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?