fallen verses

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.

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.

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.

Fallen Verses: The Bilingual Post

The Fires of Granada

after Lorca

¿Quién te querría como yo,
si me cambrias el Corazón?

Oh Spanish dancer, it is the fires of the Bolero in your Andalusian eyes,
The furnaces of Toledo heating the stage and the sound of anvils:
Your feet slamming the oak boards in a flamenco dream.

¿Quién te querría como yo,
si me cambrias el Corazón?

Oh Spanish dancer, it is your sister beside you, as fair of face,
As much an inferno of the Spanish hillside in the bloody sunset.
How can any man, sitting in the audience, clap for only one of you?

No one would love you like me
if you’d only change my heart!

Oh Spanish dancers, flit your skirts on the guitar’s six airs.
Let them flit to me and sleep peacefully on my floor.
Only do this quietly, quietly, so it will not wake my wife.

***

The Spanish from “Three Portraits with Shading: Bacchus” from Songs, 1921-1924, translated by Alan S. Trueblood.

Three pieces

Sparkles

Your wedding ring doesn’t shine anymore.
The diamonds have no sparkle;
the white gold has yellowed.
These months in the box,
unseen.
Do you sparkle these days?
Shiny purse, shiny shoes,
honest smile for the clerk
and leaving.
Though cold, the world sparkles.
The moonlight on ice.
Or the sun.

The Polka Dot Witch tried to bewitch us all with a whole “three” thing (very Macbeth, that). It was a very good idea, and you can go here and read other peoples’ responses that are, probably, much, much better.

Villanelle for Yesterdays

You’re doing what all of us are doing, getting by.
A sad, disjunctive mess of wake-up, live, repeat.
Still the occasional tear at the corner of the eye.

Sometimes you stare out the window, at the blue sky
And wish it was grey. From the window seat
You’re doing what all of us are doing, getting by.

Every breath draws itself into a sigh.
Double-panes separate you from the heat.
Still, the occasional tear at the corner of the eye.

No easy answers out in the streets, that’s why,
When faced with the unanswerable, you retreat:
You’re doing what all of us are doing, getting by.

Possibility is just a dream until you try
And sometimes you walk away, holding defeat.
Still the occasional tear at the corner of the eye.

One day over, you have yet to die.
You’d turn away, but oblivion seems sweet.
You’re doing what all of us are doing, getting by,
Still the occasional tear at the corner of the eye.

This poem was a torment to write. It usually is the case, if I sit down with a goal in mind, I can’t write a damn thing. Certainly was today. With villanelles I have to start with a good refrain. I mean, both refrains need to be good, they’re repeated often enough, but I need a good one to start building rhymes and verses out of, and I had nothing. While the blank page was tormenting me, I was watching Weeds. In the first season, when Nancy goes out with Celia and Conrad to the club and meets Tusk, she says, “What am I doing” (I think, this was hours ago) and Tusk responds, “You’re doing what all of us are doing. You’re getting by.” And I thought that line might work out. I tweaked it a bit, and within an hour had 17 of the lines written. Seven hours and half a bottle of wine later, it’s finished. There was a very unhappy gap at the fifth stanza.

Note to self (and everyone who reads this): next poem must be free verse. Have to keep the cachet.

Totally Optional Animals

This week, Tiel suggested we write about animals. For the most part, I have no real interest in any animal but people, and precious few of those. So, here’s my totally optional poem about those totally optional animals. Other Totally Optional Artists have shared their poems here.

Hunting

if i should call you
the one that got away
it is as if i am calling you
a frightened doe in the woods
and as if i am calling me
a hunter with loincloth and spear

i hungered for the primal you
the sight of your flanks quivering
shivering in chill forest winds
your soft pelt spread-eagled
and ready to be warming

if i stalk you
from the downwind side
will you sense my presence
as always
your head darting
to the empty space i
will soon fill

my knife to never
again part
your flesh
you run
from
an
other
now

Food (of sorts)

Jillypoet left us this week with the instruction to “cook up a poem.” Prompt #2 at ReadWritePoem was to write about food. I may have stretched that idea a bit. If you’re interested in reading other poems about food, be sure to check out ReadWritePoem this week. Next week, we’ll be writing about pieces.

My Green Fairy

In memory, I can float you on the back of spoon.
The metaphor should be obvious,
I always loved you mixed with six parts water.
Flying to a fantasy land was not a hallucination,
not just. It was a whole reality like Neverland
but I couldn’t hear the crocodile ticking
until the alarm was going off.
I would have fenced all the guards of Venice for you
and I thought I got off light
when all you wanted was a sugar cube.
Trick was, the cube needed to sweeten you
is larger the known universe.
Not even my ego makes up the difference.
It’s a bitter swallow, failure, and proof the mix isn’t right.