Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. My apologies, peeps. Some news:

• The first entry for Back to the Future features my interview with Wendy Babiak, the author of Conspiracy of Leaves (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s). Don’t midd the rest of the week, too.
• My “Kroger Koan” appeared last week in Four and Twenty: Short Form Poetry (Volume 3, Issue 7, p.15).
• Four of the poems I wrote during NaPoWriMo got picked up by Stride Magazine: Rabbits on the whole are reluctant to read poetry.
• microcosms has published several of my scifaiku: 1, 2, 3 & 4.
• Third Wednesday published my “Terzanelle for Dominion Beach” (Volume 2, Issue 2, Spring 2010, p. 21).
• Strange Horizons has accepted my poem “Improving on Nature.” I’ll let y’all know when it goes up.

Wendy Wisner’s poems this week at No Tell Motel.

I’ve spent the bulk of my waking hours this week reading about domestic violence. Browsing Wisner’s recent blog entries was a nice moment-thread of counterpoint.

One of travel’s many perks (up there with drunken coworkers and blizzards) is that the notebook sits beside the bed and so I miss the dateline but can scribble easily something that may turn poem. Draft begins:

Better to praise Demeter
for when the horsemen cut you down
as farmers turn their stalks to food
your harvest will have joy
…

Nothing new for the L sequence, nothing stand alone, the great quote I
misheard from Thoreau notwithstanding. Colorado makes better drivel than this but here it is anyway.

The stars my only respite
reserving judgement
flirting behind haze
constant in the houses
to which I am always welcome
horizon to horizon
empty of the heat
of my aching heart.

What kind of ending line is that? Useless prepositional phrase, not even a decent Simic.

Another start of a poem for the Laieikawai sequence. I wish I could put more order to it but life is not allowing that; I feel accomplished just for getting something workable on paper, if incomplete. And it will be easier to make them all better if I have a them to begin with, yes?

At dusk their skin’s the same
color as mine. Ten minute shower
rolls in: Grandma and I sing
the water down, the swell and surge
…

Wikipedia has let me down again, nothing I can link to about electrical sneak paths, which inspired a fairly decent lyric rough draft just now. It just needs an ending, one more solid.

Excerpt:

My future
does not cut cross-grain,
up-river, or against the wind:
I flood the die and solder self
to self.

Perhaps if I were clever I would have revised last night’s tattoos but I have decided I could get nearly 10 new things drafted if I made myself keep looking forward. That’s a lot of Laieikawai retelling. So, first draft of “The Octopus Miracle”. No darlings to share yet, but I have learned that these poems may be alliteration-heavy and alternate first and third person. So. That’s two for two.

I have Imbolc as my excuse: time of the year I traditionally try to emphasize my creativity. I have Job 2 travel to awaken the sleeper, as Paul’s father would say.

In the end, it is Robert Fisk that ignites the spark: (page 174) “At least 40 of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognizable.”

It isn’t done, it isn’t nearly urgent enough and I can’t (yet) get the meter at the ending to work out. But the beginning haunts me.

I'm out of skin.
The black felt marker
from the torturer
is wet with words
unwritten
...

Because today ripened and bloom autumnal chill, and because it is September 11th and I cannot help but think of war, although I do not wish to, I turn to Nancy Willard’s poem “Night Light”.

This poem appeared in her book Household Tales of Moon and Water. When I was privileged to hear Willard read at the West Chester Poetry Conference a few years ago I forgot to bring along my copy. Instead, I brought her (then) new book up and explained that I had intended to have her sign Household Tales; she generously inscribed her new book thus:

This poem is in quatrains, except for the exceptional ending; I return to it for the repetition and for the thoughts, not the least of which is “its one trick: / it turns into a banana.”

Night Light

The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
Made in Japan.

Whey-faced, doll-faced,
it’s closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead are cold
till I touch the switch.

Then the moon performs
its one trick:
it turns into a banana.
It warms to its subjects,

it draws us into its light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerk

in the store that sold
everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissue

and laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say Moon.
It said This side up.
I tucked my moon into my basket

and bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the
moon under my sack of apples,

moon under slab of salmon,
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread its brother,

moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.

My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.

It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.

I am in a mood for Judith Wright poetry, to rail against the world and still find beauty. And the full moon tonight stops me turning pages at:

Old Woman’s Song

The moon drained white by day
lifts from the hill
where the old pear-tree, fallen in storm,
puts out some blossom still.

Women believe in the moon.
This branch I hold
is not more white and still than she
whose flower is ages old;

and so I carry home
this branch of pear
that makes such obstinate tokens still
of fruit it cannot bear.

Wright’s poem is in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of ABCB, meaning that the second and fourth lines rhyme and the first and third have no relation to each other or to the even-numbered lines. I’d identify this piece as “heterometrical” because I think the lines are mostly iambic but rarely do they contain the same number of iambic feet. I like this “form” because it allows the reader to experience the rhythm of the poem and allowes the writer to use the visual effect of line breaks.

To me this poem speaks of the futility of beauty, and more: the persistence of beauty in spite of said futility.

The first line of the second stanza shocks me with its end-stopped-ness and its implications: men don’t? What is there to believe? What does that belief gain you or subtract from you? Lots of moonlit paths to pursue.

And what does the title tell me? That this is not the epiphany of a young woman, although the poem, by its existence, lends this epiphany to those of any age or identity. But it is the voice of a woman who feels she is past her prime and may be looking for a reason to keep going.

It’s a beaut.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Crossover.