described. Please read her very evocative poem and take that as your seedling inspiration for what you write yourself this week.

she grew,
under her mother’s obi,
perfect.  but she never woke.

Mag 101

last night, I thought the world would end in wind.
now, wind holds a hawk in place, unruffled,
against a blue so warm
I have to try it’s temper barefoot
and stand on the glossy brown porch
for long enough to drink my tea in the sun.
I don’t know why I’m here, but life
is strange, and fine.

In spring the mayflies hatch. Thin winged, translucent,
and by name, ephemeral. I could set aside
a day and watch a lifetime hatch, unfold,
eat every molecule that life will eat,
provide another generation, die
having changed a little plant to mayfly
flesh and flown it to a new location.
Fish feed on fallen mayflies. They jump
clear of their element to chase
the shadow of a thing so insubstantial
that a miss expends more energy
than eating would have gained. You, loving
the warm spring day by the river, pass through
a cloud of mayflies. Not much is changed.

response to a four-word-prompt

The question in the subject line
is one I’d answer honestly,
but opening that link of worms presents a problem.
It comes with more attachments than a mall of spam boutiques.
Some that send my leukocytes racing
for their Trojans
to fend off horsey Greek conceptions,
thunderbolts, and tortoises and beards
(with eyes trained on the sparrow
and Pythonesque intentions for my DNA)
I’d say I’m not a Goldberg thing, a letter,
or a paper plane
but I haven’t stopped beating my wife,
(the questionnaire
without the option D).
Still, risking philosophic strings, to be polite,
I’ll answer
that I’m here because I am not,
not.

_______________

Partial explanation:

Our small poetry workshop group was finished for the afternoon. Oops. Prompt for next meeting? “Why am I here?” This is from Uju, whose English is good but not playful, and who really did mean that as a prompt.

Then Joseph comes along with “Symbolic Frolic” which pretty well requires a SIGNIFICANT topic. Well…
What I’ve done isn’t symbolism, but obfuscation. I had some fun with it, but it’s wrong for either situation.
I’ll have another try later.

________

Process: mostly for my own use

I have a notion

1) purpose is just human construct
2) there is no sparrow-minded god
3) all interaction with magical beings is problematic
4) there needs to be a warming beverage that isn’t tea or coffee
5) all animals are equal, but some etc
6) time travel must include a block of social skills tutoring
7) law is shorthand warfare, but saves time and resources
8) adultry is stupid; the literature of adultry is worse
9) lies simplify interaction in the short run, but make transparent plot points
10) there should be a Nobel set aside for the first development of a vaccine against a positive response to negative campaign ads.

II
There is no purpose behind my existence,
but that’s okay.

We think with the tools at hand–words.
All we know has associations

We only see non-existence from a site of being.
“Afterlife” comes from the inability to think of “nothing”

I as a result of choice and accident

god beard tablet burning bush
forbidding sparrow infinite angry sorrowing meddling

hand thunderbolt protection punishment petition
your side, my side tug-of-war paternal
circumvent the last court of appeal

_____________we could use to have our world “coloured.” So this is our nudge. Write a colorful poem. It could be a poem about a specific color. It could be a poem of many colors. You might make a passing reference to the palette at your disposal. Just make sure the color is vivid and graces the title of your poems in some way. Colour My World (and we don’t even care if you stay within the lines!)

cultivating color

this may
take a while, it’s foggy.
make tea (it isn’t gray) tick tick eight
tick tick nine tick tick ten eleven. just shy of noon:
the fog and sky are welded into one bedraggled cotton field
matted with leaf mould and soggy sticks
in mud made of Pompeii’s old
blanket and Alexandria’s
burned books.

go dig a hole out in the front yard, by the rule of thirds,
not halfway to the drippy gray horizon,
closer. and not midway between
hedge and drive. dig to see
it from the window.
set a clump
of cattails

in it, heavy-headed, and yellow-gray; and wait
for the crows to leave; wait
see the tails of
the pigeons
sparrows

the starlings and the wrens.
this may take a while
but patience
is bright
gold.

and you’ve broken the drab lines
of that gray horizon,
so,
soon enough the holly will wink
from beneath its dominating
leather leaves toward
the red-fruited honeysuckle
and flags will wave redly on mailboxes
all up and down,
passing pickups
will flash their
fire engine
(red) brakes
and even on gray porches, plastic toys
stop feeling left out
and blink brightly at
jogged baby bundles,
pink, in cherry chariots, flying before
moms’ red
Keds.

until at last a tag of red graffitti
lights and
bends
the cattail
with a flash of scarlet epaulettes.