fallen verses

Hugh over at GapingVoid has an interesting tidbit on the “Post-Dreaming Reality,” which I thought was interesting.  Bruce Lynn left a comment on that post about a post he did in a similar vein.  It’s a fairly lengthy post and I only want to quote a little morsel of it that I found particularly relevant.

One goes through plenty of chapters in one’s life that means closing the door on a set of past experiences. High school. College. Dating. But with graduation, commencement and marriage the focus is on the bright set of new possibilities that overwhelms the sense of loss over the positive experiences of the past. However, with something like a limiting injury or other realization that progress is curtailed or prospects are remote, there is no explicit ‘positive’ to fill the gap.

Read Write Novelly

This weeks Read Write Prompt from Christine was to hack apart the end bits of some chapters from a book and use them as the basis for a poem. I picked up a copy of The City of Falling Angels by Jon Berendt, and I won’t mention what words I used because most of them got revised out of the poem. I took a different tack with this poem, and didn’t use first or second person pronouns. I’ll be honest, it feels weird not to use them, I almost want to change the whole thing just so there can be an address, but, I shan’t.

Acqua Alta

Beneath trumpeting angels, a faded
yellow splashing in this spring’s acqua alta,
it’s residents prepared and softly laughing
at the tourists in salt-ruined shoes.
Soon the Palazzo Barbarro will crumble,
sink into the insistent, hypnotic tides,
bastion of terrible beauty, coral reef to be.

City carefully level with the sea. A masterpiece
of engineering’s failure. The opera houses,
and the museums, the cafés and piazzas
laconically gather the last dust blown across the
Mediterranean before it reaches dry land,
idle as tired children catching snowflakes.
The little drowning angels of marble
will blow their trumpets as
Neptune’s kin blow conch shells,
battle for the souls of fishes.

Like something out of a Madonna video.

Hallucinogenic Toreador
an ekphrastic poem after Dali

What flourish. What magnificent cape. What slender sword.
Blood blooming like roses on the flank of the beast,
roses blooming in the dust of the arena.
Triple-thorned dance of the bull-fight
and applause.

Which woman will take you to her room, bathe herself
in rose water, bare her soft breasts to you,
feel your calloused hands on her
soft belly and thighs? Which woman?
Which room?

For you, there is no struggle, no excitement
and there is neither for the bull.
A moment’s passion for the cut.
The cheers are the buzzing
of flies.

Three poetic forms down, and thus far I haven’t had to bother with meter. Not gonna be so luck next time when I face my personal arch-nemesis- the sonnet. Today, though, was Pantoum day. Still challenging. As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland say in The Making of a Poem: “the reader takes four steps forward, then two back.” Well, as a writer, I took two steps forward, then two back. The ‘delete’ key was my favorite key while writing the pantoum, I had a crazy hard time finding lines that could handle the repetition. Whether I succeeded in that or not, I suppose I cannot say, and I leave you all to judge for yourselves.

Winter Pantoum

Shards of ice rain from the shivering trees–
tiny, blazing comets
below a gold sun
as they burn themselves on their own fire.

Tiny blazing comets
chiming like crystal blown by the wind
as they burn themselves on their own fire;
a momentary brilliance

chiming like crystal blown by the wind.
A synesthesiac bliss–
this momentary brilliance
then silence, darkness, repetition, streaks

of synesthesiac bliss:
score and light, rest and illumination
then silence, darkness, repetition, streaks
in the near-earth sky.

Score and light, rest and illumination:
below a gold sun
in the near-earth sky
shards of ice rain from the shivering trees.

…those days when you’re sitting at home, maybe listening to some music, thinking to yourself, “man, what time is it, I’ve got to get up for work in the morning.  I should go to bed.”  And then you look at the clock and realize it’s only 8 o’clock and bedtime is still hours away.  The stretch of time get intimidating, right?

This evening has been exceptionally productive.  I’m having a bit of a get-together next weekend, so I started on the massive cleaning project that must precede it.  Finished a book (reading), finished a column (writing), caught up on my Google reader.  And still hours to go.

But since the empty expanse of time is not very interesting, check these out:

• Cati Porter linked some funniness for us: Choosing a Major.
• And over at Harriet, A.E. Stallings has posted about Sonnets.  Two Posts.  Which reminds me I have at least one sonnet to write.  [cries] But I don’t want to be formalist[/cries]

Figures in Rep(r)ose

Scent, Memory

Bodies tingling in the afterglow of simultaneous orgasm, breaths quick, shallow, and in sync. My body a parallel arc to yours, my face nestled in the mussed pile of your hair. Casually, I decipher the network of scents, and know your day: early morning smell of sleep, drip coffee and peppermint toothpaste. Light lavender of your bodywash; citrus extracts in your shampoo. Remnant of new car smell, the off-clean of corporate cubicles and bureaucracy. Starbucks latte and with the foam I can almost smell the James Taylor on repeat. Afternoon meeting where no one ate the stale muffins. Car again as you drove here, thai curry, chopsticks, dry Riesling, and finally the smell of my cologne. Soon your skin will goosebump as you wait for the shower to warm, then the heavy scent of jasmine in the conditioner you call your “gym shampoo” if your husband ever bothered to notice.

Change up your Sestina line length (a Read Write Poem prompt)

I feel kind of bad that it is my prompt up over at Read Write Poem, and I haven’t posted a prompted poem! So, this changes now. I have been shirking many, many things these last few weeks, lots of family activities, travelling, end of semester nonsense, blah blah boo hoo. I do hope to spend more time writing and interacting with the blog’o'poetry updating more frequently than I do. This is my RWP poem, and #2 in the Making of a Poem series, this time a sestina. Terrible nasty form, that. dreadfully long. On the plus side, I decided it didn’t need to make sense (yay surreality! and yay wine for making it not seem like a bad idea!) so back to the random word generator and, bam, half an hour later, this monstrosity.

For the RWP prompt: My line lengths change from poem to poem, often mid-to-short, but it is more unusual for me to include very long and short lines and break them into stanzas. Hence, the strangeness of this.

---

Sestina

The edge of the crack, shattered earth falling away, an abyss
large enough for you and me and all of us. What choice
have we in this matter? What is left when the gap between personal
and professional, private and public, is no larger than a bedspread?
And the man at the teleprompter, purveyor of every script,
removes this- what need for creativity?- removes this burden.

You are a burden
deepening the abyss.
I scan the script,
see if the choice
of the bedsspread
remains personal.

One on one with the interviewer, a clown-face with which I am personal,
I wonder if she feels her personality, her switched-on-ness is a burden.
Give me the closed room, the cream skin of her body nestled in a black bedspread.
Even if she’ll be another headless body falling with me into the abyss
I would like one night, and another, maybe a week, to have made a choice,
or at least to think it was free until retroactively written into the script.

An elegant script,
serifs feel personal,
classic choice
and no burden
for printing. The abyss:
ink-stained bedspread.

It need not be ascetic, a life of perpetual answers. Perfectly tucked bedspread
(bed always made) it says so right there on page 87. Did you forget you script
today? We have rehearsal then filming. Today, you’ll be skydiving in the abyss.
Yes, it’s underwater. Technicalities. You really shouldn’t take this so personal,
it’s a dangerous scene and due to contracts enduring safety is no burden.
The stuntman contracted to fill your life is already on the way. Good choice-

Acceptance. Choice
of quilt or bedspread.
Never a burden,
accept the script.
Alone, it’s personal,
our own abyss.

Beside you under the bedspread, at the bottom of the abyss.
Pages of the script torn to make room for one meager choice:
one hefty, but gladly carried burden, accepting you is personal.

---

For next week, Christine has given us a novel prompt. Sounds like we should expect some interesting poems next week.

I’m feelin’ that.  And, in a moment of dark irony, that was spoken by the woman who is the proximate cause for the desire to wallow.

While I was driving to Iowa City for my Poetry Writing class, I thought of a road sign that would have been a good base for a poem, but then I forgot all about it, so this week, I’ve got nothing.  But go over to TOP and check out the poems based on road signs over there.

And it wasn’t until I finished the sentence that it occured to me the post title could be interpreted as a Highlander reference. It isn’t. No, Jack put together a good post:15 Resources for Wannabe Poets.  And I only wanted to mention it was a good post and that it gathered quite a bit all at one place.  The end.