Day 10: Elegy 1 for Jack London

I'm catching up today so I had to write two poems in a day.  This, the second, is about the tragedy of Jack London's death.  Yesterday, I finished Earl Labor's biography Jack London: An American Life which (expectedly) ends with Jack's tragic and early death.  Every time I read about his death, about the months leading up to is and the ailments he suffered, it's like watching a friend die.  It's awful.  It's especially awful because from the perspective of modern medicine, his ailments seem dire, but fixable.  Had there been an ambulance or an ER, or even an earlier diagnosis of Lupus (what biographers like Labor think he suffered from his whole life), he might have lived.  Here is a draft of my poem written on the prompt: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

Elegy 1
When you hear hoof beats, think draft horse, think barns
hewn of unmatched stone, think silos standing
up against mountains (still after 100 years)
think cactus without thorns think oak leaves think
the whisper of creek think path to a dried
up pond think how cool the water once was
Think stone rolled over an urn. Think poison oak tall as trees
Think the ranger who said the Miwok ate
the leaves to cure themselves of the poison

Think blue ribbon think Sacramento State Fair
think from his window he could see fireworks
too ill to leave the hotel (think Lupus, undiagnosed).
Think how to pass a cure from here to there?
Think only days left. Kidney stones. Unable to eat.
Think the body gathering what it can't let go.
Think last words think Charmian's desperate plea:
Mate, please don't leave me. Think smile, then gone.

Day 6: Untitled Hate Poem #57 for Jack London

For today's poem I had to write in response to the prompt: "Untitled Hate Poem #57".  Since my project this month is to write a poem-a-day about Jack London, I had to write a hate poem about Jack London.  This prompt made me think about the complicated relationship I have with Jack London's biography and how, by becoming a writer, I had inherited expectations about reading and writing practices from my earliest literary influence.  Writing this poem was definitely a strange exercise.  Here is my draft.

Untitled Hate Poem #57 for Jack London
The path that I'm walking is well worn. Peels like manzanita. Sky blooms blue even through the reach of thick armed oaks. And at first following you I felt strobbed in light. I'd place my foot into the muddy print you'd carved out and walk on. But lately, I've gotten caught in the mud of you. 
The shining cover of your new biography caws from tree branches, like an agitated crow. Reminds me how as a child I could grow into you: learn to sleep less, write more but now life has snuck into the scene. The children won't sleep or I need to pick them up from school, or we are out of milk/eggs/bread/time.
How you breathe down my neck these days Jack London! This year, I will be 40, the age you were when you died and still I stand in the shadow of your life: how many books have I written? Surely, not even a fraction of yours. How many words do I write a day? Does marking up student papers count Jack? How about emails back to my students? Or, to my sons' teachers? Does it count if I watch Homeland? It has a really intricate plot!

What do I need to do to walk away from you Jack London? Leave this landscape that seeps into me the way it seeped into you? Or keep walking on the moist soil until it peels enough for me to see it.

Poem-a-daying in November! (I keep looking up from my desk and seeing ghosts)

Well, once again it is November, and once again I am beginning the daily practice of writing a poem-a-day for the month.  For two months out of the year each year I try and keep this practice.  This year my poem-a-daying comes with a project in mind.  I'm reading Earle Labor's new biography of Jack London Jack London, An American Life  and teaching my favorite Jack London novel, The Valley of the Moon.  So, I'm entering the month with a poetic project in mind: a digging into the idea of Jack London that I've carried with me since I was in sixth grade and first visited Jack London State Park in Glen Ellen.  It's an image I continually revise (and will continue revise likely, throughout my life). Today, we were given the prompt: I keep looking up from my desk and seeing ghosts.... Here's what I wrote as my draft in response.   


Jack London, Biography

1

Out the window: breathe
of ghosts spindled on tall trees
only glass between

2
There is image that hangs on a museum wall.
Then, there is the ghost the presses against the glass for years to come.
Hot breath. Fog by day. Steam that twists through dreams at night.
In between the images rise up to the surface:
thought to memory to metallic silver
a stop bath on time
stitched together out of the thick thread of chance
a life cobbled out of pieces.

3
There is also the land to consider.
There is the shell of building out of rock.
There is the stories about these buildings.
There is the walking on the soft earth between buildings
and the smell of the earth as you walk (which must be the same scent?)
There is the shadow of light as it passes through the Scrub Oak and Manzanita.
There is the fog that lingers on the terraced side of Sonoma Mountain.
And in between, there is the glass of time
without passage between the life lived
and the life found again in the fragments
we gather up.