Lessons in Sea Glass

This week, I gave our group the assignment of writing a poem in tweets.  I read Jennifer Egan's incredible story she wrote for the New Yorker awhile back where she wrote in segements of 140 characters or less and the whole thing was published via tweets that were posted a few minutes apart.  I've been haunted by the form eversince.  Last week, I went to a reading at Sonoma State Univeristy where I got to hear Lyn Hejinian and Paul Hoover discuss their concepts of Postmodern poetry.  It was an incredible talk, but one idea I walked away with was Paul Hoover's suggestion to write a poem via tweets much like the Jennifer Egan story.  Here is my attempt of a draft of a poem written in this form.

Lessons in Sea Glass

The field I stood next to was unsteady.  Covered in dirt and a patchwork of grass.  The man in a track suit kept spray painting lines to find order. 

Mornings were fogged in.  I couldn’t smell the salt in the air but knew the cool sea churned the cliffs nearby.

The town was mappable as if it had just arisen from the very sea still dripping.  I talked the pavement down into a path.

On the second day, the fog held its breath and we found a sea cliff and beneath it the carnage of tumbled sea glass.

It was too fogged to see through.  Signs were posted up and down the beach:  Collecting Sea Glass Prohibited.

I taught a lesson on the word Prohibited before I let go of his small hand.  Before he wove his body between every rock and crevice the sea had left.

Hours later, when we returned to the field we could no longer see the field, or the streets.  It was as if the city had once again disappeared into the sea.

I felt the weight of his hand but couldn’t be sure he was the same boy.  His hand was covered in callouses and scars.

We sat at the edge of what we perceived to be the field.  The man in the track suit had given up on lines the color of clouds (no one could see the difference).

The boy tumbling like sea glass.

When the fogged cleared, we were in another place.  The man with the tracksuit threw up his hands, so we left the field again to find what had emerged.

And we walked it down.  Foot by unsteady foot.  Salt and peppered pavement freckled with gum, sparkling like sea glass.

Until the hand I held became his hand again.

Other

Today we were to write from a Jean Valentine poem called "Once".  It's a haunting poem for it's quiet, enigmatic ideas that get under your skin and seep in.  So, I had a hard time writing from it.  But, here's what I dredged up from the deep as a draft.  It's for my son, Max who is eight years old.

Other

Once there was a shadow –
like a dark basket—

where our fears rested like moths.

Then the light shifted, got close, and they swarmed.
Pulse becoming a rhythm, predictable as a heart.

When the men encircled us
their arms, thick as ropes,
wove together like a basket

and we became
the yolk to the thin eggshell
of perimeter,

wishing for the nets of swallows
to swoop from sky,
fish us out.

Seismic Shift

This week, we were to write off of the poem"Carpe Demon" by Lucie Brock-Broido.  Brock-Broido's poem offers a muscular knife into the perspective of childhood.  My draft I've written in reponse explore the idea of a bridge between the life before and after childhood.  It plays with the idea of time being rewritable, but that when it is rewritten (unlike code) it's source is utterly changed. 

Seismic Shift

In the dark car, the radio fuzz flaps its tongue over the slack blue bay.  Thu-thunk-
thu-thunk of tires on pavement carefully broken then threaded to contain rupture

then loss.  The dumb sea spackled in spun clouds. Bridge between before and after—on one
side is a dirtied kneed childhood carved tunnels in high grass, the whisper of creek.

On the other is after—several cities, so many hours sitting in
cubicles coding, rewriting the day like a wiki.  That is until the jump:

until feet leave the metal ledge of now; until the bodies falls and twists alphabets
of desire until ice cold water baptizes you back to where you began.

This time awake.  This time watching and listening.  Small bodies spelling the tall grass into new worlds.
The creek ruptured, but rewriteable, threaded to contain its new banks.

Their Bodies Are too Much With Us

This week, we were to write in reponse to Wordsworth's famous sonnet "The World is too Much With Us" For some reason Wordsworth's poem brought me back to motherhood.  To all of our confidence and studied knowledge that we bring into it and then to the reality of how raising human beings is such an amazing and difficult task.  How it is something you can't possibly know how to do, no matter how many times you try because every child is different.  And how, especially in the case of raising a child who is different.  One always doubts oneself and worries about whether one is doing it right.  Here is my draft:

Their Bodies Are too Much With Us
After William Wordsworth

Their bodies are too much with us—
flesh from water to air to light—
They linger in the mind like a hive of bees;
butterfly kisses on cheeks, sticky hands, the shadow of dirty knees.

At birth the path out is direct and known—
it’s the after, this unlacing of what’s perceived and built up   [like a hive]       
where we become Herodotus: note moods, growth rates, amount of joy perceived.

When the Behaviorist asked me, what do you most want to give your children?
I said, happiness.  No, she said.  You are only here to contain.

Since then the hive has split open.  Honey dripping down arms and legs.

I have a sheaf of parchment, and write note on top of note, a palimpsest.
Their tiny bodies buzzing in my mind, like a jar of bees.

 

If/Then in Autumn

This week we were assigned to write something humurous.  What I realized about myself is that I am awful at writing humor.  So, I wrote something lyric instead.  I've been haunted all week by the beautiful bark of the eucalyptus trees I pass on my drive to work.  Here is my draft:

If/Then Autumn

If the bark scrolls, no pulls away, no whirls away toward an unexplored infinity on every eucalyptus tree.  If your car, driving past, pulls from the movement a velocity toward awe.  If the leaves scent and litter your dreams.  Wonder what is written beneath that bark.

If the alligator skinned bark of the willow pulls toward sky and its long-armed limps weave in the wind. If you sit in the grass beneath its shade and think only of the miles of roots that spell it’s (keeps ship afloat).   Wonder if they spell escape or the language of knowing a place from the ground up.

If the single oak on the bare hill side speaks of solitude.  If you can’t pass without finding it crowning the hillside.  If the fog holds its breath over your sight.  Lift the tree in your mind toward the horizon.

If the air is grenadine with dawn and swollen with the dawn song.  If the hummingbird finds you high up on the porch away from the nectar.  Lift your eyes to that whir and thunder of wing.  Let that movement take you to flight.

Life Between Elements

Today's poem was inspired by the prompt to tell the truth but tell is slant.  Here is my draft:

Life Between Elements

The writer who spoke only of frozen
seas and the sea birds who linger then land
only to stitch lacy perimeter
between what is our realm and what is theirs,

unexpectedly discovered the dolphin’s
left body; that last greying sun-dried weight
of almost picked clean flesh before the next
realm opens like a slack-jawed sky.  He was

lost to it, and to the way life redirects
eddies around what the crows have warned us
to avoid.  For he had not read the signs
was in the process of rising himself

Sea birds drying their wings like scarecrows on
jagged rocks.  Heart becomes sea; not frozen,
but cold and deep enough to be sewn into lace.

Ishi Tramontane

This week, our assignment was to rewrite an old poem using some drastic revision methods.  This is a poem I never finished but had started back in April during my last poem-a-daying stint.  I tried some bold revisions and came up with this next draft. 

 

Ishi Tramontane

1

The paradise we tend is permeable.
There are afternoons when we walk back up the gravel drive
from the bus stop, rocks popping beneath our weight,
when the shadows that lean in fill me with my own childhood fear:
visceral, it reaches its metal fingers to the back of my throat.
It is a mountain we continual climb toward home.  Toward truth.
Beyond the mountains is where paradise has any hope to begin.

2

In 5^th grade the kids begin a unit on Native Americans.
After school, my son asks me:  Do you know about who Ishi is Mom?
Of course.  I say.  But I can’t see the perimeter between
what he’s been told—and the truth; what’s been walled in
to protect his innocence.  Do we discuss how many massacres Ishi survived:
Three Knolls, Kingsley Cave? Or, how the stones of Deer creek
were covered in blood.  Or, what desperation must have led Ishi
out of the dark woods into the arms of  those who had slaughtered all he had loved.
Or, that Ishi was not his given name.  It is only the Yahi word for man.
His name died with his people. And that these facts are only small pieces of the whole
tiny moths flutters toward a light. How much will carry him up the mountain
how much will paralyze him with fear.  I want to tell him everything I know.
Instead I say You are lucky, when I was little, we never learned about Ishi in school.

3

At dawn, a rosy light covers new buds
on dark fingers of Gravenstein apple trees. 
Across the valley, a flat scallop of hills rises into light
as if to claim perimeter. Paradise is this—
what truth we wall in.  But with the dawn come
the sea birds: gulls, cormorants, cranes and all
they carry back and forth between—

 

Mountain

Mountain

Some days I think I am becoming a mountain.  Not a sharp, snow-capped jab at the sky, but one of those golden-pelted hills that lingers in the fog of early morning.  Firstly, my feet have become sealed to the soil.  Secondly, what rises in me is porous and mineral as limestone.  Thirdly, there is something out in the distance, some vantage point or imaginary horizon that I am always looking towards.

I first discovered my metamorphosis when I was at my son’s soccer game in San Rafael at the base of Mount Tamalpais.  Looking out at the comets of their blue shirts, the whir of their machine legs.  I could feel something molten.  Plates shifting.  The sweat and chill of earthquake weather.

But days swallow each other like predators.  And time shimmies by like a scrimshaw of clouds. First one shape forming, and then the next. 

What I arrived at was this mountain stance.  The view.  The single arthritic oak crowning my peak reaching for something it doesn’t understand.  And the idea that somewhere, in the stratum, under tons of soil, in the tumult of stones and bugs and burrowed animals there is a secret space. Call it a lake or a cavern filled with that cold elixir of now. 

Dear Sebastopol

This week our assignment was to write a letter to a town or place.  It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.  I chose to write to Sebastopol, my home town where I now live.  I write about my town a lot, but this didn't make it any easier to write a letter to it!  But, I gave it a shot.  Here is my draft.

 

Dear Sebastopol –

It’s hard to not get dizzy, here, under
tides of scents—how they grade and terrace the air:
the salt thick tang of wet earth and limestone
against sweet rot of wind fall apples and pears.

Take, for instance, the story of your history:
Little pine sap town on stolen ground. 
Dirt wagon rutted streets.
Lulls of hills lush with redwood and oak cleared to the root.
Then, patchworked into orchards of plums
then orchards of apples then vineyards.
The wide berth of scrub oaks left smoldering
in what was left of the Laguna after charcoal farming.
The train that carried its screaming weight right through the center of town.

Once your silence swallowed me under its glass bell sky.  Now,
I’ve wake slowly, like a good daughter.  Learn to waver in the air
above what I’ve learned until I spot the truth at ground level
and can sense what’s pushing up underneath.  Take, for instance

the WPA mural on the wall of your post office.  For so many years
it framed the idea of you to me: dusty gutted rows of apple trees
flanked by white chicken coops.  This was my sweet, apple town
I carried with me. But, even the Gravenstein is bitter sweet. 

Ode to the Front and Back Steps of a Day

It's the end of summer here in Northern California. That means slow, foggy mornings.  Now that we are used to the swollen days with little that we must do, the school year is pressing down upon us.  For this week we were assigned to write a poem that was an ode to what you aren't allowed to do.  For me, as I wrote this, the poem became no only what we aren't allowed to do, but more about what we leave unsaid about what we aren't allowed to do.  And the emotional residue that lingers from everything that is left unsaid about this. Here is my draft:

 

Ode to the Front and Back Steps of A Day

Ode to the gaps between firs unmended.
Ode to the hawks whose bodies stitch the seams between.

Ode to the hang of bored air. The locked door.
The wish to never look up from the screen.

Ode to the mother who locks her door while
her children both hands bang screaming MOMMY.

Ode to the mist that threads down valley.
Ode to the cars that whine and moan unseen up hill.

Ode to the hidden limestone creek  that lures
children to sink into her dark stone gut.

Ode to the old woman who yells at the kids who play there:
That’s private property! Ode to crawdads
that must still exist under all of this—

Ode to the new mom whose lost time’s orbit.

Ode to the anger that pulses under
the skin like a lost, unmapable river –

Ode to gravity and the foot to earth,
the push and pull of body forward toward
gap or fall, the whole day that can be revealed

when the fog lifts—Ode to believing it will.

Sea of Trees

This week, our prompt was to mistake something for something else.  The last week has been a blur -- another wonderful year of The Napa Valley Writers' Conference came to a close; and our family got away for a last vacation in the Sierra Nevadas where we hiked in Squaw Valley, swam in Lake Tahoe and then river rafted on the American River.  What a blur of fun.  This draft is a mediation on all of those activities folded together. 

Sea of Trees

On the granite lip of the wide valley

I mistook the wind breathing through tall pines
for the sea.  Waves of thin green needles.  Drum
of heart's chord. The loosening shale
underfoot. At valley floor there is a
river where rocks pillow beneath waves. Dive
in. Find relief in the ache of cold but 

map the threat of sieves -- those shadowy ghosts
that pull you under granite's tongue.  When the
boys ran through the forest they had transformed.

Sway of kelp. Bars of light that penetrate

the deep. Their bodies shimmering like aspen.
With each step we have less water, fear, weight.
Sit down. Wait. Let the sea of trees cover you in their fir.

Narrative Difference

Narrative Difference

1

I’ve been driving my car around town
up and down the braille of pot-holed streets

Looking for the music of doubt.  Always
the shroud of sky.  Always the eager

electric tongue interrupted.
Truth wavers in and out of reach

Like a white flag that’s been washed too many times.
Hindsight helps us forget the human face of survival.

2
 

Over dinner, children diminished to
voices heard through closed windows, bikes circling

the drive way like red and blue planets.  Choices
are not what we've recorded.  Instead,

A conglomerate of sense—a way
to see from individual to whole. 

A way to circle and circle a center—
gravel popping beneath our tire’s weigh.

3

Her Aunt was employed by the Gestapo to screen
phone activity.  She ignored the red flag words

that pulsed out like blood—Instead she reported
what could not be condemned.  Stood

the only ground she had.  However pot-holed.
However much the sky pressed down
into the eyes of puddles.

The River of Life Manifesto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The River of Life Manifesto

Breath-like          skin over rivers waters                  god’s eye
fast-moving        pan                        reveals                                 fireflies of ideas                               
wrinkle               wrinkle                                 sink        wrinkle                                 sink                        wrinkle
At this speed     death sinks up                   dark and reaching
an           sunken oak         snags unexpected bare ankles
wrinkle               wrinkle                                 sink        wrinkle                                 sink                        wrinkle
and at its mouth a prayer             white paper that dissolves
keep writing                        in the    invisible ink of love

Dear Shirley Jackson

Whenever America pisses me off, I think about one of my favorite writer's Shirley Jackson.  How spot on she was depicting the deep corruption of a society in her classic short story, "The Lottery" where even the children threw stones because they had been taught it was right.  Here is a draft of my poem.

Dear Shirley Jackson –

I must admit, whenever I enter
the swampland, smell the vernal unfolding
of skunk grass and feel the bite and the swell
from horse fly, I think I understand where
you are coming from.  Black box.  That  current  pulsing under us even under deep
crust of snow, that thrives, that rises muddy
and hungry with the swift waters
that scrape the creek banks clean of a past. 
And there is beauty in it:
this ritual of return and rebirth.

This stepping forward into the dappled light
of slim dark trees, leaves trembling, creek
carrying everything (stones, truth, fear) past
fast.  What is folded up inside our miles
of guts? When we are asked to throw the stones
what current will try and carry us
under that sweet mud.
 

Landscape Begotten

Landscape Begotten

The tree that begat green nibs, delicate
paper buds, and a constellation of
airy green leaves holding back the milky
widening of stars.       And the hill that held

the tree begat rich limestone powered soil
where bodies of the lost still whisper their thoughts
to the tree.       The lost who begat the tree

and the hill, who still twist the roots into
braids never stop seeing milky stars. 
Never stop feeling the weight of the small
bodies they once begat that now lie on
the soil of the hill beneath the tree
looking up to the widening milky stars.

Endangered Alphabets

Last week I messed up and wrote a poem for this week's prompt.  So this week I am just riffing on what's around me.  We are on the road, in Washington D.C. at the beginning of a two and a half week adventure.  This poem draft comes out of this adventure and the amazing curiosities one always finds a the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival.  A booth we stumbled upon where children spelled out words from endangered alphabets. 


Endangered Alphabets

The net of travel is uncertain at
the start.  A plane circling like an argument.
Lightning flowers blossoming from orange
stained skies. The impossible air thick with
humidity and doubt. And body after
body after body passing exhibits
under an unforgiving sun.  Until,
suddenly you come to where you are undone.
Where you break and learn to walk again
on new stilted legs, learn to weave stronger
threads with time and find weight enough to push
root against stone to find sustenance.  Until
you find the lost alphabet that spells wisdom.

The Golden Field

Summer is upon us!  And writing poems with two kids home transitioning from school year life to summer life is no easy task!  But, they went to camp this morning so I after launching my online class I settled into the prompt for the week and tried to write.  This week we were to write off of Sappho's fragments.  I choose fragments from fragment 42: their heart grew cold / they let their wings down.  Here is my draft:

The Golden Field

In the city constructed of golden-pelted hills the boys
ran like comets. When they let their wings down
they became all muscles and golden flesh.
But, in this wind’s breath, in this pulsing air
their hearts grew cold as their bodies rose.

The field was filled with un-harvested things:
straw, arthritic, thick-knuckled trees and hope.
Shadows stretched and time lulled thick and sleepy.
Until the boys slowed, gathered back their dirty
wings.  When I left they were crouched in the shade
beneath the last apple tree mending what
was left of their wings with silver duct tape. 
They barely looked up from their work but
fear crowned the air around them like glorious contrails.

Door in the Mountain

I've started participating in a virtual writing group with some friends.  Each week we'll write a poem off of a prompt that one of us creates.  Then, when we finish our poem, we post it to our blogs.  This week, we wrote off of Jean Valentine's poem "Door in the Mountain".  It's a haunting poem.  The day I got the prompt was the birthday of my friend Gail Larrick, who died this winter.  Gail always reminded me of Jean with her quiet wisdom.  So, I couldn't help but write about her off of the prompt.  Below is Jean Valentine's poem and then my draft.

 

Door in the Mountain

Never ran this hard through the valley
never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer
tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me
heavy on my chest

People are not wanting
to let me in

Door in the mountain
let me in

-- Jean Valentine

Door in the Mountain
for Gail Larrick

Never saw the seams in the earth until
night washed us clean.  I was carrying your
memory on my back like a dead deer

up the slope when you whispered enough      shed
the dumb weight of grief   And looked up to find
stars spinning talcum soft and under foot
overgrown path up the shadowed mountain.

Heavy foot after the other until
what emerges from the dark is this:
tang of apple on tongue, rustle of wings
or hooves or haunches from coyote bush,
then quiet that opens like a wide lake.
And the door opened.
And I let you go. 

 

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.