Day 15 Poem Inspired By Music

Tired of Being Tired Blues

I'm so tired of being tired
it makes me tired
so bone deep tired of being tired
it makes me tired
it don't matter how much I rest
I just stay tired and my life's a mess
I'm so tired of being tired
and that's the truth

Day 14 Under the Influence

Today's prompt was to write about a poet or poets who influence your work. I figured yesterday's poem on Emily Dickinson sort of counted. And it's hard to choose just one poet. So here's this.

Swirl

Under the Influence

Now i lay
me down
some hot-
cross buns
old mrs.
mack's back
and that English
boy band
in their yellow
submarine
Guthrie's land
was my land
New York
that's how
i started to be
a poet in
e.e. cummings
little letters in
the woods
with the woods
some mountains
and a river
of my own
and somehow
brautigan got
in there
and parker's
resume rhymes
brooks' sassy strut
frost's fence
whitman's lines
emily's image
hughes' melody
eliot's ragged claws
i got them all
or they got me
and that's very
the short version
of the story
of poetry
and me

Day 13 Stealing Emily

All the ideas and some of the words are Emily’s. I arranged them and took advantage of her style signature. As a poet I am ever in her debt.

                    1776

I wished to tell you what I’d stol’n—

Majuscules and Bone
Woods—loud with bees’ eternities
And Riddles in the skies

Wind—I took with Draughts
of Mind and ordinary Weather
There was no Stay to all my Thefts
The Heart—a Wilderness

Snakes and Robins transcended
Time—in nine Immortal Movements
A Universe in Filament
of Light for its Circumference

Day 12 Triolet

“The requirements of this fixed form are straightforward: the first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme. Thus, the poet writes only five original lines, giving the triolet a deceptively simple appearance: ABaAabAB”



Jasmine Bebop

Jasmine jumps like bebop to the brain
and her refrain’s keyed roses
all rhythm gets its juice from heart to brain
Jasmine jumps like bebop to the brain
wind whips all scent from noses to the brain
notes hook inside like thorns on roses
Jasmine jumps like bebop to the brain
and her refrain’s keyed roses

Day 11 Flower

Who Gave Me Back Geraniums

This poem is for Ursula
who gave me back geraniums
lemon-scented ones she kept
blooming in the windows
of her special ed classroom
(where I was her teacher’s aid)
who kept pots of them going
through winter somehow
and who gave me cuttings
which by some miracle
grew into lemon-scented
leaves then pink pompoms
in my own loft apartment
window and I say gave me
back because I’d watered
the ones on my grandfather’s
grave over and over and
geraniums grew only in pots
in the cemetery of my mind
and those were good geraniums
but their beauty was somehow
stolen by the sadness of the place
until Ursula filled them again with sun
then I went to France (after
Ursula) and the balconies
were all full of geraniums
and jasmine and now I
am in love with both
thanks to Ursula and France
who and which I love also

Day 10 Hay (na) ku

Seedlings

      sweet
plum dream
tell me more

     driver
     take us
there, no, there

     tomato
  houses full
so many seeds

     
                                                                                                                        

Day 9 Shaped

Dream Trio

three to figure 

one got

        into a boat                              

                                 floating petite bayou

behind the mom & pop

bbq joint

you loved

second one

             drove

                      and drove 

                                at an angle

                                         across America

                                                 til it gave out

                                                           in Ocala                             

  

                                                                                                                                last one’s     

leafing         out

digging down

             

rooting

Day 8 Start With A Line

Frontier


for my bones are shuddering
                              Psalms 6.3

my bones are shuddering                                  
in their number at day’s end        

counted in hotspots and hope
blame and hate as the virus—  
indiscriminate—takes all
the beloveds—the ones
with songs, the ones who
caught the tune and danced
exposed in love and work
to microscopic
chance swerved
apocalyptic

in springtime
sunlight
infection
blooms red
across the map
of New Corona
such bleak frontier
the stuff of thrillers

now we live (and die) here

Day 7 New Headline

Spring in the Time of Covid

Hummingbirds come back

to red feeders, homemade nectar
John Prine on the radio



RIP John Prine, Great American Songwriter, Victim of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Wishing you and your family peace and grace. Thank you for all the great songs and the love you gave.

Day 6 Hieronymous Bosch Ekphrastic

Eve by the Wrist


In Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
God takes Eve by the wrist, helps her
up from the ground of her birth—
Adam, after his exhausting costectomy, still seated
there. God is leading her to the first husband as if
she were a child who had somehow strayed. And
while I’m trying to remember the iconography
of the wrist hold (something about lust?)
Pallid Eve—all the people in Garden except the Moors
are pallid; the Moors are black—keeps her
eyes on the ground, demure, sure, but not happy
with this arrangement. In fact most of the women
in the painting look bored or anxious or
like they want to be elsewhere. The men
have been had by the great sinning bitch of a world.

A Flemish painting, and profoundly weird,
 Earthly Delights hangs in a famous
Spanish museum. The painting, quite big,
a triptych after all, draws a crowd every day,
a textbook favorite, and Picasso’s Guernica, and
the wonderful Goyas and Grecos and
Velásquezes. Last night I dreamt myself wandering
Museo del Prado’s corridors, all of which had been
emptied by plague. El Retiro también.

And so you see. The poem is not
the assigned ekphrastic, but a mark
in time, like any painting. Like
anyone’s death. So many, undone.

Day 5 Twenty Little Poetry Projects

Today the prompt dealt with the practice of doing twenty little poetry projects, in other words writing twenty poems that each try out different poetic sleights of hand...i.e. a metaphor, an image, a rhyme, etc., one new trick for each poem OR an attempt to incorporate all—or as many as you can of the twenty tricks into one poem. I didn’t try either version of the prompt. Instead, beset by enough projects to see me through multiple pandemics, I took a slightly different approach.


Little Projects

in the bath
little projects

on our desks a million
little projects

our gardens grant us
vegetables and projects

in the mail they send you
little projects

she loves you more because
you take on projects

even birds have
nests for little projects

in dreams you never
complete your projects

bird count cloud watch
porch rail seedling
doorknob street lamp
key cut changeling

sing a little song
to all your projects
sing a lullaby
to all your projects
sing and say fare well
to all your projects

Day 4 Dream

Zoetropean


spring brought on rabbits
urban rangey
____________________

grey-pink kits
wriggling nested
____________________

swole blooms
heavy w/blue rain
____________________

oh! stop      stop`
the dogs
____________________

why can’t I
touch wild things
____________________

bare handed?
I’m afraid
____________________

of babies
and fur
____________________

afraid of
feathers
____________________

I write:

in this

____________________

interregnum

between what and

____________________

what you

don’t know

____________________

in calligraphy

afraid he’ll

____________________

still see in

my hand 

____________________

a little wounded love

that soft kit

____________________

so naturally

betrayed

Day 3 Rhyme

Little Kingdom                         

                           

“invasive” Wisteria

owned the yard –

we bought 

anyway

moved in 

ten years 

now

each year we cut it

back and 

it comes

on more

full of course we 

cut it back tug 

avid vine 

from trembling

fence

again

again

Fine. Grace

effaces.

Bee balm

salaams the rooted

idiom of lavish

plants at the pollen

crawl in

just find a cool spot

for the delphinium

prune and pray

for garnet

incarnate

in my rose

Day 2 Place Poem

Kaaterskill Falls

split
Devonian
Spruce Cove
shale

Schoharie’s
double cascade
North-South Lake’s
silver on spill

shaped
a great
cup

we swim there
or sit
behind the
falls’ cool
music
watch for
movement
in the balsam fir
through our wet
veil

Day 1 Metaphor Self-Portrait

Sea Snail

if all

melancholy
could be poured
into

a gleaming
shell

spiraled
round itself

I would
be

that

gliding

stomach-footed

in the intertidal
brine

tiny home

my lonely
own