I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF - The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan’s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

So, my home phone/internet’s been out of commission since Friday, and there was an airline clusterfuck on Sunday that ended up costing me two cab fares, 50% of my too-late-to-cancel guest-house reservation for yesterday night, and several hours of my life that I don’t get back. Grr, grr, grr.
That said, I was glad to end up with more time to herd a few more things into order… including completing the “Wishes At Time of Death” form my pastor keeps on file, which includes specifying any readings desired. For what it’s worth, I want Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” and Jane Hirshfield’s “The Heart’s Counting Knows Only One” either in the program or read aloud. I’m betting there will be an Emily Dickinson in there as well - though how I will collect if the reader in question chooses as expected, I haven’t quite worked out. (Maybe a dram of Edradour poured over my ashes? But that would be a waste of good whisky…)
I also treated myself to a glass of Canton ginger liqueur , a long hot soak in the tub, and some visiting with my poetry books. Of particular note:

I have been bitten by Marissa’s meme (even if I have just now had time to copy):

Give me the title of a poem I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first line, the last line, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got offered to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

Also, like Marissa, I ask that you don’t comment with stuff you wouldn’t want me to run with. Because I will run.

Ready? Set?

Odds are I will be up way too late, thanks to work, so when I saw that today’s PAD challenge was “sestina,” I nearly threw in the towel. But there are only two more days after this, so…

A Shot at a Sestina

I am married to a former Army sniper.
I have seen her shoot a target through the heart
and wing the zipper pull of a hated dress.
She likes things immaculate – always dries her
feet before stepping out of the shower. The part
of her hair is always on the left. I stress

how she looks, because the stress
she places on looking sharp, that’s Sniper
101 as far as she’s concerned, a part
of playing the role, cards close to her chest,
as is not allowing the wind that dries her
hair to chap her hands. She dresses

with care, with foresight. Her dress
uniform is as good as new; no stress,
strain, or stain marks anywhere. She dries her
skin by patting, not scrubbing, the way a sniper
places her foot on ground in the heart
of enemy country, where mines blast apart

anyone who walks without heed. She imparts
a story about a simpleton as she buttons her dress
and then precisely pins on a brooch. My heart
skips a beat at how good she looks. The distress
of all those nights when there’s need of a sniper
somewhere else in the city – she dries her

hands before coming to bed. It drives her
nuts when she can’t wash her hands, that’s a part
of being deployed she endured, since no sniper
worth her salt would risk a mission for dress
or hygienic standards that stress
routine over results. Still, her heart

is half-soap, half-knife, all fire. The heart
of our house is the kitchen. There, she dries her
own teas – there’s lavender, for stress,
plus, of skullcap and mint each a part.
There she bakes madeleines. There we dress
the quails and doves she collects. Once a sniper,

always a hunter. Some would stress the heart
as a refuge, but after storms, my sniper dries her
weapon and its parts the way she dons a dress.

- pld

–
Process notes:
(1) Total time: about two hours to write, and then another hour to post it at PAD and here (internet connection being majorly flaky AND poky today).

(2) My initial keywords were “sniper,” “sense,” “swear,” “dress,” “pat,” and “stress.” I changed them as I wrote the first stanza, as the scenario made itself known to me.

(3) Two stanzas in, I realized “dries her” is actually a terrible choice for a keyword (the lines don’t sound right breaking there), but decide to plow on regardless for the sake of completing the exercise.

(4) The poem itself is beyond rescue, but there are a few lines here and there that I may end up using as the seeds of other poems or stories. Which are lines I wouldn’t ordinarily have gotten around to writing, given I would have abandoned this poem much earlier if I hadn’t been writing it for a challenge. Yay for challenges.

(5) Sorry about the title. There’s probably a special punishment for me somewhere… *ducks*

My weekend went off its rails in a spectacular but mostly enjoyable way, and I blame movies: Friday night’s excursion to see Sita Sings the Blues was followed by a nice dinner, during which one of my companions confessed she had never tasted a sazerac before, which then resulted in cocktails, port, and whisky back at our house (and her eventually staying the night).

Then, on Saturday, I saw My Neighbor Totoro, and spent the rest of the day resisting the urge write futurefic about its characters and to splurge on plushie slippers.

I resorted to concentrating on a difficult section in one of my existing fics-in-progress to help get my brain back into gear, but then I got engrossed in what the characters weren’t managing to say to each other, and what was supposed to have been a 500-word write-it-out-and-fix-it-later pre-supper indulgence turned into most of my weekend wrangling with multiple variations of three lines of dialogue (because the second line turned out to be a darling that needed killin’, only I didn’t get around to admitting that until after supper tonight). For a fic in a rare fandom that maybe five people will read. I have the stupidest compulsions this side of the Cumberland.

All that said, the 541 words I came up with delight me: a major reason I write fanfic is because it pushes me to engage more deeply with canon, and I end up surprising myself with dialogue and plot twists that weren’t anywhere in my consciousness when I started the story in question. That’s true of poetry as well: my piece for yesterday’s Poetic Asides prompt, “interactions,” was originally going to be something about William Shakespeare and Michael Jordan — I’d parked in space #23 in the Belcourt lot when I went to see Totoro, so that got me thinking about soaring and mastery and how neither Renaissance dramas nor NBA games are solo efforts (Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday is April 23, and Jordan’s jersey number in Chicago was #23).

But is that what I ended up with? No….

Practicing Jump Shots With William Shakespeare

Considering that I’m near-sighted, with
next-to-zero hand-eye coordination,
we’re definitely not in heaven, but
considering how many commandments I’ve trashed
and how he probably didn’t love his wife enough,
we’re in awfully good shape for the damned, and it helps
that we don’t actually get to talk, what with chasing
the eight out of ten balls we don’t quite manage
to catch from the shadows on the sidelines, and
then more chasing after the nine out of ten
that miss the hoop. The bounce and clunk of the balls
supply a rhythm — DAH-dah, DAH-dah-dah,
dah, dah-DAH, dah-DAH-dah-dah-DAH –
I ought to turn into a song, and on
the other side of the paint, I can tell
Mr. Shakespeare’s shooting to miss
different parts of the backboard, so he can see
for himself which parts actually shake
and which remain mute and unmoved.
If this were a different playground, I’d ride
his ass about his rot about “ever-fixed marks”
but no one’s keeping score, and when he lobs
a beautiful iamb my way — dah-DAH –
I fling it straight through the hoop, all net.

As for Sunday’s prompt, “anger,” I was originally stumped — not for lack of things to say on the topic, but “things to say” isn’t the same as “things I’m ready to say,” never mind “things sayable in lyric form.” There’s a page in my planner across which I scrawled a couple dozen ideas during lunchtime. When I finally sat down to do more with the tulips, my working title was “Remains” — but halfway through my original second stanza, I changed the title to “Aftermath,” and then I went back to the top of the poem and rewrote every line I’d typed in so far. (Today’s word for the writing process is definitely Sisyphean.)

Aftermath

This morning, the tulips were fresh
in a florist’s vase: four were candy pink,
four were butter yellow,
four were milk white,
and one was licorice purple-black.

Now they are confetti on the driveway.
The glass has been swept up, but I cannot
repair how the water blurred the “3”
on your daughter’s hopscotch trail.

I have been making a point
of preparing meals
that will keep for several days.

Even so, after you both
left the table before dessert,
I had to count to ten
while I rinsed the dishes.

- pld

[N.b. Not an autobiographical poem, but with friends whose marriages are breaking up, the topic has not been far from my mind.]

Today’s PAD challenge: take a favorite poem, change its title, and then write a poem in response to the new title.

[Source poem: A Poem for Painters by John Wieners]

A Drink for Dabblers

To start, there is no defense.

My kitchen contains no wild
fruit, no
flapping of guardian
wings, no cherished chants,

yet, when petitioned
to brew up a blessing,
I leave the drawbridge down,

so eager my fire
to be more than a brown shadow
lining a wall within the ruins
of other people’s memories.

I serve you this tea,
knowing the thirst, leaving

what will last
up to your hands and their restless
roaming. My pitcher pours
its psalms upon palms
no longer outstretched
by the time the ale foams
its promises along
the cracks of your gloves.

- pld

[Some poems are like "Greensleeves" -- they become the song that slides without a second thought out of one's fingertips during sound checks, at unattended pianos, and within collabs and improvs. I've riffed on "A Poem for Painters" before, and if you peeked at yesterday's handwritten drafts, you'll have noticed that I'd started out by picking yet another fight with Shakespeare Sonnet 116...]

I did see Friday’s PAD prompt before catching my flight to New Orleans: it was “Friday.” I flirted with a number of possibilities over the following twenty-odd hours, but I eventually sketched out the start of this early Saturday morning (I habitually fade away to bed before the rest of the Saz-Erac household. While it doesn’t always translate into my rising before the others the next day, I woke up eager to write about a statue I’d seen the previous afternoon…):

Shabbat

Five days of the week, and sometimes six,
Stanley is at his desk before sunrise.
Four days of the week, and sometimes five,
he’s still crunching numbers
after the sun disappears

but Friday night, no matter who tries
to chain him to their columns of demands,
Stanley leaves the office before sundown

and as the candles glow
and the wine wakens his tongue,
shining psalms unfurl from Stanley’s shoulderblades,
floating him into his day of rest.

-pld

The PAD prompt for day 13 was “hobby.” Here’s my effort (a bit over a half-hour in a gmail window; kick-started primarily by Martha Rhodes’s April 10 “Poet’s Pick” for the Poetry Daily e-letter (a rondelet by Anon that began “I never meant…”)):

Calligrapher’s Rondelet

The letter f
defies finesse. Out of my pen,
each letter f
looks like a mashed-up treble clef.
I had not dreamt, when I began,
how I’d draw again and again
this letter f.

-pld

[I've still half a mind to call it "Calligrapher's Rondeloop," but perhaps I'll reserve that for a grander (and/or more grandiose) take on the topic (some other night).]

…at least, not as today’s prompt. Some days writing is a pain in the ass. All this…

From Poem A Day Drafts

From Poem A Day Drafts

…and then some, to net but this:

Rehearsing The Creation

A fiddle
must be retuned
after a demanding song.

My bow to your strings,
we stretch and tug each other
until we soar into resounding
the first day of our firmament.

- pld

Today’s is a long ‘un, thanks to the prompt (”memory”) coinciding with me waking up way too early for my taste (especially after indulging in two post-midnight visits to the museum — my thanks to Mary for drawing my attention to the prompts). It wasn’t until at least fifteen minutes later that I realized, “Oh, it’s April 9. Maybe last night’s freaky bubble tea isn’t to blame…”

From Poem A Day Drafts

Click images to enlarge ‘em

Missing Characters

This morning, I woke up muttering, “Ba,”
after a nightmare about practicing Chinese.
“Ba” is half of the word for “Daddy.”
Mine would have been sixty-eight today.
His ashes are still in my closet. Mom’s too.
She died last year, the week before Easter,
and glad as I am that they didn’t live
to witness the economy’s current throes
(the anxiety would have finished them off
even more unpleasantly than the cancers did),
my body keeps reminding me that grief
doesn’t have to make sense. That it can be
larger than love or loyalty, no matter
how much the mind resigns itself, makes peace
with what our family failed to be –
a peace I must repair again and again
at every funeral I attend where the kids
remember being loved for who they actually are,
or when I stop by China Dragon and
can manage only “shay shay” in Mandarin
when I pick up my quart of General Tso’s chicken.
Last spring, as I emptied out my mother’s house,
I e-mailed my brother list after list
of things I wanted to make sure he
was okay with me hauling out to the curb,
but I also told him if I came across
the notebooks from those futile years
of Chinese sessions with Mom, I would reach
for a match and the gallon jug of gasoline
without waiting for him to write back.

For someone notorious as a brainy kid,
I’ve turned out to be a late bloomer:
it wasn’t until college that I finally grasped
how musical intervals worked, in spite
of violin lessons since I was seven.
I didn’t cook much of anything
until my marriage, and only now
am I getting the hang of prepositions
in French, a language I did business in
for over two years. So I think it’s okay
for me to hope the next time I study Chinese,
more of it will stick, like good rice
and stupid jokes and the occasional memory
that doesn’t make me flinch or squirm.
Much of what Mom had never thrown away
was of the “Oh dear God, what NOW?” variety –
herbal pellets predating my brother’s birth
(I used them to line a box of his documents),
a fossilized pastry purloined from the clinic,
coffee from a 1990s flight to Japan –
but I also found the sewing journal
I now store next to my father’s dissertation
and while I didn’t save Dad’s old pajamas –
the ones I’d donned to read aloud to my brother
when he was small enough to be scared
at Dad being in the hospital — one of the times
Mom laughed at me without disdain or despair,
even though she then had to re-wash the pajamas
before she could take them to Dad — you see
how there’s too much to keep as it is?
I snipped out a square of the faded cotton
and taped it into the steno pad
I’d swiped from one of Mom’s many stashes
to note down all the things I was throwing away.

- pld

Process postscript: I made a boatload of tweaks as I typed the poem into the comment box, and that was with multiple interruptions, so there will likely be a raft more to be made once I’m in the mood to revise this some more. In the meantime, I expect (hope!) to be Away From Keyboard until Monday night, so here’s wishing you a happy festival of your choice (and/or festivity and/or general frolicking) as the week wends toward its end.