Tangled Rope

This narrative poem, sent to me via an e-mail, deserves attention and dissemination.

Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake

Nick Lantz, We Don't Know We Don't Know.  Graywolf Press, 2010.

It is for certain knowne that they have died
for very anger and griefe that they could not
learn to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder


When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

 Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not—
the doctor assures you—that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Poem in my pocket is printed manuscript copy of Whitman’s “Live Oak, with Moss”:

Wherein the image of towing the safe is meant to be homage. And what the hell: “V”, just because.

Love-Letter Number One

While you watch TV and cross-stitch, quite alone,
I sit to write my first love-letter.
All sharpeners gone, I use my teeth until the pencil's center bleeds.
The paper ends up mottled from my wet strokes,
the pencil soaked and flaccid from my sucking.
I find no stamps in my drawer, just
the Walther pistol you left loaded, safety off,
find an extra cartridge on the floor, just in case.
I place the letter in the iron safe from which our cat escapes
and tow it with tied bed sheets down the hall.

You've gone to bed; you're fast asleep.
So instead I fill your work shoes with the petals of spring blossoms.
Not knowing these are beds for apple worms;
you squish them in the morning as you walk to work.
The old janitor grins his three teeth as he washes your feet
his course hands dipping your toes in his battered mop bucket
water seeps out from under the custodial closet's closed door.

From the cubicles down the hall, typing resounds a dance club hit
causing the windows to vibrate, threatening our poodle-shaved cat
who dangers the ledges, nine floors up.
Realizing his escape from the apartment
I've followed you to work, careful not to be seen,
embarrassed when I realize that you've realized the worms;
I take the elevator while you take the stairs
hoping to beat you up.

Inside I'm held in a velvet bear trap.
Strangers in suits tip-toe to spit on my scalp.
As each leaves on each floor I calculate how long,
in this humidity,
until my hair is dry.

"Going down," the bellman says.
Half-way down I "Open Doors",
I chalk a line upon the wooden wall.
Half-way again, half-way again,
until the chalk disintegrates, and then
until my fingernails are ground away.
We reach the basement where the bellman sets me free.
The warm wet stink of peeled bananas, molding plums, spoilt meat,
and residue of oily cheese, ocean sea, hair spray, and hand cream
make treacherous my walk across the concrete laminate floor;
I tip-toe in my socks, sticking to avoid a fall,
leaving a trail of cotton threading as I go.

The basement stairs lead to a hotel lobby, walls lined
with kinetoscopes, the antique kinds we'd romanticized.
I find you there, too,
checking-in with a taller man
whose felt fedora hides his face.
He sets his forearms on the desk,
and I watch you stroke his under elbows from behind.
Thus you lead him from the desk clerk to the elevator hall,
while he threads the room key through his fingers
fast and faster.
I hope he'll rub the metallic strip away,
but instead it flashes light in each flipping pass,
blinding me like waves on the noon-time sea.
The smell of brine, the roll, the pitch of the ship
is all too much: I flee,
balancing a fragile line upon the baseboards
back to my bed, my abandoned room.

All night I roll in my sheets,
I wake to find myself bound in knots,
that you had returned during the night.
For I had written the one thing I must do,
the one thing I can't know, but know must do,
on Post-It® notes, leaving one in each room.
But each has been erased, or
in the case of ink, embroidered over.
Each of these is signed
with your crimson fingerprint--a testament to your will
and the prophesied apostasy of thimbles. 

I'll write that one thing down once more,
eventually, when it falls by,
as a letter to myself, stamped, sealed, and sent
safe until tomorrow's mail arrives.
The first day it comes I see I've addressed it to you,
so I write, "RTS - NOT AT THIS ADDRESS" on the envelope,
and, again, again, at an angle, erect
the carmine mailbox flag.

My poor attempt to follow Chris’s very interesting Venus poem with images centers on Artemis. Immediate reflection tells me I want this briefer, more elegant.

In the moon, in the night
you bathe, palming pool water
into streams upon your skin.
It glistens like stars,
traces constellations on your back--
a map of the impotent,
failed suitors caught
between shadows of your shoulders.


Diana Palace of Caserta

The sheen of your silver hair
wanes as you turn toward me.
Cut close it shows more skin, more neck,
the angles of your frame,
the bulb of your pale breast
draws me to the open
where, naked, I quake in the midnight air,
shaking like a hound before its master
falsely, feebly held together
like the water in your cupped hands
I break upon the pounded shore.


Modesty, Metropolitan Museum of Art


The pink I thought I saw
blossom on your milky cheeks--
was it coyness or rage?
Your eyes, black as a bear's,
tear a path to the mouth of the creek bed
show their black unto your silver bow,
your endless quiver
from which you slide a single shaft.
Fingering it's notch
you draw it back.


Diana of the Tower, Augustus Saint-Gaudens


You who give
but won't receive, release
the string, send
the straight and stinging arrow
into me.
Its piercing cancels any chance to catch my breath;
I moan, I twitch, I shudder,
emptying for death.


The Archer, Johann Philipp Ferdinand  c1930

Prone on my back in the understory,
trees and night sky above,
now all is still:
obsessive lust,
doomed desire,
absurd attachment,
burdened brotherhood
all are falling free.
I wait for my heart to beat,
for my lungs to heave,
for you but once to find,
to stand over me.


Diana, Jean-Antoine Houdon c1790


Forced to it, I must admit
I am your enemy
a predator of liberty, of celibacy;
at last, at least your prey.
Standing over me
your short hair lets slip
a drop of its potency,
spattering warm on my dying lips,
a liqueur of your triumph--
no bacchanalian fete with wine-soaked tresses,
but quiet, wild, and solitary.



Do you watch? Or do you merely pass?
I strain to gasp, to say, to wish,
Unmastered idol, virgin of self-mastery,
beware, for others soon will come,
beware, the banshee's ardent call,
beware, the hermit's friend-lorn letter,
beware, the promised rest, the earned calm,
beware, and never let your hair grow long!

Part II of this poem “Guide” is ottava rima:

II

My muscles locked, my lungs devoid of air,
I struggle to my knees, do all I can
to grapple with my guide's chimeric stare.
Though fierce, its eyes suggest an honest man's;
despite its tarnished scales, its clotted hair,
the fecal stench its winged panting fans,
I realize that here is native brawn
so, answering its crouching, I climb on.

Note: I felt a bad taste in my mouth as I finished this, so sour was its working. Well, it’s effort, it’s practice.

Part I is in “rime royal”.

I

As I survey the memories of my world
I'm lifted by a certainty of love,
for who deserves to have these veils unfurled?
Who has earned this coming guide? this dove
whose thundering wings blow tumult from above?
All fear now fails! And all my thoughts are drowned;
disarmed, dismayed I stumble to the ground.

Here’s another skate poem–one of the first skater sketches that I’ve tried–that I really want to come back to and “fix”: make elegant, make meaningful, whatever. As it is it barely describes the skater that I hoped to illustrate, but I can’t hang on to it right now.

Total Commitment

This black guy with earphones in,
waits,
watches over the local kids
whites, hispanics,
riding, some catching trucks up on the lips
and stumbling down
some scooping up and over spines,
one little hoard flips their boards,
lets them skid out of control
or, landing chicken-footed,
proves that each knows how to curse

Then he moves,
drags his board by the nose,
steps on, speeds along the platform,
ollies big
off the lip of the quarter-pipe
doesn't flip the board,
doesn't turn, or twist, or spin
just seven feet of air
bombing down onto the flat

and his board spins out from under
and his body splays and slides

He rises up, climbs the trans
rides again, ollies big
falling hard, without a word
just the pound of his torso on the ground

the kids turn as they see kids turn
some have stopped to watch him mount the wall
he goes again,
same start, same drag,
same solitary ollie off the lip
and as he hangs, brutal in the air,
I see it in his face:
he's here alone;
he'll rise again;
it doesn't matter how he lands.

I’m set on the idea of poems about skating; though I personally don’t have the skill yet to make it work, I like to try. Here’s one of three I wrote this weekend after some back-to-back trips to the Orem and Logan parks.

Raising My Generation

This guy with surfer hair,
my age, maybe just a little less,
old enough to fear
the pain, young enough to let that pass,

kicks off fierce, rolls right in,
almost soaring
over the fat, rusted coping
floating down to the transition,
which entices to the flat

there he pushes twice or thrice,
lifts his knee for extra speed,
drops down to the lower bowl:
a rushing waterfall
that slings around the wall
and launches up and over the hip,

I gawk at how he tucks a little grab
to show he meant it
now he pops above the lip,
lands, board in hand,
nods at me
to go.

Ben Hurst makes some good, if somewhat elementary, points in today’s post on the practice of editing and revising poetry: Revision, or The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Comparing poets to painters, Hurst writes:

Painters find a way to move across their ideas as these ideas move beneath them, shifting with their own changing inspiration combined with their constant precision.

Another poem worked out faster than I’m comfortable doing, motivated by the fact that last time I did Napowrimo I didn’t think so much, fuss so much, revise so much, but simply made the daily deadlines. At least in posting early drafts I’m more motivated to return to them quickly to edit.

Collect

I hunt along the sidewalk
for buttons worn off with use
collecting for a child's necklace
or to sew on a friend's jacket
but no one wears their clothes that long

I check for coins in every pay phone slot
saving for a dollar
but every booth is now an empty husk
their phones have flown away to hide in pockets

I search for scraps of literature
a hundred years old or more
but all the copyrights have been revived

I leave the city, looking for a mountain trail
but all the trails I used to know
are orphaned, overgrown
despite my striving quickly am I lost

I sit in a cafe, order tea to stay
but they have only paper cups.
   At this, at last, I protest
going home I promise
to never wash my coffee mug
so it, at least, will, over years,
layer on sediment and finally be full
a record of this living