Watermark

Dog & Cat

 

Run! says the dog.
Run! Run! Run!
Bark woof grrr!

No! says the cat.
No! No! No!
Hiss spit rrrllll!

I'll eat you!
says the dog.
I'll have you for lunch!

Claws! Teeth!
says the cat.
I'll bloody your nose!

You look tasty,
says the dog.
Yum yum yum!

I'm muscle and bone,
says the cat.
And claws claws CLAWS!

OK, I'm bored now,
says the dog.
Woof?

Me, too,
says the cat.
Mrrrrl?

Wanna take a nap?
asks the dog.
Sniff sniff sniff.

Sure, give me your
belly, says the cat.
Currll purrr purrr.

 

  This week's prompt was to write a humorous poem.

Haircut

 

The Braid

Its weight unfelt
until absent, the
braid lies on
the hair dresser's
table. No tears
in my chair,
she said, and
there were none.
In the Twenties,
this was scandalous,
women cutting off
their hair. What's
left is grey.
Today women cut
their hair when
the divorce is
final, or when
he leaves. In
rage, or mourning,
or relief, they
take the scissors
to their own
heads; or, light-
headed, they step
out of salons,
new women. The
hair dresser sweeps
the floor, packs
away the braid
for the wig-
makers. Left behind,
a foot or
two of plaited
history. We shake
our heads, remember
that forgotten gesture,
pushing bangs from
the eyes,
running
our own
fingers
through
our own
short
fresh
curls.

read write prompt #36: ekphrastic extravaganza

fibonacci, by Rick Mobbs

[not a] Fib

You
live
in a
shell, a nautilus
shell, a miraculous pearly husk.

You
live
in the
shell with a
light. The light is alive,

it
shimmers
in the
iridescent glow inside
the shell. The shell curves

in
a
marvelous spiral.
These are your
chambers. You live in light.

 

This week's prompt was ekphrastic extravaganza. Here is Christine's article on ekphrastic poetry. Here is a Wikipedia article on fibonacci poetry, which this actually isn't; I counted words instead of syllables.

Revised 24 July: changed the pronoun from she to you.

Spike

 

One Baccarat glass candle holder, found at a yard sale. One antique plate. Several lesser items.

Thousands of dollars in food, litter, vaccines, and, lately, veterinarians.

Your glee at being released from the cage, your home for the first four months of your life.

Your circus acts on the stair banister.

The embarrassment of watching you hump your teddy bear in front of company.

Nights disturbed by piercing yowls.

(The male vet: He's neutered, not dead.)

Countless cleanings of your upchucks from floors, rugs, upholstered furniture.

You frightened my housemates, intimidated my friends, discouraged the vet, persecuted the dogs.

So demanding, so oblivious to the wants of others.

Sending Maxine to the emergency room with a bitten, swelling hand. But still she loved you.

Full of teeth and growls and purrs and insistent demands for affection.

Staking out Abigail as yours, only yours, and defending your territory with deep-in-the-throat warnings.

Your fondness for women, your passion for men.

Stalking the contractors during renovation, earning the title: The Inspector.

 

 

 

Plush, handsome, fearless, huge orange cat, you've become a thin hank of scruffy fur.

For weeks, you wanted me to hold you, just hold you still against my breasts. Now, you want not even that.

You're hungry, but you will not eat. You vanish in the pillows.

For you, it's time.

You bully, you inconstant friend, you gorgeous, fierce and lovely cat.

For me, time comes too soon, too slow, too sudden. Not yet, I say. Not just yet.

I see you bend, stiff, around your pain. Jumping becomes more and more difficult.

Soon.

Tomorrow.

UPDATE Friday 25 July: Spike and I are still in denial. With the vet's approval, we are giving each other a few more days. I do realize this is a temporary postponement.

He has rallied somewhat, is eating (drinking) evaporated milk and chicken broth. He is purring again. He is asking for my lap again.

And he has it.

Poetry, Personality & Design

 

We've been having some interesting discussions about poems, poetry, and poetics on the PoetryEtc list -- some of it focused around my own recent work. Frederick Pollack offered some thorough and pointed criticism of my poems -- and my 'kind' of poetry. 

What is my kind of poetry? Mainstream, I gather. Lyrical, perhaps. Not, certainly, his favorite sort.

While I'm unlikely to change the kind of poetry I write, Frederick's critiques and perspective are being very helpful. I find myself thinking, for the first time in too long, about what I'm doing, and why; how I do it, and to what end. I've been lazy lately. The poems have come too easily, and I've posted them too quickly.

I read poems, and I read books about writing poems; but I don't often read, or think much about, criticism or theory. Perhaps, twenty years in, it's past time.

Frederick's advice:

Two tips: 1. Distinguish between your genuinely subjective experience and your narrowly autobiographical experience.  The former is what counts.  As I said before, neither "I" nor "you" (nor parents, siblings, Aunt Tilly etc.) are at all important in themselves; only as functions of a poem and how it engineers its reader's experience. 2: Realize that a narrative, a story, is a metaphor.  In a narrative poem, the guiding incident is the poem's metaphor.  (Stylistically, therefore, there should be as few other metaphors as possible.)

While the first point is familiar to me, the second brought me up short. Not regarding narrative poetry, which I seldom attempt, but regarding what I do write. I thought about how image-heavy my poems tend to be. Then I looked around the room.

My house is just the same. Every wall is covered with art. Every room, even the bathrooms, the kitchen, the closet/ dressing room. Tables and shelves are covered with books, magazines, artifacts. There are goldfish in the garden, parakeets in the sunroom, a small aquarium in the living room, and cats and dogs wherever they please. Everywhere, memories, totems, collections. Also dust, dishes, and pet hair.

I conclude that my house, and my poems, reflect my mind: cluttered, personal, eclectic. Dusty. And I wonder -- have you noticed such correlations in your own writing? Do your poems look like your house, minimal and modern, or traditional, or Bohemian, or . . . ?  Would an attempt to change the style of your writing be like an attempt to change the style of your rooms? And would that be easily done, or not?

I love my house, and don't plan to change it. But you might expect to see some experimentation here.

Thunder Moon | Revision

 

   

It woke me at midnight. It touches
everything, the photographs
on the far wall, the chair
that rocked me

on my grandmother's lap, this bed
in its summer whites. It's quiet,
stealthy. If I sit still
long enough,

I can see it move. But the light
in this room does not move.
This light is a thin dry mist,
it silvers

the dog's paws, twitching
with dreams. The moon
dreams, too. It dreams
of rain.

The moon is bruised with time.
It conjures bolts of fire, it sets
the mountains aflame.
Lightning, this moon.

Yes. Lightning.

   

6/20: Again, the original is below the cut, for those interested in the process.

July 12, 02008 -- REVISED

   

It's a dark night,
a slight moon.

The scar remains,
pale silent stitches

from wrist past elbow.
She held herself

together. She healed.
They used a saw

to remove the cast.
It screamed.

She wakes in the breeze
of the ceiling fan,

sinks into deep
mattresses; the sweetness

of strawberries; tart lemon cake;
the full scent of grass, just mowed,

lying down on its own fresh self;
the soft underwater feel of a tree-

shaded room. Even the taste
of mountain fires,

smoke in her mouth.
Even that pleases her.

  

16 July: This poem has been significantly revised, with suggestions and guidance from Cindy and the PoetryEtc poets. It has reminded me what I mean to be doing here. I will write more about this later.

For those interested in the revision process, I'll post a few versions below the cut.

Fire

09 July 02008, Missoula, Montana, USA

Mount Sentinel is on fire,
and the Constitution is burning,
ignited by leftover Independence
Day fireworks and fear-brand patriotism.

One white helicopter dips water
from the Clark Fork, carries it to the line
of orange flame. People stand on the river trail,
commiserating with one another. Our crews are thin,

sent to fight fires in Big Sur;
our Reserves are in Iraq. Red firetrucks
wait at the bottom of the mountain. Deer leap
into the gorge, then walk calmly into town. Smoke

furls down into the saddle, down
into the valley. The line crawls higher,
one line of flame meets another, a long curved
gesture of fire, grass that seemed green and strong

burning, burning. The Fourth
Amendment is smoking, curling into
ash. As the sky darkens and the mountain
grows brighter, we retreat. We stand at the windows

of our wood houses, watching
the flames climb up, climb down
the mountain. We are mere citizens, civilians;
the fire is near, but far enough, and we leave it

to the professionals. Finally,
we go to the private, inviolate embrace
of our own beds, almost secure, almost believing
that our castles are safe, that the fires won't reach us.

July 4th

[This poem's lines are too long for the column, so I've posted it as an image. You will find the text, with broken lines, below the cut.]

Snapshot Poem 02 July 02008

Where I used to live, light
will be embracing this day
all the way around. Here,
where I live now, light
is shorter, night longer,
days waver less noticeably.

Again and again I dream
of moving. Places strange
and familiar; neighbors
oddly unknown. Today
one of the young squirrels
took bread from the feeder

and came to sit at arms-
length in the tree above me.
She turned and turned
the food in her tiny hands,
scattering crumbs, then
stretched out flat and cool

on the wide branch. I don't know
why she joins me here, morning
after morning. I see a pale bread-
crumb traveling across the stones,
and imagine the strong-backed ant,
bearing the weight, carrying the light.

This week's prompt is light.