Ode to Room 330

You don’t know what you missed
when your shoe broke on the bus,
the room spun out of control
talking of sweat and chest hair.

The voice meant to read, makes
my words more pure, even
exhorting me to get real, get
a skateboard, get a baseball hat.

We ran our hands through the sand
near castles greying like pigeons, framed
ourselves in repetition, rhyme, numbers
and pants. Someone made love to a guitar,

it wasn’t me. I read, and wrote
sitting next to clear beauty, cold
air on our shoulders like film
stars without fur coats.

The young walk off to a summer
they won’t remember. I am here
to remember for them, the mother
in my room full of burning poets.

Today is the last day of poetry month. It is also the last official day of my poetry class. I have been blessed with a group of talkative, interesting and iconoclastic undergrads who made me see things as I hadn't before. My TA deserves special mention, not only because he is a great poet, but because he helped me see things in a new and different way. And he's getting married! I would write him a poem, but we all know how I feel about marriage right now, so it's best I leave that one to the romantics in the group.

Why

I am not trying to do anything
other than say
the unsayable, create meaning
between the words, on the empty
whiteness of the paper, find sound
where there isn’t a whisper, silence
can be louder than a scream
from a blackbird in your ear. To tell
you this is water, and I am infected
with poetic fire, you will know I exist
somewhere between madness and ennui,
the horrible disease that killed Edwin.

I love you means nothing. I am
aware. It is all you need.

Last Summer

The garden stands as still as a lake would
when no breeze can find you
in that chair, legs sticking to the wicker
leaving bumps that itch like bites. You drink
slippery wine with ice, unquenched.
A book, spine-bent in your lap, idle under
an empty hand. Waiting for tomorrow's

something to happen. A girl
bouqueted in daisies peers around
whistling without a sound, a storm
collecting itself to blow away the afternoon.
Thunder forgets, we run for pines. Except you
stand on the path, white dress running
like glue over tanned and naked boughs.

This is what is referred to as radical revision, so it's really not cheating at all. I took one line from an earlier poem and wrote a new poem. The original is here. Expect more things like this as we near the end of the month, end of the semester.....

Watcher

Scattering bird and prey
toward jagged rocks
he tucks his wing, dives.
Tethered with a string
a solitary kite, he floats
on wind that cuts our spring
coats, we shiver as he hunts
to snare a snake, lift it twisting
to the cloudy sky.


I am cheating somewhat here, because this is a revision of a poem I wrote earlier this year. I have to revise six of my poems for class and turn them in Thursday along with the originals. Revising is where the true work of poetry comes, so I am allowing myself this one.

Number 26

I am going to buy a pair
of cowperson boots and teach
your gorilla how to sing. It is the end
of something here, which might be
also the beginning of something else,
or not, the door and window may both
remain closed for now. I will bathe
in my solitude like a rat, and something truer
than those boots, that black hat, and the notes
from my old flute will survive.

The Poem Suffers

Indulging myself, nothing else
for thirty days is the claim he makes
against writing a poem a day. Something
about the suffering of Buddha. I don’t buy it.
It’s an excuse, isn’t it? A reason to not
write a poem.

Not Poetry

Oh happy meat and Yahoo! glue
put it on a pole, not a plate
complex misogyny aside
going naked for the fur
is sexist enough, no?

My evergreen soap dish with Oriental
underpinnings and colonial dishtowels
are hooded and bare like prisoner
costumes. Indigenous translations
lighting recipes of bone-in thighs
slathered with pot butter used
furtively to impregnate my daughter.

There is a strange movement in the writing world to put keywords into Google and mine the results for a poem. It has been suggested this is similar to what Burroughs did with Beat Poetry a while back, but I disagree. At least he was interested in creating meaningful and important work that informed the world around us. These outliers are specifically trying to write bad poetry - to what end I do not know. My teacher gave us this assignment to write this type of poetry, and since I am such a good student I did as I was told. You are all the beneficiaries of my efforts.

Tanya, Part One

Like a small animal, she left for the countryside
where she filed her nails by the coatrack at Mr. Murphy’s
store and grew a belly the size of a prize winning melon
full of water and blood. She returned different
between the words, the spaces filled up, her arms
empty with the smell of afterbirth, lights in the sky,
his tiny hand clutching her thumb in a dream.

This is titled "part one" because it does not feel finished to me. It came from two places - the first line is from the play M. Butterfly. The next line is from an exercise in my fiction writing class last night. I wrote it on the train on the way home.

For Heather, Who Picked the Hottest Day of the Year so far to Increase my Interval Time at the Gym

Maybe I like the fleshy
parts of my thighs to rub together
and maybe the little jiggle
when I hail a cab in summertime
is fine. No one has asked to bounce quarters
off my ass lately, and frankly
I doubt your metabolic-shifting
jargon. Your lures are cruelly
powerful, drawing me in, chipper
talk of boys, wine, and plastic
surgery. You pretend
to be my friend, but really
you are the devil
in a red dress.

The title really says it all, yes?

What You Need

My edges are like bees
swarming, looking for a hive,
a single being. Something
scares them, they take flight,
hovering, my edges undefined,
anxious. My hair grows dark.

Your edges, more severe, sharper
focus. If I stand too close, or we
touch hands, you draw my blood out,
beads forming on the tips of fingers.
I try to smooth you over, it takes time
we just don’t seem to have.

Once again, the photo is from the über talented Thomas Bramwell. The bee lives in Golden Gate Park, and is not one of my resident bees, but the photo was so perfect I forgave him that. I couldn't help but upload the other bee photo as well. Enjoy:

One

I.
You talk over the top of my wet tongue, cheap beer
sliding across the words I keep forgetting to say.

We float home, find the kitchen counter bright
in my back, my knees burned by the empty

carpet, the shower then the sheets and back
until someone falls asleep, usually me.

But once, once I caught you sleeping
naked. I pinned you down, threads wrapped

around tiny stakes stuck in my mattress.
I read your thoughts as they bubbled up

through the chilly morning, making me
shiver. You sat up later, blinking, pulling

the pins out. You picked at the strings,
wondering, saying next to nothing.

II.

This is how you leave-
slowly, carefully
remove the barbed fishhook
from the soft part of my belly
put it in a pocket
of your brown tweed hat-
from England!

I worry the wound
with my pinkie finger
for the next week
until once again you reel me
forward.

This is an amalgamation once again of snippets overheard, people viewed through tiny lenses, all gleaned from my notebook. 20 down, 10 to go. It is a marathon.

Sacrilige

When people talk about God
I judge them
a little. It’s wrong of me, I know
to put them in a jar
with all those young medieval knights
writing sonnets because someone told them
sonnets were what knights wrote.
I picture open-jawed men
serpents sliding through tents
while they baptize one another
in muddy rivers, children
singing Jesus loves me this
I know.
You don’t know anything
neither do I, we will die and then
know less
probably

I hesitate to put this poem up. I do not intend to offend anyone, it is part of my musings in my notebook and not a full representation of how I feel. No poem ever is. Hopefully it will slip by unnoticed since it is Sunday and you all should be at church anyway.

Instruments

I remove my shoes, dip
hot feet in the chilly pool
where I swam as a girl, come
now when my need for solace
fills me up like liquid in a jar.

Long before the surgeon
knew me, he turned bloodwood
smooth with his lathe,
set a gold nib, filled the magazine
with ink. Before he knew, or said,
I held the pen and it was mine.

Last night I drove to California to visit my family for my cousin's 30th birthday. We ate dinner and such, and then her husband and his father brought out these pens they made. All kinds of woods - some from their own yard, some from doors, who knows where it was all from. Really cool stuff. I was picking up pens and chatting, and then I picked up my pen. It is small, made of bloodwood, is a fine point fountain pen and was filled with purple ink. When he saw me with the pen he told me I could have it. What a gift.

Conceit

I always say nothing, I am 13
years old and big as an elephant
doing homework when
I’m here and when
I’m not. I will be famous
for jack, and I like to eat
broccoli for breakfast.

I thought I liked myself enough
for the both of us, I certainly
liked you, and me, and thought
wrongly, of course, that it was enough.
It would have worked, if your
own disgust hadn’t been so great
as to envelope me, make me

believe I am absurd, all the things I love
frivolous. Sharp colored pencils, dancing
without music, the hum of my tires
on the road out of town.

This started from a list of questions I asked my son about me (posted on facebook, of course.) He is four and has an odd sense of the world. Then I just flipped through my notebook pulling out random things to throw in. So now it is sort-of a hodgepodge of thoughts pulled together.

Routines

On this day I choose not
to take a large axe
it’s smooth handle and heavy head,
plunge it deep into your chest.

To take up an axe
would leave meaning on the table
the deep plunge of your chest
left for flowers and worms.

Meaning is left, from the table
I see only white walls.
You are out planting flowers
where the snakes knotted just yesterday.

I look up and see only white walls.
The birds chirping too loudly
at the snakes knotted in the grass,
I have nothing left to give.

The sound of chirping birds
plunges in to my shallow chest
Knowing I must give something
On a day I choose not.

This is a particular form of a poem called a Pantoum. The second and fourth line of each stanza becomes the first and third line of the next stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza show up again at the end so as not to be left out of the repeating. This poem will frustrate people who have liked my straightforward, story-telling types of poems, and I know at least one person who will throw up his arms and say "What does it MEAN? I don't GET IT!" To the rest of you, I hope you enjoy it - these are fun to write because they force things to happen that wouldn't normally occur, and that's when writing poetry becomes magic for me.

Oh, and the axe in the chest imagery came from a great little story I read in class last night by another student. The main character was going about her dull life, married ten years, and decided on that day to take and axe to her husband. This is my homage to her a little bit.

And how could I forget the snakes! My poor friend Stacey was gardening the other day and came upon a nest of snakes. She is still traumatized.

Bitch

She slept with my dog, also
my husband, but the dog
vexes me with his loyalty
shift, curling his head
upon her belly, her hand
absently stroking his soft
ears while they dream together -
foxes in the underbrush, bones
yet unchewed. He is mine, I want
him back, I would say, except
she might think I meant the man.
She can have him, but not my dog.

This poem came at the last minute when I saw a photo of a girl and a dog sleeping on a couch. I was sitting outside waiting to meet a friend, notebook in hand, frantic that I didn't have a poem to post, and I remembered the photo. Whew. So far I haven't had to cheat, but there are still 15 days left in the month.

Swim Lessons at the Club

She drops them on the cooldeck, not noticing the heat
through her gray suede pumps. They hop to the edge,
laughing as they leap into cool water, splashing the corner
of her dress. She spins, wants to yell, but they are gone
under the blue pool. It hurts her eyes to watch the sun
sparkle across the waves. Her briefcase beckons
under yellow umbrellas, she glances at the frolicking
mass of limbs in the water, annoyed by the noise.

She has fun at bunco night and book club
although she hasn’t read a book in years, yet she raises
her head over nannies and landscapers, growing larger
than life in the middle, where her skirt no longer buttons.
Her husband cowers, performing marital
duties on Tuesdays, taking it out on the dog otherwise.

She dreams of a love who found new parts of her
under the slit of a zipper,
unfolding on the dock by the lake lapping
weathered wood.

A shrill voice commands them to hurry, slow down, pay
attention, her demands fall on tiny smiling ears.

Love Sonnet Minus Two

Without gushing, or at least
trying not to gush, I love him
for you immediately. I want you
to crawl in his lap and get married
in Massachusetts or Vermont
even though I don’t believe in it,
marriage that is,
since my own broken family
hurts my stomach on Easter morning,
their tiny feet pounding on the flagstone,
skipping church for marshmallow rabbits,
I hide in a long white dress.

Easter Day

Does anyone enjoy these days
besides the darling children who
collect their loot like tiny thieves
and smear the couch with chocolate eggs?


This is blank verse, which means it is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Just for the record, this is really really hard for me. And it's not exactly right. And it should be much longer. But it's Easter, I might be getting sick, and four lines can count as a poem, can't it?

Swimsuit Shopping

Bright triangles of spandex peer
across fluorescent tiled floors, knowing
I have no choice. My children demand it.
Frolicking in the tepid pools
tires us out, sleep comes easily
under skin still burning from the sun.
I buy one that covers the scars,
stretch marks, soft white flesh
that used to be taut, tan, stretched
over boney hips and flat knees,
beckoning the boys from other boats,
turning heads just enough to get us
here in the first place.

I was just to the point where I was going to cheat and use a poem I wrote earlier in the semester, when a friend posted on facebook about swimsuit shopping. I went myself earlier this week - a dreadful errand to say the least.

Professor Stevenson, 1992

Twenty years, is it so much
time to make love
impossible? If so, pity
us. I can imagine lying
my head in your lap
next to that oak tree, your fingers
idle in my hair, Keats pouring
out of your lips, my eyes
quiet. Truly, you could
be my father, and we would raise
more than one eyebrow,
walking - arms linked - to battle
family weddings and faculty
lunches. I can handle
whispers, can you?

There is a coffee place near campus called Cupz. It's a great place to get material - people meet in there and chat with one another about the craziest stuff. The other day I listened to these two girls talk about their professor and how the one girl really thought that after the semester was over he was going to ask her out. "He's ONLY 20 years older than me" she said. "21" said the other, "and he has a WIFE." And so, a poem.

Virginia Woolf, Summer 1940

Rivers call to me in my sleep, I wake to the last
dying sound of my last name, sputtering, screaming,
sometimes spoken softly down the hall
with the voice of God, not men.

I lie in the bathtub, white dress
floating, conjuring Ophelia
foreseeing Anne, and Sylvia,
newborn skin, wrinkled and raw.

The dress drips for days, hanging
on a rod, unnoticed pools
collecting in a damp
room of my own.

Edges of lace curl,
too many trips to the bath.
It will soon be time to button
myself in for good, give
myself to the running
sound of water, smooth
stones under my fingertips, hair
trailing behind with leaves,
paper, and a sunken pen.

This is another class assignment, to write about an historical character. My fiction class helped a lot with this project: I am grateful to Chris, Samantha, Mark, John and Cody for being early to class and listening to my ramblings about female poets and how to choose the exact right word to describe Virginia's premonition of the deaths of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Wanting

We want to be in love
don’t we? Or is it just

habit thrusting us into
one another, that one

will do. His job is good
enough to raise babies by

nightlight, a crib in each
room. Cradles full of limbs

torn from the womb of every
last forlorn mother, nursing

nanny. We want to love
ourselves, even when hate,

indifference and loss
smother the very light -

ning we saw that night
together in the storm.

Pen and Ink

Words pour out of me sometimes
I get on my knees in the corner
thanking the muse and Mickey Finn.

Other times I sit blinking, pen
scrawling nothing, tiny trolls
stealing my words before they are written.

I dream of notebooks, words
mocking me from the pages, known
only to the sleep-keepers.

Not a good day for writing for me, obviously. Hopefully things will settle down and I'll have something better tomorrow. But it's still a poem, I'm on day seven!

Negative Living

for J.

Throw the baby out
with the bath water
she’ll find her way
back inside. Better
get rid of a few
necessities, than keep
so many useless
plastic toys, broken
sandwich machines,
a single red shoe.
Your diamond ring
may snag on the dusty
rug he bought
when the first
baby was new,
the stone may fall
out in the grass
its meaning devoured
by worms.

My friend introduced me to the term "Negative Living" yesterday morning. It means you throw out or get rid of more things than come in the house. It's all about purging, right?

Newness

Photo courtesy of Thomas Bramwell

Those chairs have hearts
see? she points for him across
newspapers, egg yolks drying on bread
tiny white pitchers of curdled cream.
The sun shines through leaving
grids on the concrete.

We overhear, quietly clasp
hands across our Sunday coffee,
usual blueberry muffins, crumbling
next to pools of melting butter.
Your eyes jump into mine
fluttering my belly.

This poem came about after a friend of mine commented that all of my poetry was sad. This is my attempt at not being so sad. The photo was taken by my friend Tom, an amazing photographer and a good guy. Expect to see more of his work through the month - writing about photos is helpful when you're trying to post one a day.

A Thursday Night

‘I disagree’
over our wine bottle
she says with a wave
brushing off my
claim to womanhood.

‘We should all marry
once. Those other girls flip
through life wondering
always with the wondering.’

We see her point. Adjust
black patent pumps
stilettos with cute buttons over
bandaged heels-

we walk in line to meet
the only girl who dared bring
her husband.

Theft of the Book

after C.D. Wright

candles snuffed out
across
arizona
no one jumps
out of cars
I fall asleep
writing
re-writing
the unknown
poem
of our
spirit
awakened
by the fullness

This poem directly mimic's a poem by C.D. Wright titled "Gift of the Book". I wrote the poet and asked for permission to reprint her version here, but as yet I have not heard back. If I do I will update this post. Otherwise, go to the library and check out her book Tremble. The poem is on page 27. Another great poem called "Autographs" on page 18 is much more difficult to mimic, so we'll save that for another day.

UPDATE: The poet, C.D. Wright, wrote me back this morning giving me permission to use her poem. Originally printed in "Tremble" (Echo Press 1997), and again in "Steal Away: Selected and New Poems" (Copper Canyon Press 2002)

Gift of the Book

lights go off
all over
rhode island
everyone falls
into bed
I stay awake
reading
re-reading
the long-awaited
prose
of your
body
stunned
by the hunger

Continuation

The cabbages
are dancing in the sun
means     nothing.
The garden stands still

as a lake would,    only
leaves of cabbages, lit
and dancing,
yes        dancing.

You called me ma petite
choux      circa 1987
back when I was
your     little     cabbage.

This poem is for my writing class. The assignment was to take the last line of a poem we wrote this semester and make a brand new poem. I think that was the assignment. Anyway, that's what I did.

The Opposite

Poem and open
have the same letters.

No, they don’t
but almost, they are
almost the same, or maybe

exactly opposite. What word?
What word is the opposite
of poem?

Truth? Then?
You? Open?

Where is the angel
for me to wrestle?

We all wear white shirts,
look into blue eyes
blue like paint
those eyes, those young
young eyes.
They can’t see the blackboard
but they see my hand
on this paper
they see everything
yet nothing, nothing at all.

Those young blue eyes
on my tired bruised hand
make the poem
open.