My poems “I Feel the Wind” and “Believe Me” are live at The Literary Nest. Both are golden shovel poems, a form created by Terrance Hayes, which uses a line (or more) from an existing poem. Each word in the line is used as the end word in a new poem. Thus if you use a ten-word line, the poem will consist of ten lines. You might read this article to learn more about the form.
The source for both of my pieces was “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. The great Ruby Dee recites it on YouTube.
Better Than Drowning
As clouds leverage sky and the wind scours each night.
Surrounding the spiraling strands. Wherever I am. And am not.
Over the crushing waves, suspended between air and matter.
With the earth in taproots drilled through stone.
Under the layered fog, dampness upon dampness, differing by degree.
I see you where I don’t look. You live in the mirror.
The night conceals nothing, not even my guilt.
Not even my pleasure. Nor your smile.
I shake the quilt and spread you everywhere.
Though no door existed, it closed behind you.
Which is the point of absence, the fulcrum on which I balance.
You turn and join the light, casting no shadow.
* * *
“Better Than Drowning” first appeared in Underfoot Poetry in October 2017. Many thanks to Tim Miller for taking this piece, and for his enthusiastic support of poets and poetry.
When Shadows Hide
I breathe when you breathe,
and watching me,
you capture each lost molecule.
This book blinks whenever you turn the page.
I see you between the words, between the white threads.
You are the adored chapter, the one I read in bed before
sleep, and after I wake, before the first wren announces
dawn, then in the afternoon’s highest point, when shadows hide,
and later, as they emerge to stroke your bare shoulder.
What’s on the other side, you ask. What do you hear?
Your breath, I say. Your name.
“When Shadows Hide” was first published in the print anthology Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love in February 2019.
Wherein the Book Implies Source
And words form the vessel by which we traverse centuries, the river
stitched across the valley’s floor, easing access.
Accession by choice. Inorganic memory.
Vellum conveys its origin: of a calf.
How like an entrance it appears, a doorway to a lighted space.
Closed, it resembles a block of beech wood.
To serve as conveyance, to impart without reciprocity.
Framing the conversation in space, immediacy fades.
The average calfskin may provide three and a half sheets of writing material.
Confined by spatial limitation, we consider scale in terms of the absolute.
The antithesis of scroll; random entry; codex.
A quaternion equalled four folded sheets, or eight leaves: sixteen sides.
Reader and read: each endures the other’s role.
Pippins prevented tearing during the drying and scraping process.
Text first, then illumination.
Once opened, the memory palace diminished.
* * *
This originally appeared in April 2014 as part of Boston Review’s National Poetry Month Celebration, and is included in The Circumference of Other, my offering in the Silver Birch Press chapbook collection, IDES, published in 2015.
In Gathering Light
1
I sit in darkness
my back to the words
gouged in stone
and wonder what
phrase the stars will
utter tonight,
what wisdom
one finds in dreams
or the widening circles
of the hole that was
there
in water,
in earth, in the common tongue
of all things.
The tree speaks
a different language.
I hear
whispers, a bone-flute’s
whistle, the sound of metal
striking dirt striking
wood,
but nothing, no words
I can gather.
2
I have lost my shadow
among the weeds
of this place.
Somewhere
it wanders,
a thin, grey shape
waiting for light to give birth
to the blackness
I call friend,
itself, shadow.
My fingertips trace
the lines, hoping
to draw something
from the stone –
an unknown word,
the druid’s
small bag of dreams,
the lyrics of the stars.
* * *
Another poem, another artifact from the mid-80s, rediscovered last year.
My poems “I Feel the Wind” and “Believe Me” are live at The Literary Nest. Both are golden shovel poems, a form created by Terrance Hayes, which uses a line (or more) from an existing poem. Each word in the line is used as the end word in a new poem. Thus if you use a ten-word line, the poem will consist of ten lines. You might read this article to learn more about the form.
The source for both of my pieces was “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. The great Ruby Dee recites it on YouTube.
The Resonance of No
Yes, yes, we’ve heard. The dishwasher wastes less
and cleans better. But Kenkō believed in the beauty
of leisure, and how better to make nothing
while standing with hands in soapy water, thoughts
skipping from Miles Davis’s languid notes to the spider
ascending to safe shelter under the sill (after I blow
on her to amuse myself), washing my favorite knife
and wondering if I should hone it, not to mention
my skills on the six-string or the potato peeler.
And if I linger at the plates, even the chipped one,
admiring their gleam after hot water rinses away
the soap residue, who could question the quick gulp
of ale or the shuffle of an almost-but-not-quite
dance step-or-stumble while arranging them on the
ribbed rack, back-to-back, in time to Coltrane’s
solo. Then the forgotten food processor’s blade
bites my palm, and I remember that I’ve outgrown
the dark suit, the cut branches still need bundling
and none of the words I’ve conjured and shaped
over decades and miles will extend their comfort
when I stand at my father’s grave this week or next.
“The Resonance of No,” was published in December 2016 in Gravel, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second.
Daniel Schnee wrote about this poem here.
Music Credit: Cool Vibes Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
In This Shack a Cold Wind Blows
In this shack a cold wind blows,
shuffling papers and ideas before settling
on the floor. Leaves rustling. Tea,
cooling. You recall the peace of near
death, fear circling the drain,
giving in to breath, labored but certain,
one exiting another and again,
then laughing at the improbability: you
are nothing. You were nothing.
Nothing will come of you. You say
yesterday, and think tomorrow. Today.
* * *
“In This Shack a Cold Wind Blows” was first published in April 2019 by The Elixir Magazine out of Yemen.
Elegy
1. Adrift
I count more graves than people in my sleep,
but nothing turns more quickly
than an empty wind
in a place whose memory has died.
And all manner of departure: What you have left is you
without you. As if it could be different, as if decades
could withdraw and draft a blueprint of motive and action,
returning them, returning you, to that point
across the sea where the ship has not yet arrived.
If you ask she will say it does not matter. If you ask.
2. Parentheses
To be within, yet without, as in the unuttered phrase.
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
to render the void clear and resolute, the diction of
separation divided by decades and your ocean.
The language of silence, drawn near.
3. From the Other Side
Sometime becomes never and steps around a desolate corner,
and all we have left is our field
awash in stone, remnants of the unspoken.
I have no memory of you. Nor you, of me,
but the strands do not lie, and unraveled,
expose the imperfect blends
that compose my love. A leaky roof. The last word.
A pity to put up at all
but there is rain.
4. Another Night
Of all the hours which were the longest?
The earth trembled around me
and I lay still, bearing witness to
the uncertain malice of its
shrug, shoulders brought to
fore, then returned,
and finally, released. If,
after this half-century, words
could reform in your mouth,
what denial would issue?
Ashes, washing ashore.
5. Bridge
And seeing you only as the shadow of an
ending whose voice lies
in an uncommon past, how
may we recognize the very shape we share?
The bridge’s fate is loneliness,
knowing that one side
decries the other’s
call, that separation affords new light:
they are between
comfort and space, between words and a smile,
between nothingness and sorrow,
two points, beginning and end,
reaching, in opposition, towards each other.
Notes:
“What you have left is you without you” is from Edmond Jabes’s “At the Threshold of the Book” in The Book of Questions: Volume I, translated by Rosemary Waldrop.
“It is time the stone made an effort to flower” is from Paul Celan’s poem “Corona,” included in Poems of Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger.
“A pity to put up at all but there is rain” is from Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns, translated by Cid Corman and Kamake Susumu.
Albert Huffstickler’s poem “Bridges” which appeared in The Balcones Review in 1987, begins “They are between…”
“Elegy” first appeared on Underfoot Poetry in October 2017.
This Oak
Never rooted in Tibet,
has not watched a whale breach
a November Pacific dusk, or guzzled
bitter beer near Vesuvius. Nor has it
absorbed the warmth of a loved one’s
hip on a frozen morning long after
the embers’ glow has greyed
and the windows blossomed
white. It cannot know the beauty
of disparate instruments playing
in joyous harmony. It will whisper
no incantations, does not smile,
won’t ever feel the anticipation
of a first kiss after a complicated
courtship. The bouquets of Bordeaux
elude it, as do tears or the benefits
of laughter. Why, then, do I envy it so?
“This Oak” was published in Slippery Elm (print only) published by Findlay University in Findlay, Ohio, in spring 2019.
O at the Edges 