Restless

This week’s painting-prompt at Fifty Two Pieces is Gregory Grenon’s Moth Girl. I couldn’t help but think of it in tandem with Lesley Dill’s Standing Man with Radiating Words:

Restless

It’s after midnight, the weekday just
a few hours ahead. The lamps should be off,
the piano lid closed, the curtains drawn,
the clothes in their hampers or on their hangers,
the laptop powered off. It is not the hour
for fingers on keyboards. But none of the manuals
have chapters on getting to sleep when wings
insist on emerging from our shoulderblades. When
we don’t know how to arrange the blankets
in ways that won’t crease our panache beyond repair
or ding the edges of the letters depending upon
both to give them weight and give them flight. There
is nothing to be done except to continue fumbling
through the almost-silence for whatever semblance
of almost-repose one can retrieve from the shadows:
Martha runs through “Greensleeves” first as a boogie
and then as the blues. Across the room,
Isaac holds a “g” too close, like an umbrella
he will refuse to unfurl even when the rain
showers down as a thousand tiny nails,
glittering to the sight but dull to the ear.
It’s not an hour for sunlight: Martha moves on
to a tune I don’t know, but it’s thick with smoke
and the one drink too many that spells the abyss
between a drunken nap and sleepless sorrow.
It’s a song that’s good company for the self-forlorn:
the letters on Isaac’s back droop into drowsy folds,
and I drift into slumber as Martha eases the song to its end.

– pld

PAD 18 and 19

My weekend went off its rails in a spectacular but mostly enjoyable way, and I blame movies: Friday night’s excursion to see Sita Sings the Blues was followed by a nice dinner, during which one of my companions confessed she had never tasted a sazerac before, which then resulted in cocktails, port, and whisky back at our house (and her eventually staying the night).

Then, on Saturday, I saw My Neighbor Totoro, and spent the rest of the day resisting the urge write futurefic about its characters and to splurge on plushie slippers.

I resorted to concentrating on a difficult section in one of my existing fics-in-progress to help get my brain back into gear, but then I got engrossed in what the characters weren’t managing to say to each other, and what was supposed to have been a 500-word write-it-out-and-fix-it-later pre-supper indulgence turned into most of my weekend wrangling with multiple variations of three lines of dialogue (because the second line turned out to be a darling that needed killin’, only I didn’t get around to admitting that until after supper tonight). For a fic in a rare fandom that maybe five people will read. I have the stupidest compulsions this side of the Cumberland.

All that said, the 541 words I came up with delight me: a major reason I write fanfic is because it pushes me to engage more deeply with canon, and I end up surprising myself with dialogue and plot twists that weren’t anywhere in my consciousness when I started the story in question. That’s true of poetry as well: my piece for yesterday’s Poetic Asides prompt, “interactions,” was originally going to be something about William Shakespeare and Michael Jordan — I’d parked in space #23 in the Belcourt lot when I went to see Totoro, so that got me thinking about soaring and mastery and how neither Renaissance dramas nor NBA games are solo efforts (Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday is April 23, and Jordan’s jersey number in Chicago was #23).

But is that what I ended up with? No….

Practicing Jump Shots With William Shakespeare

Considering that I’m near-sighted, with
next-to-zero hand-eye coordination,
we’re definitely not in heaven, but
considering how many commandments I’ve trashed
and how he probably didn’t love his wife enough,
we’re in awfully good shape for the damned, and it helps
that we don’t actually get to talk, what with chasing
the eight out of ten balls we don’t quite manage
to catch from the shadows on the sidelines, and
then more chasing after the nine out of ten
that miss the hoop. The bounce and clunk of the balls
supply a rhythm — DAH-dah, DAH-dah-dah,
dah, dah-DAH, dah-DAH-dah-dah-DAH —
I ought to turn into a song, and on
the other side of the paint, I can tell
Mr. Shakespeare’s shooting to miss
different parts of the backboard, so he can see
for himself which parts actually shake
and which remain mute and unmoved.
If this were a different playground, I’d ride
his ass about his rot about “ever-fixed marks”
but no one’s keeping score, and when he lobs
a beautiful iamb my way — dah-DAH —
I fling it straight through the hoop, all net.

# # #

As for Sunday’s prompt, “anger,” I was originally stumped — not for lack of things to say on the topic, but “things to say” isn’t the same as “things I’m ready to say,” never mind “things sayable in lyric form.” There’s a page in my planner across which I scrawled a couple dozen ideas during lunchtime. When I finally sat down to do more with the tulips, my working title was “Remains” — but halfway through my original second stanza, I changed the title to “Aftermath,” and then I went back to the top of the poem and rewrote every line I’d typed in so far. (Today’s word for the writing process is definitely Sisyphean.)

Aftermath

This morning, the tulips were fresh
in a florist’s vase: four were candy pink,
four were butter yellow,
four were milk white,
and one was licorice purple-black.

Now they are confetti on the driveway.
The glass has been swept up, but I cannot
repair how the water blurred the “3”
on your daughter’s hopscotch trail.

I have been making a point
of preparing meals
that will keep for several days.

Even so, after you both
left the table before dessert,
I had to count to ten
while I rinsed the dishes.

– pld

[N.b. Not an autobiographical poem, but with friends whose marriages are breaking up, the topic has not been far from my mind.]

Shark Eye

One of the halau at Merrie Monarch did a dance in the name of Keku`iapowa, who was the mother of Kamehameha the Great, and her craving to eat a shark’s eye. And it ran out into a good draft so I’m only going to put a few lines here:

It is the gods put a taste in my mouth, a destiny
I will transform by teeth and tongue and gut and bring forth
into the world as dance and song and shit
and a son…

This one I definitely want to come back to next month, as it is one of two successful poem-things about Hawai`ian women.

L`Elephant

Inspiration from Silent Thunder didn’t come out entirely like I intended but I may come back to the first few lines for another take:

The world is smells before sound,
sound before crashing light,
light—at the last—fading into savannah.
To pay attention is to move
your trunk into and out-of everything
lit up in infrasound. Your hide, your song
part of the dripping, steamy, rumbling mess.

your face is a birthday

Progress: Well, I’ve been sick. I even took yesterday off work, and I have to be really sick to do that, since – as a temp – I don’t get sick time, and (instead of writing poetry) slept and tried to keep my electrolytes up.

I had written a poem about cheese (after the G.K. Chesterton quote that’s been going around twitter: “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”) and a poem about my husband’s body parts, so I’m up to 16 poems written this month putting me two behind. Now that I’m feeling human again, I intend to try my hand at some more poems about food.

Prompt for today: I’m rather taken with Read Write Poem’s prompt from yesterday: missing something, or something missing. If that doesn’t work for you, you can always write about cheese.

Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.

NaPoWriMo Days 15, 16, 17: Brianna

Day 15:

I’ve been trying to get in the habit of writing for an hour or so in a coffee shop in the morning.  I work from home and I’m finding I need some kind physical-spatial work/writing/rest-of-life delineation.  There are a lot of coffee shops within a few blocks of my house.  So far the one I went to on this day is at the bottom of the list.  Sorry, Waves.  I spent the time revising (I really enjoy revising, most of the time–I know many writers don’t like it so much, but it’s one of my favourite things) road trip poems in preparation for…

Day 16:

First installment of my new writing group.  This is the first thing of the sort that I’ve done since finishing my MFA.  There are 5 of us, all poets (among other things) with various interests, levels of experience and degrees of being established.  We looked at everything from concrete poetry to a job posting.  It felt great x 10000 to spend some focused time with writers and talk and think about writing again.  The plan is to meet every month, and I’m stoked.  Having that small externally-imposed deadline to force gently encourage me to write isn’t a bad thing, either.  For my part, I tabled revisions of the first three road trip poems.  That was fun.  One of the other writers had brought a poem about snow geese, too.

Day 17:
Finished formatting and printing out submissions for 5 journals and a chapbook publisher.