Write Their Days Enchanted

 

My daughter says

the children always

bear my scent

when they return,

a sort of story

on their skin.

And so I walk the aisles

spraying paper strips

too small to hold a verse

but heady.

Beautiful

Happy

Sensuous

Love

Blue

and Red 

Flower, Fleur,  Poppy.

Ah! 

Enchanted. 

We'll spray their days

Enchanted,

Let's write their lives

Enchanted,

as childhood

ought to be.

Young and Easy

Yesterday was the birthday of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. It was the power of Thomas's poetry that snared me at seventeen. I've been lost in poems ever since. Now much older than he lived to be, I fool around at writing, but really, I'm just a great audience for real poets. 

Kerry at IGRT reminded me of Dylan Thomas's birthday, so I blame her for this:

YOUNG AND EASY

on reading Dylan Thomas in October

And so,

The gifts that sift and fall

On fallow ground

Grow old and spotted

As October's rose

Or the hand that holds them now.

Unyoked, you plow plant reap

Fine wheat.

Too soon, too young

You scatter, seed, outrun

The dying sun.

Yellow Cat Story

Yellow Cat Story



Every morning, before the house awakes,
I sit in the dark with my coffee
In my favorite cup that reminds me
Of other rooms and other doors.
I sit in the dark, save for the light
Of the screen on which I peck out my words,
One finger moving through my mind,
Stirring thought like swirling cream
In a Parisian cup. Anyway, I digress.
I usually do. This is a poem about my cat,
The missing one, the nameless Mister, Mister,
Whose missing name I never said without a lisp.
Mithter, mithter, cat talk, baby talk
For a cat I swore would outlive me,
For a cat now gone by years, not days.
Again. This is a poem about a cat. Not Mister
But the damn big yellow cat that Poppy says
Killed him. We found him under the mountain laurel,
Looking caved in and small, Mister I mean. Buried him
Near the creek in some approximation to Lady.
(Someday I expect to see their bird thin bones
Wash away in a flood.)
This is a poem about that damn yellow cat
That killed Mister and --
Every morning as I sit here
In the dark, me and my screen, mining memory,
That damn yellow cat comes up on the deck,
Causing the motion sensor light to turn on,
So the morning dark, which envelopes me and
Makes me feel like some explorer hunched
Around her fire, the motion sensor light come on,
The morning dark disappears
And that damn yellow cat comes slinking to the door.
Every morning he -- he couldn't be a she, could he?
Every morning for three years straight,
He comes in the dark to my door,
Turns on the light outside, and turns that big
Yellow satisfied face to me.

Criminal Admits Her Guilt

Happy New Year, All! I wanted to write a New Year's poem and found myself falling into my natural way of writing, which I am certain grates on most modern readers' sensibilities. So, borrowing a form from Robert Herrick, who would die again if he knew it, and blaming Real Toads for the inspiration, here's my first poem, er apology, of 2013:



Criminal Admits Her Guilt
or
Vain Attempt to Write a New Year's Poem




The days, they fall away like dust,
Like stardust from my hand
That stains my palm with fiery ash,
Then scatters o'er the land...

No, wait;
I've nothing new to say,
Rehash
The same tired image, meter, rhyme...

I write the way I must;
The words, they fail? This is my crime.

woman writes, woman rhymes, woman loves

What could be more unpopular than a poem that rhymes? Maybe a poem about happiness? After all, aren't we poetic types supposed to be full of woe? Well, sorry folks, but I just can't manufacture any angst lately. Oh, sure, there are things in my life that are difficult -- things I would change -- but in the end, I am a very happy person.

When I started thinking about the TFE's Poetry Bus challenge this week, to be still and feel what is inside us, I could only think of one line: I have loved and been loved. Have I had hardships? Yes. Loss? Absolutely, heartbreakingly. But through it all, I am blessed to be able to say that I have faith and I have loved and been loved.

For the full Poetry Bus challenge and to read the other (probably non-rhyming, maybe not-so-happy) Poetry Bus riders, go here. It's a talented crew and a rollicking ride!


deep within

a warm wind formed in rain skirts below the windowpane
stirs the curtains skips along the wall

travels gently down the hall skids across the cold stone floor blows in
through an open door to the heart-room of the home

where the woman sits alone works the pen that tells her art
thinks about the singing sound made by choirs of angels' wings

as they gather as they swing through the ether and of weaving at a loom
where the art reflects the heart of the weaver then a thought comes

fully formed from the wind where it was borne:  "Contentment deep within,"
in the poem that she forms in the music that she hears in the blessings

of the years in the people she has known in the love
she has been shown contentment on the wind skirts the curtains

rushes in mixes with her softest sigh weaves itself
into the dye of the fabric of her very happy life

about a sunflower

ABOUT A SUNFLOWER


I am  sitting tonight in front of the window
staring at the blackness staring back. A cozy scene:
a woman, seated at a worn wooden table, a bowl
of oranges and lemons in front of her, an arrangement
of cheerful plates on the wall behind, pen in hand,
her arm lying across a paper angled just so, big dark eyes
like holes in her face looking back from the glass.
All summer, I watched from this same seat
a sunflower, a tall hairy stem, pointy sepal arms,
hundreds of bumpy brown seeds, bursting
little teeth, little rows hoed in circles, a plinking
stone in a still brown pond,
bonneted, beribboned, turning this way
and that, reaching up a round child's face,
angling for her father, a heavy earthen mother,
finally falling beneath her weighty thoughts, beaten
by the rain, become a blinded skull, her eyes pecked out.
Examined from the ground up, imagined
from the sky down -- the worm's view, the crow's view,
in memory, the poet's view -- a blind reflection
in the glass tonight while the words can't find
where the woman fits in the scheme
of all these things.

Appointments

The Poetry Bus this week, driven by Don't Feed the Pixies, challenges us to follow the signs (real or imagined) to wherever they take us. As I am reading Mary Oliver's, A Poetry Handbook, in which she talks about the importance of keeping appointments with your writing self, I've begun to think about following the signs to that place where I can do what I've set myself to do.

I will find it
Somewhere fair,
In rarified, clarified air,
The land and the house
And the room
Of my own.

It will be
A silky stop
Above the rocky crop;
A quiet refuge
That clamors
To be found.

It waits;
It watches the path
I tread,
The fallow past,
Its patience an ancient,
Beating, breathing thing.

I've appointments
There to keep,
Annointments hallowed, deep
In this meeting
And this resting place
For me.


Just a note: This wholly unsatisfactory piece is part of keeping appointments with myself. Good, bad, or indifferent, I will write.  While you're here, take a look at the two posts below this one. Practicing. Practicing.

lost haiku

I lost a haiku.
Somewhere on the way to work,
It flew from the car.

Somewhere on the way to work,

Between the dashboard and the zigzag lines,

I dropped a haiku from my mind.

I said it to myself and to the air

And to a clutch of crows

Astretch the power lines,

But somewhere on the way to work

Between the dashboard and the clutch of crows

Sitting on the power lines

Like exclamations on the sky,

I dropped a haiku from my mind.

I searched for it along the power lines

Between the dashboard and the hanging leaves

Bowing with the morning trees,

But somewhere on the way to work

Between the dashboard and the hanging leaves

Bending with the trees

Like supplicants to sunrise,

I dropped a haiku from my mind.

I hoped to find it caught among the boughs

Between the dashboard and the hills of green

Climbing to the rising sun,

But somewhere on the way to work

Between the dashboard and the climbing hills

Escorting me through morning

Like ushers garbed in green,

I dropped the haiku from my mind.

I sought for it among the climbing hills

Between the dashboard and the parking lot

Swallowing my car

Like an open mouth,

But somewhere on the way to work

Between the dashboard and the workday world

Waiting to devour my life

Like an eater of rhymes,

I dropped a haiku from my mind.

perspective

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

in memory

you stand

an abstraction

of sensuous delight

however

reverie out

of all proportion

with grim reality

does not withstand

a detailed scrutiny

i write to invent

not re-create

therefore

i must

state

you

are

a matter

of perspective

On Bebelplatz and 25 Most Influential Writers

Being tagged to list the twenty-five writers who have influenced me the most caused me to remember a place and time when the words of writers floated as ash into the darkened sky…

On Bebelplatz

On sunny days
on Bebelplatz,
the burning room
reflects a soft blue sky
as travelers gape to see
an empty shelf.
Ghostly volumes, dimly glimpsed
amidst the rush, reflect
faces of the curious
eager to be off
to find the next big thing.
One man, unawares,
steps hard on echoes
of the burning leaves,
while far away
under an Appalachian sky,
a child peers up
through burnished leaves
that dapple tales
of her dark knights
on sunny days,
never once in her wildest
dreams perceiving
that books may burn
or man may step on thoughts
or smoke may stain the
soft blue dreamer’s sky.


25 Most Influential Writers

When K. Lawson-Gilbert of Old Mossy Moon challenged me to list the twenty-five writers who have influenced me the most, I knew what a difficult task was before me. Deep and wide exposure to good literature has certainly influenced my thinking, which in turn, influences my writing.

As air is to breath, literature is to writing. Reading and writing for me are recursive processes: I read, I write, I read again. My own writing informs my thinking, just as my thinking informs my writing, but my thoughts have also been formed by the West Virginia hills, the people whom I love, the roads I have traveled, and the writers whose works I have inhaled my entire life long.

Narrowing this list was nearly impossible, and I apologize to all my dearly beloved authors whose names do not appear below:

William Shakespeare

Homer

Charles Dickens

William Faulkner

John Keats

Percy Bysshe Shelley

William Wordsworth

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

William Blake

Thomas Hardy

Emily Bronte

Emily Dickinson

Edgar Allan Poe

Alfred Lord Tennyson

John Steinbeck

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Gerard Manly Hopkins

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Walt Whitman

William Blake

Virginia Woolf

Toni Morrison

E.B.White

I challenge Sarah Hina, Rachel Westfall, and Julie Buffaloe-Yoder to show us your lists!