Day 30 -- Remember

A Valley, Somehow, A Kind of Cup

footbridge and 
                   bats feasting
                             
                            Shiva
                                  in his halo
                                          of night bugs
                                                      and sodium light
               
a small river slides sideways into a bigger one
        

            late peaches and no moon, long pulls
                                                              on green bottles
                                                                      on cups of grief


        how did our skin feel against that hot dark

    how did we manage breath
                                                   at all
           
            what kind of poem will this be   

when we have forgotten what we were?   

Day 29 Double Dactyl

How 'bout Another One?

Cuneiform acrobats
shaping up ziggurats
fabulous hatboxes
pinwheels and pearls

Syllable solitaire
cultivates lightning there
stirs up tornadic air
gives it a whorl

Day 28 A Poem About Space

Dingle Hill Road

A dirt road slips itself into the space between
    a creek and a laurel-frilled cliff

A dirt road slips itself in below a dark summer
    canopy of spruce, maple, birch

The creek sidles up to the road with a slick
  & rocky summons
         to the dust
              in all of us.

Day 27 Nursery Rhyme

Too tired for much more than this:

For the Money

 

Some days you think you’ll do it
Some days you think you won’t
One day you think you want it
The next you know you don’t

Day 26 An Elegy

Elegy, For What I Don't Remember

Memory, same as looking, changes the object
         of scrutiny.

I learned the principles of uncertainty in my physics
         for poets class

which I took because I couldn’t do the math and needed
         a change.

Everyone was doing it, Boethius, Heisenberg, the Beatles, such
         a cliché!

Now, I just want to get the shape of your eyes right, the taste of tobacco on
         your skin

which wine it was we drank with breakfast and
         which after

what it was I said, exactly, that I’m not sure made
         you cry.
 

Day 25 Cento

Trying to Write a Love Poem

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled.
What else was I supposed to start with?
 
All bright light and black wings,
the paper slept but the night woke me up
 
and now over death-struck Paris
the shrine lies open to the sky.
 
I was filigree and flame.
 
Love! That red disease
deals -- one -- imperial -- thunderbolt
 
Why is the word yes so brief?

But I was made for this: listening:

 
Sources: Adrienne Rich, Paisley Rekdal, Dorianne Laux, Fanny Howe, Anna Akhmatova, H.D., Rita Dove, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Vera Pavlova, Jean Valentine

Day 24 A Lipogram

Though the name of this form makes me think of liposuction and Tyler Durden's soap (ewww!), I tried it out anyway, as instructed, explicitly refraining from using a particular letter. Some lipogram poets ditch whole sections of the alphabet -- all vowels except one, for instance, or everything from K to P, or all the letters in a name.  Rookie that I am, I just eliminated one little vowel.  The letter I chose to strike from the roster was "i".

Samskara

A haltered
             thought
on repeat
               where
are you?


Now?
     Where are
you?
     Altered thought?


On repeat
               now
where are
               you?


Haltered?
         What now?
You
         on repeat.

Where?

Day 23 An Ekphrastic Poem

I recently got to see some of the pieces from The Phillips Collection at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.  A work by John Sloan, Six O'Clock, Winter, is the source for this poem.

Sloan's Pathos

No one sees the darkening sky at six o’clock winter

above the El, blue not-machine and bluer applique

of cloud. Correction: we do.    

                                                                  They do not, those

fleshy smudges at the bottom of the canvas whom we imagine

human and hurrying home to supper, glancing up at windows

yellowed against that familiar cusp of coming dark

bound to catch them, us.   

           

Day 22 A Poem About A Plant in Honor of Earth Day

My Mother the Science Teacher

and Her Friend the Wild Carrot

It’s not magic; it’s capillary action

turning Queen Anne’s Lace blue. 

This has been another homemade

science lesson brought to you by 

your own mother, cut wildflowers and

Betty Crocker Food Coloring in a vase.

It works with daisies too.

Day 21 Hay(na)ku

Here are three little ones for today.  The hay(na)ku form is pretty simple: first line, one word; second line, two words; third line, three words.

mockingbird 

sings anything:

finch, sparrow, cat

rain

cloudy slipstream

sun yes      nope

say

honeybunch twice

she’s that sweet

Day 20 A Travel Poem

Farewell Levon Helm! 

Where She Has Gone

Ashes of of laughter

the ghost is clear

why do the best things always disappear?

    --”Ophelia”  Written by Robbie Robertson,

           made famous by Levon Helm and The Band

Levon,

Your topaz voice rode shotgun in my pickup truck when I ran away to join the cactus

that winter after the baby didn’t happen and he left me. Survival, the long and the all 

of it: Tucson Best Western bar on Christmas Eve, the gentleman’s club next door,

strippers and the not-an-axe-murderer-he-promised guy who escorted us drunk

to midnight mass, where we tongue kissed like acolytes and gave each other

the sign of peace. We were all hiding out for the holidays. When I broke open

my tent in Sonora, Coyotes brought their captives to the flaps, and I ransomed

them with G-chords and cassette tapes.  We went into town and got wasted

on creosote and rumble strips. After, at Reenie’s place in LA, that girl and I bashed

our way through every tune on Anthology, me on margarita, her on guitar, til I could

laugh (an ashy laugh) at the sad little ghost camping in my backpack, the one

who wouldn't disappear.

Day 19 Opposite Day

Opposite Day

 

On Opposite Day at Camp Wendy

the delight of Backwards Lunch

starting with the Dixie Cup ice cream

and flat balsa wood spoons was spoiled

by the Spam salad at the end.

One hundred little church campers

undone by such cruel food,

chopped potted “meat” & mayo,

could not be persuaded by tales

of children starving elsewhere

to touch the stuff.

Sent to our tents without supper

to meditate on children whose

lives were the very opposite of our

own well-fed, overprivileged ways

we broke out the contraband

candy and had a feast.

Day 18 Not a Lullaby

The prompt today was to write a lullaby, but I ended up with a dream/nightmare fragment instead.

Just Before Waking

And there he was on a hot bike, a loud bike, a blue and gold bike

striking out for the hinterlands, eternal winterlands, 24/7 sun.

Done, you’re done, worse than well, and no, you can’t come

son. That country eats up little ones; it’s packed with wolves

love, so stay here with your meditations in the tall grass

passing up another chance at spectacular demise.

Spies are anywhere, I’m telling ya, even so-called here

appearing nightly, looking like a younger version of you.

Day 17 An Epistolary Poem

Dear Spring Night

     You and your starry bling, you and your mole sleek polymorphous spooning with flat

space and curvy earth.

     You and your posse of snuffling moonstruck skunks. Allow me to restate the problem: you

and your jasmined air.

     You and your chilly buds. You and your blue TV windows. You and your dauntless

weaving spiders.

     There's you and your possum paw prints, you and your mushrooms. You and your

AM radio bounce no one listens to anymore.

     Let's not forget you and your streetlights faking dawn. Let me remind you Mr. Big Shot.

You're just a temp.

Day 16 Something About the Sea

The Lost Sea

     Sweetwater, Tennessee

No one knows 

how large the largest

underground lake

in America might be.

One wet cavern room

opens to the next, again

again, another.

Once, a jaguar lost

himself on the Lost Sea

shore and left his bones

in the dark with

the cave fishes.

Once, I asked a friend:

if we can lose a whole sea

to blind trout and fossils

what can we ever keep?

Silly poet, she said.

The Lost Sea has been

right here the whole time.

Day 15 A Parody

With Apologies to Emily

I felt a Foaming, in my Brain

Baristas to and fro

Kept frothing --  frothing -- till it seemed

That Steam was breaking through

And then they were all shouting

Doubles, triples, soy and skim --

My under-caffeinated mind -- gave out

And everything went Dim--

Day 14 Fourteen Lines, Something Like a Sonnet

But it's not.  Just fourteen lines, based on a true story.

Today an Elephant

Today an elephant at Rural King

yes, in the parking lot a pachyderm

placid, matter of fact, maybe smiling,

kids climbing up and down his back in turn.

What’s a nice elephant like you doing

in a place like this American South,

where we buy our mason jars, gardening things

boots and ammo, baby chicks in horse troughs

under heat lamps, fuzzy, yellow, cheeping?

But here you are. A great, grey spectacle

among the house plants and gold Easter bunting

putting monster trucks to shame. Not baleful

at all as I’d expect you’d be, given

the circumstances, no, just bigger than.

Day 13 A Ghazal

This one is a late-night ghazal after another very long day. So, it's a short one.

Moonflower

We sat on the back porch drinking wine at dusk and waited for the bloom,

green hearts, these leaves, these long thin buds, waiting for the bloom.

Watch you said. It opens like a hand, like a dinner plate, like a pie

an ache grown fierce with lonely, waiting for the bloom.

Silver moths spun in the streetlight, whirring nightbirds in the hedge

planets dropped hints on the horizon, blue waiting for the bloom.

Like this you kept me still forever, dreaming flowers in the night,

eyes on the vine, the accordion bud, waiting for the bloom.

Day 12 - Translitic -- A Homophonic "Translation"

The spirit of the translitic is play. That's it, just play with language, take your chances, see what happens.  I feel like a toddler at the easel with fingerpaints when I write translitics.  Everything gets messy.  Here's a tiny, silly translitic based on an verse from a Danish poem, "Havenfornemmelser"  ("Gardensensibilities") by Ursula Andkjær, which I found on the Poetry International site.

Original Danish

Havefornemmelser  (Gardensensibilities) by Ursula Andkjær

navnene står på skilte/væksten er høj og tung i
haven står alting med navn/mæt med tilbageholdt åndedræt
og rasler

My Translitic

Haven for Nan Miller

novena star, passkey, fox den or hog tongue, ay,
haven star, all things well met, novena, mad tiller, bag holder and dread
hog wrestler