Lenten Sonnets (Second Post)

This will be the third religious post in a row. I try to avoid that, since I know I do have some non-religious readers (and readers for whom reading about religion might be boring, which may not have the same members as the former group). But anyway, here's another sonnet, one that is maybe more accurate in sentiment than the previous one I posted.

3

And when you fast, he said, do not look dreary,
Like hypocrites, for they deform their faces
To show the world that they with fast are weary;
They have received at least their promised places.
And when you fast, put oil upon your head,
And wash your face, so that your fast may not
Be seen by others, by the Father read
Alone, who will reward you with your lot.
But God, complaint is my preferred expression;
Moaning is my wine, griping my bread.
I publicize my woes as harsh oppression
And groan until the time of fast has fled.
I ask you, God, to turn my pouts to graces
And fashion patient psalms from painful traces.

Lenten Sonnets (First Post)

This Lent I am supposedly writing a sonnet for each day. I say supposedly because I haven't been very good lately. I can still catch up though--I might do that this Saturday. At any rate, as a bit of motivation to continue this practice, I will post one that I wrote last year up here. My attempt last year failed horribly, so I'm using the few I did write as a bit of a buffer. This is the second in my sequence so far.

2

This fasting is a desert we escape
Into together; we, like Jacob, walk
The sandy paths of penitence and ape
Our loss amidst the plains of ash and chalk.
The Promised Land, our distant Canaan, lies
Out there, ahead, a season’s journey hence;
Invisible beyond the rocks and sky,
Oasis lost among mirages dense.
But that the Lord once met temptation here,
This waste would not be sacred; by walking we
Do consecrate this barrenness each year
And shape from dust cathedrals bare and free.
In wilderness we make a stony altar
Which will both fast and wand’ring faster alter.

Theoretical Sonnet I

For a seminar I had to summarize Derrida's "Signature, Event, Context"; after I completed that assignment, I decided to do it again in the form of a sonnet. (To those who don't know, even lit theory nerds who disagree with Derrida still get a little bit enamoured, enough to do silly things like write a sonnet about one of his essays.) I found this exercise very helpful, and I might try it again with other theorists.

I'm not sure how much this is worth to you if you aren't already somewhat familiar with Derrida (a deconstructivist), but at any rate I thought I'd put it here, just in case.

Final disclaimer: I'm not saying that I agree with everything Derrida says; this is a summary, not a statement of my opinion.

I sing my song of Derrida; this dry
And second thing communicates to thee,
My absent reader, that this sonnet’s free,
And I, with my intent and context, die.
This place from which I write, you cannot scry,
Nor can I know what meaning you can see,
Nor whether eyes to tears shall movèd be;
To origins quotation shan’t comply.
This sonnet, then, does not communicate;
Could speech? Ah, no, for words of tumbling air
Can only mean in language spoken late
By others, diff’ring concepts here and there.
Speech and writing, each such stratagem
Can graft again upon another stem.

Poetry from the MoA

I am going to do something I will likely regret. Due to my continued absense from this blog, resulting in equal parts from overwork and procrastination, I feel the need to post something, even if it's not great. As such, I am going to present some shoddy poetry I wrote at the Museum of Anthropology. I thought it would be cool to go to the MOA and sit down in front of artifacts and just write free verse poetry on the objects I saw. And on this forum I am going to treat you to the poor poetry I wrote.


The Lion and the Owl (in the Koerner Ceramic Gallery of the MOA)
15 Oct 2010

Gold and baroque
--as baroque as a piped waltz--
the lion holds his shield and helm
which blends into his unruly chest
On the red shield is his little twin
rampant and roaring as silently as his larger self
Ornate golden lion, your glazed stare
plumbs the empty space before you

Smooth, blue, yellow, and white
--as plump as a jar--
the owl too looks wide-eyed into
the air, shining with the tinny chords
He comes to the lions shoulders,
his wings by his side hold no shield
His own flat plumes will do for his colours


Hamsalagamł (bumblebee masks) at the MOA
15 Oct 2010

Eight faces, eight dwarf cherub faces
their yellow seive-noses high between their eyes
cheeks sink down
and there is a man, a boy-man
looking at you across the room from an armchair
trying to see you with his poet's pen
seeing only your empty faces
But are your faces empty?
What history would those eyes dream
which looked through yours?
What do your eyes dance?


On Bill Reid's Haida Bear in the MOA
15 Oct 2010

the bear looks on
the canoe down whose length he stares is more polished than him,
worn with the grease of hands
but it is painted in the same colours, its prow the same red as his tongue
the man he sees through the arches is traced with the same black veins,
but these veins contain yellow and white,
unlike the bear's
the double serpent on the arch is the same weathered wood as the bear's long claws but they do not see that
the bear, from his corner, looks on


In the shadow on the chairs in the MOA
15 Oct 2010

there is a hummingbird
with a long beak
and folded wings still as wood
and it sits on a disc held by
seven stiff men who hold
their hands palms out against their many faces
--some faces shorn off--
and their small doll-feet hang suspended
above the eagle's cracked face
with a fissure running deeper than the frowns it cuts
past the pale end-less beak
over its chest and down its leg
into the claws that
clutch a disc sitting on
the heads of twelve men with unreadable expressive faces
and naked formless bodies and
who in their turn stand on
the head of a creature, human-like,
with no nose but a knotty hole
and the fault running through her eye
(she holds a child, damaged
in her sibilant asymmetrical arms)
and her knees turn together and that
crack still runs between them right down
to her crooked feet and vague toes
which hold the weight of them all.

Planaria

In murky ponds your flattened lengths you hide,

Your heads like tender diamonds gazing dim

'Long logs you use as cover for your slim

And soft bodies, your vision feeble-eyed.

Your race's many members creep in streams

Around this world, yet we the treading swains,

Whose errors cut upon you ample pain,

Do little know your cross-eyed, broken dreams.

Yet every brokenness will yield another

You, from your wound; each fragment blooms into

A separate self. A cloven head's now two

That share a body branching. Quarrels mother

You clones who split your lengths by pulling free;

You worms will grow through love--and injury.

Yup. Planaria are funny little critters.

This is more emphatically a draft than usual. If anyone is out there, interested in contributing, I have a question: do you prefer the fourth line as it is, or would you prefer to see it, "And soft bodies, with tiny muscles filled inside."? Further, would the twelfth line be better as it is, or rendered, "That share a branching body."? Other critiques also welcome.

I had wanted to do more with this, but I often find that sonnets hold less than I anticipate they will, so I have to make due. Perhaps I could write another planaria sonnet, one that should follow immediately after in the sequence, which discusses how sexual reproduction is more genetically beneficial than asexual reproduction... and, yet, asexual reproduction seems to directly benefit those planaria who get injured, since they reproduce their genes exactly. It might be worth another sonnet.

Actually, an aubadina might work well for this subject. Shame it's not a real tradition.

Tetramorium caespitum

or, Pavement Ant

You march with many sisters, Amazon.
Across your desert mount you track your twin
In rushed obedience to now begin
The second hill to bring adherents on
This upper plain, for war against your foes.
Of your six limbs you give but empty care;
For queen and colony alone you bear
The unexamined burdens, senseless blows.
If thinking were your province, then would you
Forsake your bloody kind? Does thought condone
That social animals desire to be alone?
Would reason force the end of selfless crews?
What fate's the maid's who lacks a queen to give
Her harvest to, and guards her chance to live?

Forficula auricularia

or, The European Earwig

Your body lithe, you swim in dying leaves,
A hunter seeking moribund remains,
In reeking flowers, dumps, and swollen eaves,
Devouring pests and, lacking them, our grains.
Translucent legs and vested wings your weeds,
Which nightly you parade as ghoulish gown,
Not down those tunnels that your naming reads,
Though still provoking fear with pinching crown.
But 'neath the wintry earth you lay your clutch
In chambers underground, and tending turn
Your eggs to forestall mould, and mother much
Those white nymphs who in spring your ways will learn.
From humankind you've found but constant strife;
Yet buried under death, you raise up life.

4 March 2010, Fort McMurray

For some reason earwigs have always fascinated me; their bodies seem so graceful, their browns so glowing and clear. I used to be afraid of them, but I'm not any more. If they pinch me, it's my own fault for handling them. However, I recognize how other people are afraid of them. I've wanted to write a sonnet on them for some time and, after researching them on Wikipedia and letting the ideas percolate for a few days, something finally came to me. I was meditating on the form of the sonnet, and the above structure resulted.

Lines broken to reflect pauses in reading:

Your body lithe,
you swim in dying leaves,
a hunter seeking moribund remains in reeking flowers
dumps
and swollen eaves,
devouring pests
and, lacking them,
our grains.

Translucent legs and vested wings your weeds
which nightly you parade as ghoulish gown,
not down those tunnels that your naming reads,
though still provoking fear with pinching crown.

But 'neath the wintery earth
you lay your clutch in chambers underground
and tending turn your eggs to forestall mould
and mother much those white nymphs
who in spring your ways will learn.

From human kind you've found but constant strife;
Yet buried under death
you raise up life.

Maybe the Most Horrific Thing I Have Ever Written

or, A Sonnet

I had been wanting to write a sonnet to Forficula auricularia (a la writing a sonnet to Cepaea nemoralis, seen here), but so far I have no idea how to proceed. However, my eyes glancing across my room, I happened to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sitting, as of yet unread, on my desk. A perfectly ghoulish inversion of sonnet conventions stuck me, in which the speaker's beloved mistress spurns him until she is turned into the living dead, at which point she is more than interested in consummating their not-so-mutual interests. Needless to say, I succumbed. What lies (or rather limps, or shambles) before you is the unfortunate result.

***

Zealous you pursue me, who, when 'live,

Of your alluring self you cruelly starved;

My love for you unslaked, in wood I carved

Beloved name of you who'd me deprived.
I craved your blinking eyes, your sable mane,

Each limping joke and, more than all, your brain.

Must now you answer diff'rently than when

In blushing breast your heart still pump'd out life?

So far have I avoided your love-bites;

This time I will surrender you to other men,

Releasing them 'gainst Laz'rus-aping you as wife;

Except I know you'll come for me some hunted night.

So I must ask, Will I, when meeting you undead,
Still loving, die? Or yet remove your maidenhead?

***

1 point for each sonnet convention or early modern pun that you can find.

1 point for each allusion to a zombie movie/comic/video game/haiku that you can find.

5 points if you can find the sonnet's hidden name.

I am dreadfully sorry about writing this. But maybe not so sorry that I won't post it.

I promise that my next sonnet will be a serious one.

Cepaea nemoralis

or, The Grove Snail

You little nomads, keep your secrets banked
Inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
And hide within those rounds your patient lores,
Enclosed among your kind, disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom, slow-footed news.
At leafy caravanaries you trade
Among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
To them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl
Your body; prongs are, like the point, in air,
A question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me, one bred
In a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?

I wrote this on Monday (the 15 of Feb), on the Winter Road between Fort Chipewyan and Fort McMurray. One of the things I miss about Ontario are the snails, especially the yellow ones, which from Wikipedia I gather are Cepaea nemoralis, or grove snails. I have written about the snail's wisdom before, but I decided to try the idea again. Actually, I like some of "Eulogy for the Garden," but not the whole thing. It needs a lot of work yet, and that's something I will some day give it. In the meantime, I'll expand the snail bit in a sonnet and not free verse. As the New Englander says in The Tommyknockers, "Real poims rhyme."

Re-written, so the line-breaks match the pauses:

You little nomads,
keep your secrets banked inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
and hide within those rounds your patient lores,
enclosed among your kind,
disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom,
slow-footed news;
At leafy caravanaries you trade among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
to them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl your body;
prongs are, like the point, in air, a question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me,
one bred in a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?

A Harp on the Athabasca

I'm digging into the archives for this one. (My personal archives, that is.) I haven't written anything publishable as of late, so I'll put this up. If/when I ever get around the publishing it in print, I'll likely have to take it down. Until then, here she be. (This is from a CWRI class portfolio. I might discuss it more elsewhere.)

A Harp on the Athabasca

Rob felt slightly idiotic, fussing over his camcorder and tripod as he watched Miranda bound down the ice, one hand steadying the instrument strapped over her back, no hesitation at all. Her harp easily cost more than his camera, but there he was, shifting his boots on the grit and trying to balance himself against his backpack. Miranda looked across the river when she got to the bottom, letting him stagger down the ice in privacy. When she could hear the pebbles scatter and grate under his feet, she turned to him and winked.
The Athabasca broke just weeks before, later in the year than it had for a long time, and sheets of ice were still piled on the banks, broken and jumbled up the slope and even into the gravel parking lot where the river bent by the water treatment ponds. Down where the fishermen sat with their coolers and folding chairs was narrower, backed up against the ice, but on days when the sunlight came down hot and direct, the coolness spread out from those wintry remains, keeping the heat at bay. A couple of young guys fished near the path down the ice and there was a family fishing nearer the bend just then, where the ice piled higher and its open face was cleaner.
They walked down to the family and looked for the elder in charge. A man with a deep tan and a smoker’s face seemed to be their best bet, so Miranda addressed him. The rough-haired woman, perched on the cooler to his left, squinted at her.
“I don’t suppose we could ask you to move?” she requested, straightening her back and squaring her shoulders as she spoke.
The cooler-woman squinted more.
“My friend and I are going to shoot a scene for our music video, and we’d like to do it here.” She pointed at the shore behind him. “We can’t exactly have folks in the background. It would be just for ten minutes. You could even watch us.”
The man worked it over with his lips and tongue and decided in the end he could move after all. They got up and dragged their chairs a little further along the beach, waving at their two fat boys to haul over as well.
“You don’t mind the booze, do ya?” he asked, gesturing to the bottles stuck in the softening ice.
Miranda looked at Rob.
“Nah,” he said.
With the family moved out of the way, the pair scanned the ground. They tossed a few beer bottles and cigarette packages out of view, and Rob pulled the little stool off the straps on his backpack. Miranda sat on it near the water’s edge. Rob set up the tripod.
“Hey,” he said, “the wind’s coming off the river. Did you say you wanted your hair blowing across your face?”
“Not too much,” she said, “but don’t you think that’d look kinda cool?”
“Sure, but if you want that you’ll have to face the ice.”
She turned, and the wind eddying off the ice tossed her loose hair around her face. Miranda hung most of it over her right shoulder so the camera still had an open view. The wind was modest and would not interfere too much with the sound. After they each made adjustments to their instruments, he nodded to her and she began to play.

Rob had met Miranda at interPLAY summer street festival the year before. He had been filming the buskers for a series he’d been working on about interactive performance and had asked the pretty girl playing a Celtic harp whether she minded if he filmed her. She said she wished people would do it more often, laughing, and they got to talking and she said her band needed somebody to film their music videos. He told her he wasn’t a real cameraman and she told him they weren’t a real band, and the next weekend he was meeting Jimmy, Natasha, Keith, and Chuck for the first time.

When she finished playing, she paused, stood up, and carried her harp in one hand past the camera. Then she stood and smiled at him.
“Was that good?”
“When do you not play well?”
“No, the last bit. Walking off camera like that. You could use it for the video maybe.”
“We’ll see. You know this is Jimmy’s thing right now.”
“Sure,” she said, “but you’re the movie guy. He’d listen to whatever you said. We trust you, you know.”
“Except Chuck.”
“Chuck’s a knob and he argues with everybody, but he thinks a lot of you. You’re getting us on camera and you’re doing it well. He appreciates that.”
Rob smiled. “He still thinks he should have had that harem in his video.”
Miranda waved it off. “Where’s he going to get a half dozen sexy Cree babes willing to undulate against him for free?”
They crunched back along the bank, nodding to the fishers as they passed. The two college guys down the beach had come over to watch as well. Miranda and Rob felt their audience staring until they’d climbed up the embankment to the parking lot.
“You won’t have too much difficulty getting these videos sold, if those guys are any indication.”
“No, no,” she laughed. “I am not taking my clothes off for the camera. Nice try, dude.”
“Hey,” he laughed back. “You’re the one with the dirty mind here. I’m just saying, it looks like people are interested.”
“Yeah, right. Looks like we’ve both been spending too much time with Chuck.”
The next scene was set to be in the hills above them. They started climbing up the path along the bank. Here it was Miranda who felt out for the ground every so often, squatting strangely to keep her centre of gravity low. Rob, however, had spent half of last summer in the bush back here. The edge of the woods was a minute’s walk from his apartment and there was lots of experimenting you could do with a camera in these trees. The hills didn’t bother him at all.

The band’s name was The Ravens of Avalon, and they played folk metal.
“Eclectic metal,” Natasha corrected when Jimmy introduced them.
“With Dené influence,” added Chuck from the drums.
“And a little country,” said Jimmy, jabbing his thumb at Keith, who had been hammering out some honky-tonk on the keyboard when Rob and Miranda got to the garage.
He had never heard of such a cobbled-together group in his life. According to Jimmy—lead vocals and guitar—they each came from entirely different musical backgrounds, but their similar ages and mutual love for Tolkien conspired with random happenstance—Natasha’s phrase—to bring them together. Each member contributed his or her own songs, and everyone tried to accommodate their individual style to the group project.
“So if we ever get a video out,” Jimmy explained, “it’ll technically be folk metal, but there’ll be tracks that weave the fantasy themes through country-western, death metal, unblack metal, and folk lenses.”
But the first song they played for Rob was a cover of “I Love Rock and Roll,” Jimmy forgoing the vocals so Natasha could sneer into the microphone. Keith replaced her bass and he even looked like a countrified Gary Ryan. Rob made them play it over and over again, getting into capturing each member’s quirks and posturing, until Natasha stopped beating out the lyrics and started lisping them in a Britney Spears imitation. Chuck started wolf-whistling and Miranda giggled until she got angry, and they were done for the night.

They clambered over the last tree roots and got to the clearing they’d picked out a week ago. The dogwood hadn’t grown all the way in yet, but the moss in the hollow was thick enough and green. Some of the saplings in the back had started sprouting leaves and a great log was behind her, shaggy with dead moss and composting at one end. It was quintessential northern Alberta, but maybe it would remind viewers enough of Ireland that they wouldn’t question it. And the decay didn’t bother him too much. All the folk metal videos he found on YouTube were filmed in spring or autumn anyway.
They set the stool out again, and she dug the dress out of his backpack. He turned his back to her, watching up and down the path to give her warning if anyone came by when she was changing.
“You can look again,” she said. He noticed she was red and out of breath. Maybe this accounted for the impatience in her voice. She wasn’t as used to these hills as he was.
They wanted her to look more Celtic in this scene, so she braided her long hair and let it hang over one shoulder. The dress, borrowed from the costuming department at Keyano College, was narrow in the torso and waist. He wished that they could have brought her other harp here. It was an inherited concerto and far too unwieldy to carry into the hills, so they brought her Celtic out and used it for the rest of the video. She preferred the smaller one anyway.
He steadied the tripod once in the middle of the path, but had just started checking light levels when a dog and cyclist started down the hill. Pulling the camera out of the way, he watched the guy on the bike thunder down the slope, giving a thumbs-up as he went. His grinning Lab trotted behind him.
“He’ll kill himself,” Miranda said once he was out of earshot. “He’s a fool.”
The second time Rob set the camcorder up just off the path. It didn’t have the higher angle he wanted, but it would have to do. He made the appropriate adjustments and waved to her to play. She got through the first few chords of Jimmy’s new song, “The Wyrding Well,” but then she stopped and looked up at him.
“Has Jimmy been an ass lately, or is it just me?” she demanded. He fumbled for the “Stop” button.

The weekend after they played “I Love Rock and Roll,” Rob showed the band what he had done with the footage. They loved it. At least, they said they did. Jimmy invited him into their group and Chuck spent the next half hour explaining what Rob had done wrong with the video. It was only later that Miranda explained this meant he was a fan. After editing the film, they got down to business. Over a pitcher at the pub, Jimmy told him the plan.
“We want a music video. A themed set, right? We’ve each got two or so songs we’ve written, and the first and the last will each be a conglomeration, something lyrical that provides opportunities for us to riff off each other, with solos and duets. We haven’t gotten all the pieces perfected yet—”
“—or started,” Natasha added.
“—but we’ve got two or three down. Now, we want to put these together into something interesting and we need someone to link these visually into something seamless, you know?”
Chuck interrupted. “None of these battle re-enactments folk metal bands usually do.”
“No,” Jimmy continued. “Something that places us in the history of music. Something that highlights our inspirations, that locates us in the broader spectrum of lyrical achievement.”
Miranda and Natasha chorused, “The broader spectrum of lyrical achievement?” Natasha was delighted while Miranda sounded unimpressed.
That night Rob tried to keep track of all the songs he was supposed to listen to, the members recounting their favourite bands and their inspirations. Each listed at least five bands, ranging from the local Rezz Dawgs to the exotic Orphaned Lands. Rob said he hadn’t heard of any of them.
“Just YouTube it,” whispered Miranda, squeezing his knee.

“What makes you say that?” Rob asked Miranda. Now that he was paying attention, he realized he should have seen that the flushed face meant she was angry.
“You haven’t noticed?”
He shrugged. “He seems the same as ever.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Same as ever, only more so. I’m sick of it.”
“I’m lost.”
Miranda flipped her braid to the other shoulder. She was surreal, blushing red above the white old-fashioned dress. “You remember what he said yesterday?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“My song doesn’t push the genre far enough? It doesn’t make people re-examine what music means?”
“You seemed to take it well at the time,” he said, wishing he hadn’t as the words left his mouth. She didn’t seem to notice his implication that she wasn’t taking it well now.
“Yeah, well I hadn’t had time to think about it. You know what? I don’t want to re-examine what music means. I don’t want to redefine the genre. I mean, hell, we play folk metal. Eclectic metal. Whatever. How much more can we change the genre? Who cares? It’s folk metal! No one listens to folk metal!”
Rob shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can help you. I know nothing about music.”
“You know enough now. You’ve been with us for nearly a year. But look, that’s not the point. The point is, who’s Jim to say that it doesn’t push boundaries? What I’ve written is far mellower than whatever they wrote. Is that not pushing a boundary? Mellow metal?”
He shrugged again. He had no idea and was tired of pretending like he followed the music-talk. It didn’t matter, because she didn’t stop for him to respond, watching her own gesturing hands instead.
“Here I am,” she continued, “playing a crazy harmony for his, his epic monstrosity. This is never how I played the harp when I was girl. I—”
She stopped, and breathed again.
She looked at him. “What do you think?”
“I think maybe you’re right, maybe the band does care too much about defying conventions, but why are you blaming just Jimmy? Natasha’s far worse for trying to be ‘authentic’ and ‘original,’ and Chuck is constantly throwing things off by trying to incorporate rap and, I don’t know, Native elements.”
She glared. “What are you saying? I mean, you’re right about Natasha—how can you be authentic if you’re too busy trying to be original? But Chuck’s just like that and no one expects otherwise. Jimmy—he’s smarter than that. It’s just like, like he lets being all intellectual take over. That’s fine and all, but sometimes I just want to play music.”
They were silent a while.

The first few weeks he was with them, he learned something about their past. Not how they got together—he never heard the whole of that story. He knew, though, that Keith was a late addition and that for a while they had considered kicking Chuck out of the group, but then Leroy showed up. Leroy was a solid bassist and this had balanced out his more annoying personality quirks, according to Jimmy, but when he pulled out the spoons, that was the last straw.
“What’s wrong with the spoons?” Rob had asked. “You guys have a harp already. It’s not like you care about traditional instruments.”
“Are you serious? Spoons?” Jimmy demanded.
“Besides,” said Keith, “the harp sounds nice.”
“And he was serious about those spoons,” Jimmy kept on. “He wasn’t going to part with them.”
Later, when the two of them were going over some footage together, Miranda told him that the personality trait Jimmy had most objected to was Leroy’s insistence on getting into Natasha’s pants. “It wasn’t just that he was open and persistent about it, either, but that Natasha didn’t seem to mind all that much. She wouldn’t go for a guy like Leroy, or at least she’d hold off for a little while, but she’d giggle and laugh. Jimmy’s protective, and he’s always had a thing for Natasha.”
She must have seen the look on his face, because she added, “Oh, no. Everyone thinks that at first. We’re not together. We just go way back.” She paused, and said, “You know, Jim ought to have been born in ancient times. He’d have had a dozen wives and would have loved every one of them.”
After Leroy was gone, they didn’t mind Chuck so much.

The same Lab as before came up the path, and the biker followed a few minutes later.
“Having fun?” Rob asked.
“Sure thing,” he said. “Nothing like a sunny day for screwin’ around in the hills, eh?”
The biker pushed his bike back up along the cliff side. When he was out of sight, Miranda said, “How long are you sticking around?”
“Sticking around where?”
“With us,” she said. “With The Ravens. How long will you film for us?”
“However long I’m in Fort McMurray,” he answered.
She nodded.
“Why? How long are you staying?”
She fingered the moss. “I don’t know. This isn’t where I thought I’d end up, you know? I saw myself somewhere else. I’m a secretarial assistant and make more than I would if I was working on a career right now. I could be getting my B.Ed. in Calgary instead of putting in nine-to-five, gobbling overtime, and then spending all my leisure time screwing around trying to get big with some garage band.”
“You’ve got time, right?”
“My mother was just about pregnant with me at this age. She already knew my dad. I see myself with kids, Rob. Maybe in Calgary, but I sometimes thought I’d head out to the Maritimes. Play my harp on the bluffs in Newfoundland.” She laughed twice, and then frowned again. “Sure, I’ve got time, but how do I want to spend it?”
She looked at him, and he wished he could read what that look meant.
“Do you know how long you’ll be in Fort McMurray?” she asked again.
“No,” he said. “Until my loans are paid off, I guess. Until I know what I want to do with my life. Find a studio or something, or find someone to buy my documentary. Then, who knows? Who ever knows, here?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking over his shoulders to the hills across the river. Then she nodded to the camera, and he started taping again. This time she played, slow and creaky at first and then picking away faster, pulling at the strings. It sounded fiercer than before, during the sound recording—fierce and tragic. Her face was rigid, furious. Her voice tightened as she sang the open, meaningless vowels Jimmy had written for her. Her singing was no less clear than it had ever been. It would work with Jimmy’s song, where her harp and voice were supposed to be fate’s background mechanics, the fate that would destroy Jimmy and Natasha’s lovers. It was maybe the best he’d heard her play.
Soon she was done. She took her clothes from his bag again and didn’t wait for him to turn around before starting to pull the dress off. Blushing at her underwear, he covered his eyes.
“Let’s go,” she said when she was done.

Sonnets to My Jilted Lover (1)

So I started writing a sonnet sequence called, tentatively, Sonnets to My Jilted Lover. I took as an inspiration, of course, the Renaissance sonneteers, particularly Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and to a very peripheral extent Donne's Holy Sonnets. If you cannot tell from the title, this sequence inverts the sonnet convention; in this case, the speaker is the one who is spurning the lover.

While it would be all lies to say that this project did not occur to me as a result of a few different autobiographical events (eek--I dislike even mentioning the existence of such an autobiography on this blog), my impetus in writing it has very little do with excising wounds of any sort. I'll note that these most certainly are not written 'for' or 'to' any person in particular--or, at least not in the familiar sense. The energy I am using to write these sonnets is more philosophical, theological, or analytical than personal; perhaps that's why "sonnets" is less accurate than "sonnet-and-a-half." I haven't put much work into it, I'm afraid. Maybe the whole sonnet sequence thing isn't for me, or maybe I need to be truly lovesick (or guilt-ridden, as in this case) to produce something of this species.

But regardless! I am going to put up a (one) sonnet, for you to enjoy and critique. Seriously. I want feedback, even of the "I hate this. I hate poetry. I hate you." variety. Except obviously that's not true. If you write that, I won't allow it. But useful criticism will be just as or more welcome than carefully nice criticism.

OK, here we go.

Sonnetta numero 1:

1

I know you love me, dearest one of mine,
That you have set your heart out with the glass
Which sits upon the table, filled with wine,
And wait for me to drink instead of pass
As I have passed each day and night we tease.
I hear the ache inside your dancing words,
The whispered want contained by wild ease,
The innuendo penned like straining herds.
But while you knock my heartsick onto yours,
Although you promise all of what you are,
Despite my dreams of opening the doors
Into your house of houses, left ajar,
My heart is locked as sure as these dry lips
That will not take your champagne's sugared sips.

A New Poetic Form

For a piece of world-building I'm working on, I made up a poetic form called an "aubadina."

An aubade, in real life, is a morning poem, usually about lovers seperating. Think the morning scene in Romeo and Juliet. The aubadina, then, is always an aubade, but has a particular form. It has three stanzas of eight, six, and four lines. They rhyme abacdbdc eefggf hhii, though I will also allow ababcbcb ddbeeb fbfb or abacdbdc eefggf hihi or abacdbdc efegfg hhii or some other subtle variation.

A traditional aubade uses somewhat alliterative accentural meter. There are (usually) five accents per line with any number of syllables. They do not count in feet. Usually, accented syllables begin with the same letter, though this is not strictly followed. It is not iambic or trochaic or amphibrachic or what-have-you, though iambs and trochees may show up in some lines because we're included to hear meter in that way. (The sort of meter I described is common to Middle and Old English poetry.)

I'm here imagining that the aubadina was developed in the city of Aubade (on the river Aubade), where travellers often came and went, such that a poem about parting lovers is appropriate to the environs. This form was popularized and spread under the name aubadina by the afore-mentioned travellers. Among these travellers were a few groups of seasonal nomadic peoples, who adopted the aubadina and developed their own tradition with it. While a classical aubadina usually has one lover remaining in the city while the other must leave, the nomadic aubadina generally has both halves of the couple leaving in different directions, as they are parts of different nomadic groups which occasionally meet. Thus the lovers will meet again whenever their clans do--but that might not be for a while.

Of course, as in the case of sonnets, heroic couplets, etc., different poets will do different things with their aubadinas. Some write religious ones to saints or shrines that they made pilgrimage to and now must leave, others write bawdy ones (like "The Sailor's Farewell to His Lady of Wages"), and others, often scholars, write highly formalized ones in alliterative iambic pentameter. Sometimes they would be written in dialogues, where the lovers alternate lines until the final verse, where they each take one couplet.

You can't see if a form will work unless you've written one. This is, of course, the first aubadina ever written for real, and as such I've just established the conventions as I went along (though you can see I've stolen a lot of Renaissance sonnet ideas because I understand formalized poetry through the lens of Renaissance sonneteers). So conventions include mention of birdsong, reference to the astronomical and meterological phenomenon of dawn, the belief that the dawn dispells evil creatures, jealousy about what lovers are doing in towns, looking at the horizon, concerns of truth and fakeness, and complaining about the passage of time.

Here it is:

The dawn disperses the pale ghosts in the dark,
The purple sky, blushed by the hidden sun,
Weakens, whitens, and wakens the wild lark
Whose serenade stirs the city's new amours
To make those early delights last ‘til the rise
And rush they their rest with their kisses and fun
But we watch the time on the weakening skies
For when the day breaks, so does my road from yours.

The horizon’s rosy and the rooster’s head raises,
Now our tents are folded while the townie lad lazes.
Say that’s not the sun’s lip on the distant knoll,
Put our lips together while that sundog there hangs
A fool of a hound who sells us false pangs
That we feel split when we’re whole.

Say that’s not the green beam breaking the gloam
Hasting us thither to our far wandering homes.
That is not the halo that mimics the star;
That is the mean lark that sends mine afar.

Or, if you want me to mark the stresses for you...

The dawn disperses the pale ghosts in the dark,
The purple sky, blushed by the hidden sun,
Weakens, whitens, and wakens the wild lark
Whose serenade stirs the city's new amours
To make those early delights last ‘til the rise
And rush they their rest with their kisses and fun
But we watch the time on the weakening skies
For when the day breaks, so does my road from yours.

The horizon’s rosy and the rooster’s head raises,
Now our tents are folded while the townie lad lazes.
Say that’s not the sun’s lip on the distant knoll,
Put our lips together while that sundog there hangs
A fool of a hound who sells us false pangs
That we feel split when we’re whole.

Say that’s not the green beam breaking the gloam
Hasting us thither to our far wandering homes.
That is not the halo that mimics the star;
That is the mean lark that sends mine afar.

The Gallery

In the spirit of posting things you'll not have seen before, I'm going to post "The Gallery." This is one which might get me in trouble with particular friends if they read it... to those friends, who never read my blog but there's always a first, none of the characters are supposed to represent actual people. Except one, but that person really isn't going to be reading this.
It was written for a creative writing class last year. I was experimenting with form a bit back then. Still am, really, but less overtly.
---------------------------------------------

The Gallery

      He once had a dream where he walked through the winding passages of a carnival freak show. In it, the gallery’s denizens were sitting in chairs or on stools, each in a separate niche or room, posing without obvious chains, but he could tell behind their eyes that they were not here by free will in the strictest sense of the word. It was more a case of
      not having anywhere else to go, so we sat around our living room and talked about stuff. I was feeling tired and out of it from cleaning the house all day, so I listened more than talked.
      Rafe and Carol were arguing about religion from either end of the futon while Julie watched TV. It was really Joe who had started it, of course. He’d asked if Rafe believed Muslims were all going to Hell. Rafe made some sort of diplomatic answer that said, “Yes, I believe that all Muslims are going to Hell, but I don’t want to say it out loud.” Carol, as usual, got mad about it.
      “I’m not saying that I think there is a heaven or a hell,” she said. “I honestly don’t think there is. But I don’t see how you can be so closed-minded about the afterlife to say that all people who have different religions than you are going to hell.”
      I didn’t want to get involved and I certainly didn’t enjoy the argument, but I saw Joe that was grinning and his eyes
      were a little more mischievous than the usual person’s were. The man wearing a stained work-shirt and last week’s grime clearly enjoyed this exhibit: The Four-Legged Girl, sixteen or so, who had two pairs of legs. All four appendages lined up in a row next to each other, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. Above the waist, the girl was normal, as far as he could tell. She used all four legs in an odd pattern as she waltzed to the sound of an old gramophone, seemingly for her own amusement rather than theirs. The other viewer was noticeably relishing the thought of what someone could do with a girl who was double below the navel, but all he wanted to do was ask if it felt odd to have extra feet, or if the rest of the world just looked top-heavy. He did wonder about things along the same line as the man next to him, but it was not
      something you talk about if you want to avoid insulting someone,” Julie said from the floor in front of the TV.
      “Exactly.” Rafe nodded. “I had a Muslim friend when I was a kid in summer camp, once. We just didn’t go there.”
      “Think about it,” Julie went on. “Muslim people likely think all Christians are going to hell. Christians likely think all Muslim people are going to hell. Muslims and Christians likely think all Buddhists are going to hell. So they probably don’t want to talk about it because it wouldn’t help social situations any.”
      “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to say,” Carol said. She flapped her arms quite a bit as she spoke. “If everyone thinks everyone else is damned, then society falls apart, unless they’re open-minded enough to realize that other religions are just as right as they are.”
      “No one of any religion will think that other religions are just as right,” Rafe muttered. When Carol shot a look at him, he spoke up. “It’s part of religion to believe only in one God. As a Christian, I am bound to say that other religions are wrong.”
      Julie looked like she might disagree with this, but first Carol went red in the ears and said, “I just wish that being a Christian wasn’t the same as being
      a Pinhead. That was what the sign called him, anyway. It also said he was The Missing Link between humanity and animals. A young gentleman, probably educated from both university and newspapers, had a young woman clinging to his arm and was displaying the exhibit’s varying points of interest to her. The display looked dolefully at the observers, sitting on the stump placed in front of his tent, which was so small and open that he had no privacy. His head was small, and hence the name. More specifically, it sloped back radically from the eyebrows and ears and came to a clear, rounded tip at the top. His head, but not his chin, was shaved, giving him a Neanderthalic appearance. The dreamer wondered whether the man could read, and then thought, just for a moment, that when the gentlemen examined various points of phrenology, that man on display was thinking ‘I know
      exactly what you mean,” Rafe interrupted. “You think that religious people can’t be very smart or else they wouldn’t be religious at all. Dawkins’ book, and all that.”
      “I just don’t see how an intelligent person can believe in God,” Carol said. She’d now turned on the futon and crossed her legs so that she was facing Rafe directly.
      Julie had swiveled back from the TV to say something, but Rafe cut her off before she could start. I could see his hands tremble a little. “Perhaps intelligent people have figured out that reason isn’t everything, and atheists could learn something from that.”
      “He’s right,” Julie said.
      “There’s emotion, intuition—which studies show is more reliable than calculation—there’s faith, authority…”
      “Oh, come on,” Carol said. “Those are logical fallacies. You learn that in grade ten.”
      “Logical fallacies,” Rafe said. “There’s your logic again. Thinking like your typical doctor…”
      Joe’s amusement aside, I wasn’t feeling very comfortable with all the tension, as from either side of the futon the two heads
      argued with each other. That the Two-Headed Woman’s two heads would bicker did seem somewhat caricatured to him. It was generally understood that couples who argued and resolved their differences had healthier relationships, so he hoped that was the case here. They sat on a stool in the centre of their niche, wearing a sleek black dress reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. There was no fabric between their young necks, so the viewers could see that this was no hoax. A flurry of boys, entering adolescent awkwardness and clearly not old enough to be there, clustered and gaped at the women. One of them shouted out at them and asked if they had the same boyfriend. The woman on the left stopped the hushed debate to ask the boy if he thought he was man enough to satisfy both of them. Her sister scolded her and they fell back to arguing. Suddenly, the spat seemed to flare, but then fell into laughter. He then wished he could get to know them over coffee, or as life-long friends; asking personal questions from a distance like the hassling rabble would not bring him any
      understanding of the situation or of the people involved,” Julie continued. “Look, unless you genuinely try to see things from the other person’s point of view, you won’t get anywhere.”
      “But,” Carol objected, “none of the religious people I’ve met have ever tried to do that. And that includes my parents, who are very liberal for missionaries.”
      “Not that you seem to be trying all that hard yourself,” said Rafe.
      “It’s different,” Carol went on. “By definition, if you believe in a religion, you have to discount other points of view. I at least examine them objectively.”
      I somehow doubted that, but still felt too uncomfortable to say anything.
      “I don’t mean that you have to believe what the other person is saying.” Julie had pivoted entirely at this point. “I’m just saying that you have to respect that the other person has reasons for believing what they do. I mean, you two arguing on the couch is maybe a step forward in dialogue, or whatever, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re simply trying to convince the other person of your point of view.”
      Both Rafe and Carol began to glower, but Joe cut in, saying, “What’s really happening is that they both want to screw each other, but they can’t because Rafe’s Christian and Carol isn’t, so they’re trying to convert each other. Really, it’s their unresolved sexual attraction that’s causing all the arguments.”
      Julie raised her eyebrows at me and started to laugh, but then she noticed how embarrassed Rafe and Carol seemed, like Joe’s comment
      had exposed something private. The middle-aged woman watching vocalized her shock at his public display, saying how terrible it is to show yourself in such a way. The dreamer watched as the man crawled about his living quarters on all fours. His knees, according to the sign and visual testament, bent backwards. The middle-aged woman said that he should be employed in something useful and out of sight—perhaps as a beast of burden on a farm in the country, where none could see him. Horse-Man was trying to ignore her, but his head was consistently drawn in her direction when she hectored. Eventually, he surrendered and sat in a modified lotus position on the floor. It made his limbs less shocking, but
      it still doesn’t obscure what they really are,” Carol said, though less passionately than before Joe’s comment. “Religions just fulfill some psychological desire.”
      Julie, now frustrated with the argument, had returned to watching TV.
      Joe said, “With so many people believing in religion, there has to be something behind it, yeah, but I agree it isn’t necessarily logical.”
      “Once again, logic isn’t everything,” Rafe argued. “There’s also—”
      I was about to leave the room to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich or something, but Julie spun around and shut the argument up for good.
      “Just talk about something else, OK? You’re clearly not going anywhere and there’s no point getting everyone upset over this. You know each other well enough to know that you aren’t the stereotypes that you’re talking about. Rafe is perfectly intelligent and isn’t anti-Semitic, Carol, you know that, and Carol’s not immoral and, I don’t know, an abortionist or something. So, if you’re done taking this out on the rest of us, let’s talk about something else.”
      Carol looked like she was still willing to argue, but Rafe said, “Yeah, alright.” With some reluctance, Carol mumbled, “I’m sorry, Julie.”
      “You’re a Christian, Julie. Do you think all Muslims go to hell?” Joe asked, and all four of us laughed
      shakily as she lay on her bed. The sign called her Snake-Woman, but he thought it was a misnomer. She lacked any bones beneath her ribcage, and so the rest of her lay draped like animal skins. Other than her toned arms and thick neck, she lacked any muscle-tone at all. They were alone together in this room, and she spoke to him between her wheezing giggles.
      “Don’t feel sorry for me.”
      “I—” he said, and didn’t know whether he wanted to say ‘don’t’ or ‘can’t help it.’
      “I am happy with my life.”
      “I can’t see how you could be.”
      “You don’t have to.”

My Lady Mandeville

According to my prof, this is the best poem I've written yet. It's the one I read at the anthology launch, and has received positive feedback.*

Not sure if I'll be publishing this. If I do, I suppose I may need to take it down.

Anyway, here goes:
----------------------------------


My Lady Mandeville

a mountain slumbers on Silha
an island Mandeville found.
at the top is a pearly lake weighted
with jewels and stones
with yellow leeches and snakes
and cockodrills
the serpentine beasts with dead eyes.

if you rub yourself down with lemons
the natives said
you can enter the mountain pool
and take the pearls.
around the cliffs are wastelands
filled with white ox-heavy lions
two-headed geese
coiled russet dragons that feed on locals
yet not on strange men from strange lands.
the sea is tucked so high against the shore
that the peak appears to hang amoung the clouds.

I want my Lady Mandeville,
my sailor-mate, to break her prow on the rampart shore
to dare my looming sky
someone foreign to trek the barren gravel
some farmwife to untangle my crossed drakes
pluck them to their down
to calm my hydras with her strange hands
beat my leonine pride.
some intrepid to scale these bluffs
to lullaby the tugging asps
acidic enough to wilt the leeches
burn the moccasins
outstare my crook-toothed cockodrills
to slip into that reed-gagged pond
try for the bottom
pull out those oyster stones.






-------------------------
*Not to brag, but "positive feedback" has meant both that people have verbal told me it was a good job, and that when I looked up after reading and looked into my peers' eyes, I could see they were thinking, "Damn. That's good." Or maybe I was hallucinating it.

Also, it's my strong inclination to provide a reading for this poem. I want to tell you want each little bit is supposed to "mean." But I know I shouldn't, so I won't.

Here's a link, though, that provides one of my 'influences.'

Wanted: Dead and Alive

This is an assignment I just had returned from an American Literature class. I did well on it--better than I expected. I thought I'd share it here. Unfortunately, you may have needed to be in the class to fully participate in it... unless you've by chance read Emily Dickenson, Whitman's Song of Myself, Spofford's "Amber Gods" and "The Circumstance," Frederick Douglas' slave narrative, Edgar Alan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and "The Man Who Was Used Up," Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Edwar Taylor's Meditations, Hawthorne's "The Black Veil" and "Artist of the Beautiful," Emerson's "Experience," and other seminal or not-so-seminal American Literature.

Wanted: Dead and Alive

I was born upon the sea in a land under sweltering suns:
my tongue and every atom of my blood formed from this soil
this air, the grey sky, obscured by no deathly blot.
ghostlike we glide through nature
on every visage a black veil—
wild wartunes endow the living with tears you squander on the dead.
"O graft me in this Tree of Life within,"
again gurgles the mouth of my dying general,
knocked on the head.
with her voice ceased her existence yet she could not sing.
(I had as well be killed running as die standing
—the dead thing in my bosom rising and falling—
I in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not till death.)
forsaken songs rose from that frightful aerie
weeping wailing tunes that sob from age to age,
"gone, gone, sold and gone."
from the symbol beneath which I lived,
and die with overflowing grace doth killing,
cure the sinner, and kills sin right:
we do not play on graves
because these murtherous wretches went on,
burning and destroying all before them the golden dore of glory.
is the grave too sacred for us?
I do not desire to live to forget this,
in one sense it is the elixer of immortality
(posion with the falling dews)—
it cannot be that I shall live and die
a slave as scarcely loving my life, my health.
to be alive is power—omnipotence enough:
we could not but shout to the dead for help!
no man can understand the science of the grave,
look through the eyes of the dead,
feed on the spectres in books;
nature's practices extend to necromancy and the trades,
the notion of putting spirit into machinery.
the lords of life, the lords of life:
beautiful, beautiful, is it alive?
and in the wide arc of some eternal descent she was falling.
there really is no end to the march of invention.


Poet-scholar's statement:

In looking through the course material of the semester, I caught a common theme: the middling areas of life and death. Whether narratives come from the other side of the shade—or as good as do, in the case of the strangely returned Pym—or follow individuals who oddly survive their own death, such as Lackabreath and Wakefield, there is a sense that not only does poetry acheive immortality, it preserves the very act of immortalizing itself. Alternately, the texts may dwell on death—defying it like Rowlandson, lusting for it like Taylor, or philosophizing it like Emerson—and thereby underscore their own vitality by their current survival. Most question that fundamental boundary, or the obviousness of it, using such figures as ghost ships, speaking corpses, living machines, and assembled men. Each text's complexity only tangles in comparison with the others, and any discussion of the matter must exceed strictly academic discourse.

As such, I have constructed a poem about the intersection of these two realms, using lines torn from the texts. I have been liberal with punctuation, and some of the lines might not be entirely recognizable, pieced as they are from different sources. Nonetheless, I hope to have caught some of the sense life and death play in the varied works and, in the process, defamiliarized many of the original meanings.

Yeah, as with other academic work I've posted here, there's a lot of name-dropping. Sorry about that, if you're not of a background which presents to you all of those writers.

Fronteir

It’s lonely out here
past where the railroad ends
through swinging saloon doors
out in the gasping hills
where the crowd smells only gold

Here where we draw our own landscapes
draw water among the cacti
draw pistols from sagged belts
draw lots in broken straw
draw lines on our dusty faces

The sky burns for us
the town doesn’t care who we are
troubles are solved in the rush of oil
conflicts on scabbed knuckles
hatreds from barrels in a dry dawn
_________________________
I wrote this'n when I was particularly frustrated with the necessity of returning to Fort McMurray, a town that I sometimes view, perhaps unfairly, perhaps not, as uncaring and violent.

The God of the Physicians (A Glosa)

like one of those slow diseases
of the joint or the bone
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize
as bigger words for dying.
“How It Will Happen,” Bronwen Wallace

I was reading a book on modernity,
and it told me that God wasn’t just dead;
He was justifiably executed by philosophy.
He’d been buried next to Santa Claus’ cenotaph
and the Easter bunny’s empty grave.
As a transcendental notion He eases
the Oedipal husk of childhood grudges
but in a healthy society religion haunts
old men’s minds; it warps and seizes
like one of those slow diseases.

I had to ask myself whether the author
of that book, who’s long exhaled his last,
realized that Descartes’ radical doubt
fell short of the mountainous monks who floated
beneath the frenzy of their ego-less thoughts.
Easy enough to say that author died alone,
joining no ancestral procession, but the geneticist
measures his spectres in levels of carbon
monoxide hallucination and the neural drone
of the joint or the bone.

Long dead is the mysterious world;
now answers tame as easily as early dogs.
Neurologists preach an epileptic Muhammad,
meditate on posterior superior parietal lobes,
and convert to transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Now Jesus Christ will anaesthetize
Lazarus with the suppressed proletariat,
and Donne’s holy agues are simply common
colds and pneumonia and I realize
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize.

The homilies are now irrational
numbers, higher powers are exponents,
and thinkers on the problem of evil
suggest democracy and capitalism as cures.
Unsolved mysteries aren’t numinous
but symptoms of simply not trying,
and instead of nirvana or rapture
the modernists propose lack of brain
function, expiry, or flat-lining
as bigger words for dying.

Clumsy (Flash Fiction)

I remembered in the fifth grade after her mother died how she was clumsy, falling down stairs or putting her arm against the stove or sometimes even cutting towards herself with knives and slicing her hands. I never saw her do these things, but she told me when I asked her about the evidence on her arms and hands and face at lunch time.
We went to the same high school after that, but I rarely spoke to her. We both remembered playing regular kid games in the elementary school yard before it wasn’t cool to play with girls anymore, but somehow those times were over. I did notice that the bruises were still there, but I was older then and had a few things figured out.
I came home after university to figure out what I was doing and found out that her alcoholic father had died. She showed up to one of the church groups and I thought we were really connecting again, but she had this new boyfriend who didn’t know she was going to the Bible study. We couldn’t do anything together because of him, though I would have liked to and I thought she might have wanted to as well. I noticed that she always wore sweaters and turtlenecks and that her hands were pretty rough, and I was even older and thought I had a few more things figured out.
One night she was quite upset about something and she let me take her home. We were lying together on the couch in the dark when she finally told me that she wanted to leave her boyfriend but was scared. I told her that I would take care of her and we were married a few months later. The lights were out that night but I could still feel the smooth burns and rough scars. I thought I had understood something.
Three years later, I’m lying in the hospital and have no idea if either of our children will survive because she set the house on fire, and I wish I had known that she had started cutting herself the day after her mother’s funeral.

Tomorrow's Villanelle

I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown,’
when talking with parents’ friends, who repeat
until I feel my age is not my own

but instead memories I have on loan,
a ‘When I was as young as you’-like bleat
I seem to always hear as ‘how you’re grown

since I last saw you, taught you,’ in that tone
that writes my past back to my baby teeth
until I feel my age is not my own,

or with old friends I pretend to still know
I’ll reminisce and from their shifting feet
I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown

away from us,’ where the stories have flown
to younger crowds, who play my former beat
until I feel my age is not my own.

Other birthdays come, and from each milestone,
in the under-thoughts when my brain’s voice greets,
I seem to always hear, ‘My, how you’ve grown,’
until I feel my age is not my own.

Poem in Conversation

Bermudas

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In th’ ocean’s bosom unespied,
From a small boat that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song:

“What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the wat’ry maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where He the huge sea monster wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs;
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air;
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows;
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet;
But apples plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice;
With cedars, chosen by his hand
From Lebanon, he stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore;
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The gospel’s pearl upon our coast,
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple, where to sound his name.
O let our voice his praise exalt
Till it arrive at heaven’s vault,
Which, thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.”

Thus sung they in the English boat
An holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
--Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678




The Ellice Swamp

In Perth county’s weedy puddle
from sagging barns, Rostock, Kuhryville,
a fleet of orange tractors grunts an unsung melody
and the manured wind does not care:

“How do we deserve this soil,
pulled from the water field by field,
archipelagos edged by culverts,
turned back to swamp with rain?
Here the water tastes like coliform
and the cows’ feet are wet
in the hollows from which our grandparents
took more than Europe’s family farms could afford.
Do we deserve this eternal well
which bubbles up among our crop
and invites the geese to rest when headed south,
once our plows have passed?
Yes, the fruit takes to this ground,
yellow pears come with yellow jackets,
hard sour crabs hang like tempting cherries,
the blinding corn is green and tall,
in autumn scarlet fires the beans,
pumpkins defy the garden and spread across the lawn,
and apples grow enough to spoil on the branch
and intoxicate the sparrows.
Yes, the cedars, maples, willows grow
and ample old woods dot the marsh,
but it all has the musk of pigs, cows,
chickens, workhorses, and sweating earth;
in the muddy ground are contained
those who first divided land from the water table.
Moserville’s headstones and the town names
mark those buried under St. Paul’s Lutheran care.
Do we deserve this earth that swallows
histories, hours, evenings, lives,
that sits beneath the horizon
and lets us earn each day?”

From the combines this song is not heard
between the farmers’ jokes and complaints
and continues for all time.