Graveside

Comments and criticism very welcome:

Graveside

Flowers aren’t enough
We start out going weekly, quickly
Fading into monthly, monthly
Into yearly and yearly
Added to the budget: Annual Bouquet, $50.

We give dead flowers to the dead,
Living for ones that are alive
Write elegies in a country churchyard
Kneel or weep into a napkin.

There is no place for the ancestors,
Hovering over us critically
Like bees before a flower.

And we wonder why our honey tastes bland,
Hovering over our own fountains
Of nectar and pollen, packing
Our throats with sweet and our leg flaps with powder.

We buzz around the city
And finally outside it,
Wilting flower after flower till we reach
A spray of roses, abandoned with love
By a wet, stone tablet.

But the roses are parched
Ruby-throated necks slit
And we waft a little lower
Where a small clover grows,
a red eye just cracked open,
yawning to the spring of its ruddy childhood.

5/7/08

Dust

I've brought this poem to Scribblers a couple of times, and now here's draft thirty-seven or something. Comments welcome.

Dust

I scrubbed and scraped and scoured my skin
Till most of the African dust came off.
It took most of the skin with it.
Tan lines from sandals fade after a few months,
And bleach removes dust-colored stains.

Forgive me.
I can’t always talk about the dust.
Sometimes I can’t speak at all.

Forgive me if I don’t tell you
About a calculating lioness
Crouched in spiked grass,
Or about the gazelle
That almost didn’t get away.

Forgive me
If I can’t tell you
About an orphaned child’s dirty diapers,
Or about her smile,
Or about how her bottom lip stuck out
When she cried.

Forgive me if I can’t talk about the dust itself,
But know that everything I say is stained by it.
(Or at least it ought to be.
Minds shouldn’t be like skin or clothes.)

Forgive me
If I show you a picture, instead,
Of someone you’ll never know,
Of a smile, or a tear, or a snotty nose,
On glossy paper.
Forgive me for using that photo as a weapon.

Canoeing Poem

I brought this a few weeks ago, and I've just made a couple of little changes. I'm mostly posting it for Katie and Tim, but if any suggestions come to mind, they're welcome. Karyn, enjoy the awkward line breaks. ;)

Town Lake

The loud anhingas
breaking from cool roost
(as we come near) fall
upward on the sky
with scattering of
sharp, black feathertips.

I stand unsteady
in the shifting bow
and stretch to catch and
clip a spray of blooms.
With the snip’s jerk the
petals break on me
and on the boat and
water like the wings
break on the sky.

Skin on a turtle’s neck
is like a bright maze
or a winding map
of park trails. “You Are
Here,” the eye’s dot says
and slaps into the
lake with breaking drops
that scatter like the
petals or the wings.

(v. 3)

for a prose guy, i seem to be posting a lot of poetry lately

so this was written many moons ago, when the earth was much younger, but i found it the other day and remembered that nothing had been posted here in a while, so have at it. it was actually an early precursor to my story published in shook foil.


When he saw you down on Hampton looking lively and alive,
Was that merely Chinese lantern sleight of hand:
Some fleet memory, behind a veil of candid innocence,
From a former life now lost in shifting sand?

Once you lived alone in splendor, waiting naked by the phone
In the hollow of your swank Manhattan digs,
Cultivating rough hewn calluses, maturity in youth;
It could never be a life of wine and figs.

But self-banishment does not suffice, such penance will not do
On the outskirts of this worn and rusted place.
Dr Heidegger has no respite to soothe this older you,
Etching shadows in that sweet unbroken face.

See the tattered shroud of memory attempt to find a cure:
Tracing specters of emaciated thought
As you struggle with your demons, still skull deep in mellow jack,
Only praying to escape the prize you’ve bought.

The beautiful insanity that lit upon your brain
For a moment, while that adolescent stood
In his ignorance unable to do anything but watch
And perhaps reluctant even if he could,

Has eaten what was left of you, the choicest morsels gone,
Leaving nothing but illusion-riddled scraps
And your burned out elegance lies dying, bleeding in the dust.
Don’t speak now. Please. There’s nothing left to say.

finally

hello peoples - sorry this poem-ish thing is so late being posted, but i would really appreciate feedback - it seems like it should be the beginning, or ending, of something i have not yet written.

"Scrambled Eggs and Dotted Swiss"

In the kitchen

Scrambling eggs

With anxious hands and

Hair falling from a rag of dotted swiss,

She looks up with broken eyes - 

He cannot meet them,

Cannot meet her

So appallingly vulnerable - 

He flees from the eggs shells and salt shakers

 - From the eyes and dotted swiss.

Whoa, Emily actually wrote stuff

This is a revamped version of the Christmas poem I brought at the beginning of the semester -- it decided it wanted to be prose.

-----------------------------

“Merry Christmas, God bless,” mutters the raisin-faced Salvation Army worker. From behind a scarf, a teenage girl imagines Santa Claus or Jesus someone propping the old man there, leaning against the pole, and telling him to repeat these words, over and over. The old man doesn’t raise his head as the girl’s gloved hand drops a pocketful of change into his bucket. “Merry Christmas, God bless you,” he mutters. “You, too,” says the girl.

The girl also sometimes says “Merry Christmas” to particularly harried customers, though she knows it’s supposed to be Happy Holidays. She takes her post in ladies’ sleepwear, occupying her mind by wondering about the recipients of the gifts customers are buying.

A round man, well past middle age, greets her cheerily. He’s looking for a nightgown, he says. He pulls a slip of paper out of his pants pocket and holds it at arm’s length, squinting. Shaking his head, he pulls out his spectacles from his breast pocket, puts them on, then reads, “Long-sleeved, size extra large.” It’s for his mother, he tells the girl. That’s about all she needs these days, pajamas.

She’s a hundred and two.

He chuckles nostalgically. Every year since nineteen forty-five, he’s gotten her a box of chocolate covered cherries. Every year since nineteen forty-five. She’s a hundred and two now. The man turns his face a way. Every year since nineteen forty-five, he says, his voice cracking a bit. Since nineteen forty-five. But this year, she can’t —

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come right now, I’ll be back later —” he says, crumpling his slip of paper and hurrying away. The girl watches him as he leaves, brushing his eyes.

Briefly neglecting her register later in the shift, the girl rummages through the nightgowns (taking note of all the long-sleeved, extra large ones appropriate for a hundred-and-two-year-old woman), in case the man should come back. She wants to tell him, “Merry Christmas, God bless you, and God bless your mother.”

------------------------

Here's the original:

Merry Christmas, God bless you,
Mutters the raisin-faced Salvation Army worker.
She leans against a pole like a plank of wood propped against a tree.
She doesn’t raise her head
As a gloved hand out of a bundle of warm clothes
Drops a pocketful of change in the bucket.
Merry Christmas, God bless you, she mutters,
Her cheerful bell tinkling.
You, too, a voice says from under a scarf.

The girl under the scarf
(Who occasionally says Merry Christmas to particularly harried customers,
Though she knows it’s supposed to be happy holidays)
Takes her post in ladies’ sleepwear.
A round man – well past middle age –
Greets her cheerily.
He’s looking for a nightgown, he says,
Long-sleeved, size extra large,
He reads off a slip of paper.
It’s for his mother.
She’s confined to a nursing home now, he tells the girl.
That’s about all she needs these days – pajamas.
She’s a hundred and two.

He chuckles nostalgically.
Every year since nineteen forty five,
He’s gotten her a box of chocolate covered cherries.
Every year since nineteen forty five.
She’s a hundred and two now.
The man turns his face away.
Every year since nineteen forty five,
He says,
His voice cracking a bit.
Since nineteen forty five.
But this year she can’t –
Can’t eat them –

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come right now, I’ll be back later,
He says, crumpling his slip of paper and hurrying away,
Brushing his eyes as he leaves.

Briefly neglecting her register later in the shift,
The girl rummages through the nightgowns,
(Noting the loveliest,
Softest,
Silkiest,
Long-sleeved, extra-large gowns)
In case the man should come back.
She wants to tell him,
God bless you,
And God bless your mother.

---------------------------

Specifically, I'm wondering about the paragraph that begins "He chuckles nostalgically." That was my favorite stanza back when it was verse, but I'm not quite sure how to handle it in prose. Suggestions on any part are welcome, though.

So this is still a very rough draft. I suspect that before I'm finished, the whole thing will be metered. The free verse stuff captures the general language and imagery that I'm liking at the moment. I don't have a copy of the first draft with me, so those of you who haven't read it or don't remember it, just treat this as a first draft.

A little background for those who aren't familiar with the story of Tantalus and Pelops: Tantalus was a Greek king who was the favorite of the gods. One day he threw a banquet for the gods in his palace, and served as the main fare the flesh of his son: Pelops. Demeter was the first to taste the meat, and as soon as she did, the gods realized what Tantalus had done. They were enraged, sentanced him to be chained to a rock in hell, with a pool of water at his feet that dried up every time he tried to drink of it, and a bunch of grapes hanging from a branch above his head that were blown out of his reach by the wind every time he tried to grab one. He is starved and thirsty for eternity. His son was restored to life, except for a chunk missing from his shoulder where Demeter took her bite.


Spit in thine eye, cries Tantalus the Man
To gods who sit in judgment
Over inadequate welcome-gifts.

The sacrifice of Abraham once made,
And once accepted though returned unused,
Now offered freely, unsolicited
Has been found lacking.

Worse than lacking: offensive, cruel.

But not cruel in the mind of a father,
Unless it be the cruelty of gods
Who do not make their wishes clearly known
And arrive uninvited for dinner.

For Tantalus the Man is not Abraham.
He has no manna from on high,
No ambrosial fare fit for Holy guests
And knows no hospitality but this:
That he lay down the life of his son,
Precious fruit of his man-flesh
To feed the appetite of immortals.

But now he stands alone, accused, alone,
Condemned by those he sought to honor most.
For there does Pelops wait in shadowy wing
Behind the throne of Zeus, and makes his case.
Plaintiff phantasmal showing tattered eye
And masticated shoulder now in shreds,
He does not comprehend his father’s choice
But only feels the slash of gruesome blade.

So Tantalus the Man recieves his doom
And slouches toward the everlasting hunger.
As Charon anchors manacles infernal
The gods nod in approval, sated, full.


Still a long way to go I think, but its getting there. This poetry stuff is kind of fun.