fallen verses

I spent most of that night watching
the perfect half-circle of her lips
and feeling the slow rise and fall of untroubled sleep.

I woke while the shower was still running
and pictured the dark curve of hair
cascading across the small of her back
before it was vigorously towel-dried.

There was footsteps,
the sounds of doors and drawers
and the whisper of cloth against skin.
The zipper of a suitcase.

I kept to the imperfect artifice of a shallow breathing.
With my eyes closed I watched
as she stood in the doorway,
turned toward the bed-
her lips formed an unasked question,
and she waited for its answer.

In the silence-
which proved answer enough-
I chanced a deep breath
to capture the essence of her perfume
(the only thing that lingered).

If asked to describe it,
I could only say
that it smelled like twilight,
like the very last touch of pink
after the sun has set.

Ekphrasis

For my poetry workshop, we were supposed to write an ekphrastic piece. I knew the piece of art I wanted to write about, but I had some difficulties getting a good concept. After talking with my instructor a bit (and having to turn in the portfolio tomorrow), I wrote this:

On the Technique of George Seurat

It’s at the end of a long gallery. You can’t help but to stand in the doorway, just for a moment and look at Seurat’s masterpiece. It fills the entire wall at the far end. The time he must have put into it…
We stood, just like the thousands before us and the giggling teenage girls being quietly shuffled along by the art historian whose MA should qualify her for a job better than tour guide. We stood and looked over the parquet floors to see that little park in Paris.
The working-class man with his dog, the upwardly mobile strolling with parasols and gloved hands, strangers all, and inhabiting that moment together as they shared some purpose for being on that island.
(Seurat! What would your painting of this hall be? Would you catch the giggles of the girls or would prefer something less fleeting?)
We stood for our moment to take in the painting, stepped inside the gallery and sat on one of the benches. Ever the instructor, you told me about Seurat’s life, his influences, his technique. You suggest I take a closer look. I stand, look at you, expecting you to join me. A slight shake, “no.” My solitary footsteps, then, echo.
(Seurat! These frames lining the walls surrounding the work of your peers: would your keen eye see green in the shadowed recesses of their gilt scrollwork?)
I can’t see the whole thing as I near it…. I have to focus on smaller and smaller sections…. and Bernadette Peters really does look like this woman in the front…
Sunday in the park with…
The people start to get fuzzy, not blurry, their edges bleed into the trees and the trees into them…
Sunday in the park with…
“He used a technique we call pointillism. Instead of fields of color, the entire image is composed of dots of discrete colors. At a distance, they eye blends the dots together and you see the colors as if they were unified.”
Sunday in the park with…
Your voice blends into the moment in my mind and I see the dots: blues reds pinks even yellow in the dress… bright dots of spotlights… (Seurat! Seurat! How did you see all these colors? How close to the dress and the tree did you have to stand?) the small dots of atoms I will never see and the large dots of stars and the distance is dots of nothingness and your face, half shadowed above the bench in the distance…
On the interstate that night, you’re asleep in the passenger seat. As the headlights of oncoming traffic flit past, I see your face lit for just a moment. Ahead, the intermittent red of taillights.

I wrote the piece below for my workshop class and is a “found” poem by the criteria the instructor set forth. Because of the formatting, I had to post it as an image, which I set so you could click it and see the full image which is slightly larger than the one below.

I haven’t been posting much anything here for a while. This semester at school has kinda killed any creativity I might have thought I had at some point. Like it or not, most of my writing is brought on by reading. Specifically, reading things I enjoy. Haven’t done that in a while. Modernist texts- blech. Marxist, feminist texts- blech. Reading with theory in mind- blech. I hope today finds everyone in teh intarblogwebs well and not stuck in the tubes. I have had to write some terrible pieces for my poetry workshop class, I may post those at some point so you can /point and /laugh at them. For today’s amusement, a short poem I wrote during my poetry workshop class while I wasn’t paying any attention to the nice grad student who teaches it. Sorry.

(Fragment)

Torn foil and cork still on the screw-
One bottle- one glass-
the dissipating residue of sweet German grapes

Down a short hallway a muffled figure in a bed that has only one pillow.

Read Write Resolve

resolutions

resolutions
to resolve
to re-solve
to solve again

translation:
the awareness
born of champagne
that we will always
make the same mistakes

Images seem really hard right now. As does quality. So, just because this is not stellar, don’t think the rest of the poets at Read Write Poem aren’t writing stellar poems. Some of them are, actually, talented. Go, read their poems about resolutions. Have some champagne, you know, that bottle still in your fridge.

A New Year’s Sonnet
or
A sonnet in which the poet ponders writing the suddenly changed date of the new year.

For the next few weeks, upon occasion,
I will forget and believe it is last
January again. Then, scratch of pen,
The mistake corrected, proper order
Restored. But what is this renumbering?
Has one day so changed it deserves a new
Name, unique from the one before? Snowfall
Today new snow, each kiss claimed from fresh lips?
The lips of last year were pleasant enough
For a midnight kiss. The days ripped from the
Wall and scattered like the snow-buried leaves
Of every autumn, marking that midnight
Just a little farther away. Might want
To check that date, this isn’t last year. No….

You may, if you paid any attention, have noticed the lack of silly things like rhyme and meter. Yeeeaaahhh…. …. I decided not to hold myself too strictly to traditional rules for Sonnets. Poetic forms change over time, change their formal elements, change their cognitive elements, change according to new languages and cultures as they spread. I don’t think we live in the same culture and use the same language such fascinating writers as Shakespeare. Ergo, keeping to the same strictures they wrote under is somewhat silly. They had no problem adapting forms and language to suiting their needs. From the Italian, the English chose to write in iambic pentameter instead of hendecasyllables. They opted to use a different rhyme structure to accommodate the relatively rhyme-poor English. They changed the themes of the sonnet from Petrarch’s love besotted obsession to a more general use. Eliminating the volta in favor of a rhetorical couplet.

I opted to eliminate the rhyme. I don’t care much for rhyme. I removed the metrical nature of the sonnet. I used a decasyllabic form because that fits natural language better (IMO) than iambs. I returned to the Italian octave / sestet division. My sonnet pays homage to some aspects of the history of the form, but is unafraid to stand on its own formal, slouchy, untied-shoe feet. And that’s just how it’s gonna be.

snow snow blowers snow
covered cars snow shovel
one body holding it

Now, go over to Watermark and read more and better haiku.

She’s a good witch!

And, perhaps unfortunately, I don’t recall enough of the Wizard of Oz to be really clever about that, so, please, pardon the inane cliche. Carolee and I were playing catch-up with this week’s Read Write Poem prompt, provided by Ceridwen, to work on a collaborative piece. It was an enjoyable experience and a tad bit tricky working with someone else’s ideas, but that also helped the poem open up in directions I wouldn’t have gone. (an aside: i hate the word “collaborate” and the derivative words. It does not have pleasant feel when speaking it, or when typing it.) Other people have collaborated and posted their poems over at Read Write Poem already, so check them out if you wandered here from elsewhere, and be sure to check Carolee’s site for her thoughts on this. This is the Carolee and Tom poem:

Expect Longing

Countdown counted out suddenly
face to face with tomorrow
drunk on imported champagne,
I look to you for a midnight kiss.

For a kiss, I ask, for lips
around this open wound, a tongue
to lap away my worry-words.
This new day tell me, tell me….

Tell me of tomorrow’s failures:
the resolutions forgotten,
the weight that will wait
to be taken from suntanned flesh,

the light I’ll waste with longing,
nights paced away in planning
as if lists and flowcharts led
anywhere but the bottom of the page.

For tonight, I’ll map my designs,
roll smooth, crisp blueprints into tubes,
wonder tomorrow how to stop the ink
from draining through these purple veins.

What mouth will meet these lips
blue with the residue of faded ideas?
What tongue will taste this mouth
rank with discarded promises?

You kiss me slowly then press your cheek
against mine. I look past your shoulder
at the other revelers, still holding
each others’ tongues and I am jealous.

During the process, Carolee suggested we each take the poem we wrote and use it as the base text for a “found poem” exercise. I took… well, most, of the words from the poem, played a little with capitalization and punctuation and have the following “gem” (ironic quotes here) for you all:

Residual Expectations

Down- sudden.
Tomorrow drunk
and a midnight kiss.

I ask for lips,
a tongue
to lap my
new day.

Tell me…
tell me…
tell me of tomorrow:
the resolutions,
the wait for flesh,

the light,
the longing,
the nights.

Tonight-
smooth.
Wonder.
Don’t stop the ink
from draining
through these
purple veins.

Meet the lips
with the
residue of ideas.
Taste the mouth
with promises.

Kiss me.
Slow.
Look past,
revel,
hold each other
and I am.

Very indirectly inspired by Duchamp

Analogue: Hatshepsut

exactingly carved replica
porphyry
encased in glass
title plaque: Beloved
no jewels
no paint
no cuts of lace
no clasping bodice
simple straight-leg pants
buttoned shirt
low heels
eyes as
dead in stone

More, I suppose, about dreams and the deaths thereof.

For L.

I wanted to write a poem about you, perhaps
a sonnet in the mode of Petrarch, but the words
were inexplicably distant. I thought, for a moment,
that I was not able to write, that I was out of verses,
but then I wrote a haiku about the last red berry
seen through my window stark against the field of snow.

I wonder if Petrarch ever had this problem,
or if his inkwell poured the name Laura onto the page,
leaving him to collect the sheets and sign them.
The truth, I suppose, that it was one afternoon
and we barely spoke, has not deterred poets before,
but the words are so far away, and the berry right here.