Days 27-30: The final stretch to the finish line

Well, I fell a bit behind in the end posting my daily drafts to my blog.  So, below are the last four poems I wrote, along with the prompts I wrote off of.  Thanks to all who wrote with me and encouraged as we trudged along through another month of daily writing.  May 1st always feels so strange because I don't have a poem "due" by the end of the day! 

Day 27: I Dare you to Become the Wind

What would it be like to become the wind.
To rustle seas of leaves like green water. 
To hold the bodies of hawks on tendrils
of air.  What would it be like to wheeze in
through cracked windows, and under doors.  To cool
flushed skin. To cover everything in smooth
velvet breath.  So many names: Anemoi,
Venti.  The Greeks believed the wind was made
by horses running madly from their barn,
or winged men moving the air with their
enormous wings.  Whatever it is to
be the wind, in it are secrets, wistful
and light that weave between us no matter
how far we wander from our barn.  The wind
mends.  Speaks a language only trees know to bend to.

Day 28: The buds are just flushing the trees

Spring Still Life

We all have favorite Spring discoveries:
as soon as the field is waist-high the boys
throw their bodies into the green itch and
gather handfuls of Chinese lanterns to
cover our house and cars with the luck of
alive.  Spring awakens on our driveway
thick clumps of yellow chamomile shooting
through gravel and dust while buds flush the trees
in white/pink fireworks erupting across the field.

Day 29: Here is a little extra ___________ just for you.

Dear Water:

that held my son’s body this afternoon
when sun split the sky in two
and he giggled as he was swallowed
by your cool, shimmering skin. Here is a little extra density
and depth for you.  Why not let more of us
into your joy?  Why not open your wet
arms so wide whole smoldering cities slip
in? Why not baptize angry commuters 
in your chlorine cellophane? Or, even
those like my neighbor whose heart was stoned
with grief.  Surely, in your cold triumph we’ll
rise just as my sons thin body knifed back
to the surface smiling and wanting more.

Day 30: At the Finish Line

When the radio announcer reveals
roads blocked by dual car accidents, over
turned semis, bumper to bumper mishaps
I feel like Medusa.  Each road is a
tendril I’ve untangled in my dirty car.
I am a highway flyer, commuter
the woman you see sipping coffee and
laughing in her own private world as
you pass.  My commutes are legendary:
200-300 miles a day. 
So many misty dawns slow reveal of
the slack-jawed bay, the thu-thung, thu-thung
rhythmic passage.  Mountains would rise and fall
beneath my car’s weary tires until
now.  The finish line waits.  There isn’t much
ceremony.  Just a quiet nod from
the man behind the counter at Chevron
(who’ll likely miss my business) and I’m off
to another life.  One where dawn has sprung
by the time my wheels hit the road. One where
I stand still and happily forget the
names of roads mentioned on the radio.

Day 26: terpsichorean

Terpsichorean Nights

Some nights the only way to understand 
the seep of amber sky is to become 
a chorus of delight. Come together.

Let packs of children run free through orchards
like comets. Gather around a fire.
Pour glasses of wine the color of sky.
Let the scent of the earth rise to your lips
and speak until threads of words and laughter
spark stars back into the darkening sky. 

Day 25: The sounds that fish make when no one is listening

The Sound of Underwater
We share this: a love for what is submerged;
refracted from surface, dense with shadows.
A place were skin always remains cool.  Where
light pours and shimmers like liquid. Where sound
holds its fat tongue. Underwater, all is
bearble. The bodies strange mechanics:
lungs, muscle, heart. All become mad
for air but can be quieted by knife-
like precision of streamline, the movement
of the body forward not by force, by
becoming a part of what surrounds.

If I could give you anything it would
be this: another submerged life. Somewhere
to slip into. Somewhere to emerge
from into the shimmer liquid light.

Day 24: Trees near churches

The Tree of Birds

The eucalyptus outside the arm-wide
window where I sit days watching hills
of trees sway under fog's covering breath.
Where the blue jay perches each dawn staring
into me. The arthritic apple trees
bent with age a few graphed hybrids, author
unknown. And the press of woods from behind
where wind and footsteps untangle, startle.
The few redwoods jut up from the valley
as if startled to be the last left to
stand as hawks circle and scream into air.
Once, there was a tree made entirely
of birds. Small and large birds that nested so
long in its wooden eaves their white and black
wings became leaves their hollow bones echoed
with the sap of all the tree knows until
everything lifted: the tree, the bodies
of birds into the open arms of sky.

Day 23: Short Shrift

When I read through the definition for "short shrift" I was struck by the way the word shrift was used as a term to describe exile.  And, whenever I think of exile, I think of Ovid.  How, at the heart of his career he was exiled to the very edges of Rome, Tomis  on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus.  There is no record as to why Ovid was exiled, although he stated in his own poetry that it occurred because of carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake".  My classics professor in grad school (who was an expert on Ovid's haunting work Tristia which he wrote while living in Tomis) once visited the city.  He said that in it, is a lake and in the middle of lake is an island called simply, "Ovid's island".  He said no one there knew why it was called Ovid's island, and there is record (aside from references in Ovid's own poems) to record where he lived during his exile.  But, I like to believe he lived on that island.  This draft is a short reflection on Ovid, and the idea of exile.  Hope you enjoy.

Ovid's Shrift


Exile is like that. Bordered. Lines that blur
And stutter. Cold. An island. Not a limb
Touching land, or, the icy waters that
numb and surround. Pulling you away from
That hive of bodies. Rome's pulsing red core
What he writes down loses it's form. Is dredged
From the deep waters that surround his home. 
And there is still an island. We are still
Mapping what's drifted under the surface of

Day 22: 50 ways to cook a chicken

Anyone want to guess what I was teaching today?

Spring Chickens

Spring hums here.  It doesn’t slowly unfurl
its green leaves. Blossoms confetti the air. 
Then trees leave out quick as if afraid sky
will open into showers.  Today my
class didn’t know what a subway looks like:
it’s dark like a mouth, I said, then opens
into light--people freckle than slur past.
like apparitions.  What are apparitions?
What’s come apart into air.  I say.
I move on to the bough.  What’s a bough?
It’s the part of the tree that reaches for
the mouth of the sky. Confetti of blossom.
What’s left after a hard rain. 

A red wheelbarrow, for instance, beside
those relentless chickens that peck and peck
the wet ground looking for what comes after.

Day 21: I gotta to see a man about a chainsaw

For some reason today the prompt made me think of all the old historic buildings around here that perch on hillsides and sag and then slowly fall down.  What lost stories are falling with them and who will take the time to dig them up. 

Salvage

The old school house rested on the crest of
hill near the restless blue-breath of cold sea
has finally collapsed into itself.
Time is in the wind that picks up over
rocky cliffs. That slowly eased the redwood
planks apart until, tired skeleton, it
sank. For weeks, no one stopped their car, no one
witnessed. Only the ghosts remembering
what their footsteps spelled when they were in flesh.
Until a big man noticed. Eddied out
of traffic to pick through what was left to
gather what wooden stories the dead have left.
It was there, sifting through the planks that the
box was found. Unbroken belly of black
age-tanned wood. The man shook his head at his
discover. Feeling the ache of what
lay hidden inside. Silenced voices, dark
words that would rush into him once he let
them out. Once he did. Once he found a man
with a chainsaw and opened the musty
box his eyes washed clear as deep as the sea.
His path opened by the truth.