Month: April 2009

On the Road 4

I met Lo and her husband today, which was great fun. I hoped all the poem talking would inspire something. Here they are, heartfelt appreciation for the beauty of their relationship:

When the boat comes
I will follow you.
I won’t set out before.
The wide world’s done
it’s wandering with me
and there is just one trip
I’ve left to take.
Alone. But never first,
No matter how the nerves
default to panic
or endorphins buoy me
above fear’s waterline.
You say you’ll follow me,
you won’t set out before.
The ship will kiss the sand
with us still arguing.

the blood already running there

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…]

one from the weekend

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

bagatelle night

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).]

NaPoWriMo Day 14: Brianna

I realized, today, that posting poems on the Internet makes them ineligible for publication.  Darn.  I wonder if that’ll ever change?  A weblog is hardly in the same camp as a literary journal, but it’s also not the same as showing something to your friends around a table at a bar.  Anyway, it means that’s the end of my sharing of terrible first drafts.  I’ll finish out the month by writing about whatever writing work I do that day, and maybe posting some excerpts, a la the very wise Mary.

Today I wrote the bones of a poem about riding the Skytrain.  It’s called, brilliantly, Skytrain, and I started while riding the Skytrain.  Imagine that!

And I spent most of the day organizing batches of submissions for literary journals and a chapbook publisher.  I think my eyes are now permanently crossed.  Not the most fun work, but it always feels good to get it done (or almost done–I have more niggling format issues to conquer tomorrow).

On the Road 3 (NaPoWriMary)

I wish I were the kind who could write love poems in wartime because I see their great need. Instead I write war poems in wartime. Tonight, another 20 line piece about running off, lover left, to kill people who have killed people you love. Perhaps if I could address the pointlessness, but I did that in “The Shield of Thetis.”