This is a poem that started last night as free-association writing, a.k.a. stream-of-consciousness, whatever-pops-in-your-head-first writing. October 2 a.m. is a productive time to be thinking about summer. So what else can I say about this poem? It's a rough draft and I can credit the repetition to inspiration from someone in my poetry class. I like how it ended in a strange kind of love poem.
I've been using the image of birds a lot since I saw this very large flock pick up and fly off a branch somewhere near St. John's, MI, when I was in my car. I probably should have been watching the road instead of the world around me. But that's what poets do, Officer.
A Funny Logic
Summer made you drip
like a leaf on a tree
like a leaf on a tree
Your body has to run inside these colors.
It has to exhale
flocks of sparrows
from a bough
that ripples
Sand in my hands
cupped like the bowl
of your hips.
You chose me.
You chose me
to jump with
and hold your breath
like a leaf on a tree.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
I've Dreamt of This Day Since I Was Twelve
“You gave me your finger?”
I asked you.
“It’s a gift,” you told me.
“You can keep it.”
I thought of Van Gogh and that
infamous earlobe he
gave an unimpressed whore.
What was her name again?
I looked at your bloody bandage
where the left pointer used to join your hand.
The tiny box in my palm, the finger felt
heavy and surprisingly solid
like a piece of cold lead pipe.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“Well,” you replied, “you could eat it. Love is like that.”
I wondered if Van Gogh was ever called a starving artist.
I asked you.
“It’s a gift,” you told me.
“You can keep it.”
I thought of Van Gogh and that
infamous earlobe he
gave an unimpressed whore.
What was her name again?
I looked at your bloody bandage
where the left pointer used to join your hand.
The tiny box in my palm, the finger felt
heavy and surprisingly solid
like a piece of cold lead pipe.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“Well,” you replied, “you could eat it. Love is like that.”
I wondered if Van Gogh was ever called a starving artist.
Spinning Plates
Spinning Plates
After Michael Ferris Jr.’s “Nora”
Nora, your hair grown
long, gilding your hip
with gold and rose quartz.
You plait it around your head
like a crown to helmet the
coiled scrolls
radiating from your skull.
Nora, your body streams graffiti,
skin white and blue and green.
The sea
rolling and rippling –
live like wires.
Nora, your skin bottle glass greens,
targets circle your cheek
as if rippling the grass waves
of vibrating,
windblown
Stonehenge –
A hexagon, a halo
held within such a familiar geometry.
Nora, your face possesses
a symmetry
supported by a line-drawn
scaffold as if you alone can build the sky.
From left to right, Nora,
you follow the sun
revolving around you
like a dizzy, dizzy spell.
After Michael Ferris Jr.’s “Nora”
Nora, your hair grown
long, gilding your hip
with gold and rose quartz.
You plait it around your head
like a crown to helmet the
coiled scrolls
radiating from your skull.
Nora, your body streams graffiti,
skin white and blue and green.
The sea
rolling and rippling –
live like wires.
Nora, your skin bottle glass greens,
targets circle your cheek
as if rippling the grass waves
of vibrating,
windblown
Stonehenge –
A hexagon, a halo
held within such a familiar geometry.
Nora, your face possesses
a symmetry
supported by a line-drawn
scaffold as if you alone can build the sky.
From left to right, Nora,
you follow the sun
revolving around you
like a dizzy, dizzy spell.
The Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi
“If a builder build a house for someone and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” –Law 229
My father roofed houses one summer.
Under the sun I baked mud pies in and warmed
washtubs for makeshift swimming pools,
his arms and neck bubbled and burned
deep brown, as dark as the cracked shingles
he pried loose and flipped to the ground,
his hands toughening to the grain
of the new bundles of sixteen hogtied rectangles.
I visited him once that summer with my mom.
He was working on top of a new house with no people in it yet,
crawling on hands and knees, an apron ripe with tinkling nails
hugging his hips. The sun came from behind
him so I squinted at the light flashing through his hair,
still thick and brown, the same brown
as mine, beaming red-gold in the sun, glowing like a halo,
like a reminder that autumn is coming.
I circled a sapling tree while my parents talked,
my mother blocking the sun with her hand.
This day my dad wears a mustache,
the final hot weeks before he shaves it for good,
like a costume in my memories
of watching Bobby’s World together on the brown living room carpet
in that cigarette-burned floral comforter
and playing Skyshark on the Nintendo.
“Watch how it’s done,” he’d say, my brothers and I
leaning forward.
That summer my dad became a volunteer firefighter,
which meant a muttering radio and Dad putting on jeans
in the kitchen at bedtime, looking for his keys
while we jittered in pajamas like fawns.
It also meant the Fourth of July ended
summer. It ended in an ambulance racing
past fields of yellow knee-high corn
and a trip to the Green Bay hospital
where I drank gritty, vending machine hot chocolate
and I told my dad I loved him the only
time I remember.
A week later he came home
and could not stand without tipping,
strange angles working under his feet.
He sat in the blue living room chair,
his brown skin fading and the sun burning above our roof untended.
I would creep up to his bad side and stare,
cropping my breath and hanging it,
my eyes dry and exhausted before I left, knowing
he couldn’t see me.
I was tempting the gods.
Now, I’m thinking of Hammurabi’s Code,
laws thousands of years old.
The same sun browning the builder’s sweating skin
and baking his clay bricks,
the same joints and sockets
that eventually will collapse and crumble,
the same blind justice.
“If a builder build a house for someone and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” –Law 229
My father roofed houses one summer.
Under the sun I baked mud pies in and warmed
washtubs for makeshift swimming pools,
his arms and neck bubbled and burned
deep brown, as dark as the cracked shingles
he pried loose and flipped to the ground,
his hands toughening to the grain
of the new bundles of sixteen hogtied rectangles.
I visited him once that summer with my mom.
He was working on top of a new house with no people in it yet,
crawling on hands and knees, an apron ripe with tinkling nails
hugging his hips. The sun came from behind
him so I squinted at the light flashing through his hair,
still thick and brown, the same brown
as mine, beaming red-gold in the sun, glowing like a halo,
like a reminder that autumn is coming.
I circled a sapling tree while my parents talked,
my mother blocking the sun with her hand.
This day my dad wears a mustache,
the final hot weeks before he shaves it for good,
like a costume in my memories
of watching Bobby’s World together on the brown living room carpet
in that cigarette-burned floral comforter
and playing Skyshark on the Nintendo.
“Watch how it’s done,” he’d say, my brothers and I
leaning forward.
That summer my dad became a volunteer firefighter,
which meant a muttering radio and Dad putting on jeans
in the kitchen at bedtime, looking for his keys
while we jittered in pajamas like fawns.
It also meant the Fourth of July ended
summer. It ended in an ambulance racing
past fields of yellow knee-high corn
and a trip to the Green Bay hospital
where I drank gritty, vending machine hot chocolate
and I told my dad I loved him the only
time I remember.
A week later he came home
and could not stand without tipping,
strange angles working under his feet.
He sat in the blue living room chair,
his brown skin fading and the sun burning above our roof untended.
I would creep up to his bad side and stare,
cropping my breath and hanging it,
my eyes dry and exhausted before I left, knowing
he couldn’t see me.
I was tempting the gods.
Now, I’m thinking of Hammurabi’s Code,
laws thousands of years old.
The same sun browning the builder’s sweating skin
and baking his clay bricks,
the same joints and sockets
that eventually will collapse and crumble,
the same blind justice.
A Love Poem for Everyone (Sestina)
As the raindrops fell between us
like sand grains in an hourglass' waist
when it catches and stops, just right,
I thought I saw the first light
ever burned from the sun
that laid all the gears in motion.
Birds flocked in a commotion
like smoke above us,
our eyes turning on the sun,
our clothes hanging from our waists
like drapes. I felt the birds' breath lightly
stir the branches on my right.
When the black cloud was right
over our heads, their rolling motion
blocking the sun's light,
I whispered: it has chosen us.
Nothing is wasted
under the machine of our sun.
If forever rose with tomorrow's sun,
I would have no right
to tie down my waist
or dig my heels against the motion.
But it would be too soon for us.
I would be Dylan and rage against the dying of the light.
Time is too firm when I've lightly
walked and hardly touched the sun
on my skin and rain falling between us,
It isn't right.
We cannot stall its motion,
but I am buried, buried to the waist
in lists. Things to do. I say: grab my waist.
We are losing daylight.
We are drowning in commotion.
With our breath rising to the sun,
I saw the birds fly on my right.
I saw the earth turn for us.
Raindrops fell between us as you cupped my waist.
You held my hand when the light
of the sun fell for the first time through the oldest, blackest motion.
like sand grains in an hourglass' waist
when it catches and stops, just right,
I thought I saw the first light
ever burned from the sun
that laid all the gears in motion.
Birds flocked in a commotion
like smoke above us,
our eyes turning on the sun,
our clothes hanging from our waists
like drapes. I felt the birds' breath lightly
stir the branches on my right.
When the black cloud was right
over our heads, their rolling motion
blocking the sun's light,
I whispered: it has chosen us.
Nothing is wasted
under the machine of our sun.
If forever rose with tomorrow's sun,
I would have no right
to tie down my waist
or dig my heels against the motion.
But it would be too soon for us.
I would be Dylan and rage against the dying of the light.
Time is too firm when I've lightly
walked and hardly touched the sun
on my skin and rain falling between us,
It isn't right.
We cannot stall its motion,
but I am buried, buried to the waist
in lists. Things to do. I say: grab my waist.
We are losing daylight.
We are drowning in commotion.
With our breath rising to the sun,
I saw the birds fly on my right.
I saw the earth turn for us.
Raindrops fell between us as you cupped my waist.
You held my hand when the light
of the sun fell for the first time through the oldest, blackest motion.
September Falls in Mount Pleasant, Michigan (Revised)
The days lit orange, falling westward
across horizons, city streets
they never counted on passing by.
The leaves burnt so gold it stings
the eye, September cut and spilled
already when I wasn't watching.
I didn't notice green had bled
again, the soil cellar damp.
The summer fled millennia
ago – ages steeped and gone
in minutes, hours, underground.
My feet press on tiny graves.
A maple sheds away the dead,
while my veins are tied to bone.
For this you will outlive me.
As a reprieve, you drop a leaf
to my cheek where it falls
to kiss me and bless me before I die.
across horizons, city streets
they never counted on passing by.
The leaves burnt so gold it stings
the eye, September cut and spilled
already when I wasn't watching.
I didn't notice green had bled
again, the soil cellar damp.
The summer fled millennia
ago – ages steeped and gone
in minutes, hours, underground.
My feet press on tiny graves.
A maple sheds away the dead,
while my veins are tied to bone.
For this you will outlive me.
As a reprieve, you drop a leaf
to my cheek where it falls
to kiss me and bless me before I die.
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