Freshman English

Image from de.wikipedia.org

Robert Frost, I stopped loving you when I started hating him—

the professor who wore the same polyester slacks to every class,

and ranted about his stepmother and dot matrix printers

(he loathed them both in equal measure),

who said listen here missy when he didn’t like my questions,

and collected our papers but never returned them,

who dismissed Dickinson as useless,

and found shampoo pointless—

It was all his fault. He filtered all your images

through the pool of sweat on his upper lip

and the green stuff stuck between his bottom teeth,

leaving only snow and bugs

and cows with shriveled udders

and boys who have no business using buzz saws

and middle-aged men who wander in the woods

worrying about walls and whining about apples.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him sully

your pristine New England verses. But I was too tender.

I was only eighteen. And you seemed so old.

And he was so mean.

It's Not Me, It's You

Fair warning:

Today is not your day.

I don’t have time

to give you attention

and God knows

you need

a lot of it.

My plate is full.

I have a job. There are

students to teach, papers

to grade, people

to meet. As we speak,

there are

online forums

awaiting

my moderation.

And though you may

laugh, I’ll have you know

that I have other

things in my life

to write,

like emails

and reports.

And I’ll just say it:

I find their

non-figurative nature

surprisingly

attractive.

Their straight lines

leave me less
twisted and
tortured with
self-doubt.

And when
we are finished,
they don't
make me roll them
around
to feel how they
sound
before
I send
them
out.

Enough

Celebrating Mother's Day and the upcoming Listen to Your Mother show by re-posting some of my motherhood-themed poems this week...

My sixteen-year-old boy arrived at the hospital at 6:30
that Saturday morning to sit with me.
He sat between the window and my bed, his long fingers
curled around my own IV-taped hand.
And he was beautiful,
his lanky body bent over my bed, partially
shadowed by the window-framed sun.

He had gotten up so early just so he could sit with me
before his track and field meeting at school,
but I couldn’t move my morphine-heavy
eyes and lips to talk to him.
It seemed like I should say so much,
but I could only manage a few I-love-yous and
you-don’t-have-to-stays. But he did.

I kept drifting out and tripping up in my own
bad dreams and staples and tubes. I couldn’t
quite hold myself there with him. I kept wandering,
two nights back, to my mumbling pre-surgery prayers.
And I realized I could have done better.
Instead of my weak now-and-at-the-hour-of-our-deaths
and acts of contrition, I should have just said,

Look Lord, Here Lord, I made this boy.
And that would have been enough.

Waters

Celebrating Mother's Day and the upcoming Listen to Your Mother show by re-posting some of my motherhood-themed poems this week...

I wanted to say
When I saw
Your blue eyes brim
That the waters
That flood so fast
And rush past your lashes
Are the same ones
That spill from mine
That they come
From the same stream
Of love and regret
Of grasp and release
Of swell and stab
Are the same tides
Of contracting and pushing
Of me and other
That clean
And then roil
The bonds
Between child
And mother

Promising (Catch-up Haikus for NaPoWriMo Day 9 and 10)

A boy’s shadow stretched

Beneath the basketball hoop

On the dry driveway

A napping dog stretched

Beneath a barely budding

Japanese maple

****

In the aftermath of the migraines, I am resorting to haiku to get me all caught up.  I hope to have more substantial offerings this weekend.

Rage (NaPoWriMO Day 5)

My spring softening
froze over upon seeing
deer eat my tulips


www.sweetclipart.com

Relief (NaPoWriMo Day 4)

When the grass

On the path to the

River turns green

Everything in me

Loosens and releases, finds relief

In knowledge that

I have a

Solid, straight place to put

My feet and

A way forward

Without risk of injury or

Muddy, demeaning grief

NaPoWriMo Prompt 4
Today’s optional prompt is to write a lune. A lune is a sort of English-language variation on the haiku, meant to better render the tone of the Japanese haiku than the standard 5-7-5 format we all learned (and maybe loved) in elementary school. There are a couple of variants on the lune form, but just to keep things simple, let’s try the version developed by Jack Collum. His version of the lune involves a three-line stanza. The first line has three words. The second line has five, and the third line has three. You can write a poem that consists of just one stanza, or link many lune-stanzas together into a unified poem. Happy writing!

Arrival (NaPoWriMo Day 1)

The way the river swells and pushes

The way the meadow sits brown and heavy

The way I switch with distrust from wool socks to cotton

The way the trailhead parking lot overflows on Sundays

The way ice gives way to mud and makes the hikers giddy

The way my face craves affection,

And turns with gratitude

To the stingy, sometimes-blue sky.

Common

From Great Expectations, Chapter 9




...she had said that I was common,
and that I knew I was common,
and that I wished I was not
common,
and that the lies had come of it
somehow,
though I didn't know how.

But Joe
took the case altogether out
of the region of
metaphysics,
and by that means,
vanquished it.

If you can't get to be oncommon
by going straight
you'll never
get to do it
through going crooked.

Pause you who read this,
and think
for a moment
of the long chain of iron
or gold,
of thorns
or flowers,
that would never have bound you,
but for the formation of the first
link
on one
memorable
day.

Hello, blogworld!  I've been gone a long time, so I'm not sure if anyone is out there!  I'm trying to get back into the swing of things by using We Write Poem's prompt #109, which asks us to make a poem from another writer's prose. All credit for this, then, must go to Mr. Charles Dickens.  Please note: "oncommon" is not a typo.  It is how the character Joe says "uncommon."

Demeter and Persephone

It was a hard-fought labor
that gave her life.
And so it was
her mother's right
to fight again
to bring her back
from the murk,
the seductive depths.

To call upon the gods
to restore her.

To pull her up,
to drag her out.
To insist that she re-break the waters
and remember her name.
To cajole, to whisper,
to cry out, to claim
her daughter
for the light.

It was that maternal push
to never forget
to always remind,
to wail and to rage--
to blight the crops
if need be--
that brought her daughter out,
whole and free.

So when she was restored,
she knew what saved her.

Reborn at last
to her mother's arms
and walking once more beneath the sun,
her gratitude
held her
in check.

She couldn't explain.
She didn't dare share
how the darkness touched her,
or who she was
when she was lost
down there.

Spool

The sleeping thread
keeps close to its spool,
its ends hidden
from probing fingers,
wrapped in batting,
zipped tight in a pouch,
reveals nothing
of its potential energy—
Guarded by an imperfect memory
that knows
the danger
of letting loose
its kinesthetic possibilities
of complete separation,
of unraveling—
Protected by the itchy persistence
of one who knows the chaos
of tangled fingers
and endless webs—
Recalls enough to confirm
that neither end
has any business
near the eye
of a needle

Core

When what’s at the center
is a black, leaking hole
at that point
there's not much to know
No man-made chemicals—
neither dispersants nor antacids—
can stop the flow
And then if all the muscle goes
into the plugging of it
there’s not much left
in the way of energy
or intuition
or intellectual heft
to address questions of origin
or birth
least of all matters
of self
or worth
~~~~
I have been suffering terribly from writers block for over a week now and have not fulfilled my partial NaPoWriMo pledge! I've decided, however, to not beat myself up about this any further, and just see how many poems I can post over the next few days. This poem is a response to one of Big Tent Poetry's prompts from last week, which asked us to write about what is at the core or center of something. This brought up memories of some emergency surgery I had a few years back, and I went from there to this...

Present

"Woman with crossed arms" Picasso

A thousand small hurts
tenderly tied with ribbon
of sharp rusty wire

alone in the dark
unopened and indignant
plot quiet revenge

This prompt is loosely based on one or more of this week's prompts at Big Tent Poetry.

Jack

From the beginning

your hands moved with the instinct

of the second born son,

first banging on me from the inside,

so I wouldn't forget you were coming.

Then reaching out in welcome,

like happy baseball mitts, clapping.

Or balled up into fists,

pushing hard against me,

while simultaneously

insisting,

on sleeping right beside me.

Your hands took no prisoners,

even in peekaboo,

but always pointed just in time

to the full blue pools of your eyes,

or the perfect curve of your dimples--

smart hands!

And they felt so right

resting in mine,

but too often I had to drag them from behind--

the plight of the second child:

never enough sleep,

never enough time.

But now your grown hands strum your guitar,

and I can't remember the last time

your hands reached

for me.

But I want you to know

that you have always had me

head over heels,

out of my mind

in love.

My hands

will always miss yours

wanting mine.

Status Update

When you text your friends

under the desk in my class

I can still see you

Your smart phone does not

make you invisible, dude

there's no app for that

When spring comes

Snow melts and each word

from sputtering angry lips

melts into tulips

This kind of follows one of this week's prompt's from Big Tent Poetry. I'm having to resort to Haiku to keep this thing going!

For Colleen

On the day we met,

I was struck by two things:

how your face opened up

like a book of kindness

and how completely in tune you were

with your own body.

You were confidence in motion.

I was in awe.

And my brother was in love.

And each day since then,

you have been

the sister of my heart,

a gift to my family.

Time and again,

I have seen

how you harness seamless energy

of mind, body, spirit:

on the basketball court,

on the dance floor,

Even in the throes of labor,

when you reached down

and delivered your own son

from your own body--

one of the most beautiful things

I have ever seen.

And so it seemed impossible

that the words breast cancer

belonged anywhere near your name.

A cruel incongruity.

A ridiculous mistake.

And I wouldn't have blamed you

if you had slammed that beautiful,

open, kind face

shut for a while.

But you didn't.

You wrote your story for all to read.

And you triumphed--

through surgery and radiation and fatigue

and teaching and mothering.

You came out cancer free!

And I just wanted to tell you

how grateful I am,

and how beautiful you are,

and how much I love you.

My sister,

my hero,

my friend.

April

It's not true that April enrages me.

I reserve my violent emotions for March,

that drunken bastard who stays too long,

and spews sloppy snow all over my shoes,

and slushes himself all over my lawn.

No, by the time April arrives,

I am done.

I am spent.

I'm too tired to shake my fist at an April sky.

March has worn me down,

softened me up,

so that by the time April comes round,

All he has to do is show me some tulips,

And just like that--

I

puddle

up.

This was written in response to Big Tent Poetry's prompt that asked us to start a poem with "It's not true that..."

Pain

Manipulation

of memory, the genius

of pain. The body

bends too easily

to accommodate.

The psyche

promptly imitates

such hospitality

of nerves and tissue and ligament,

thus completing

the fallacy.

The self detects no deceit.

Intruder becomes

pampered guest

then

companion

then--

most cruel of all--

family.

Hinge

This week's prompt at Big Tent Poetry asked us to come up with our own holiday. I didn't come up with a specific holiday, but I thought of something to celebrate...

I would raise my glass
to all that go
from impossible
to inevitable
with no state of being
in between:
snow and tulips
babies and freckles
democracy and wrinkles
you and me