The Earth With A City In Her Hair

TONGUEBITE

Youth wasted
on the young.
Metamorophosis wasted on
bugs. Exquisite sensitivity and cognition...
I don't want to say it.

Labels: mordant observations, my own poems

A season-word saves me--that is, I hope, from the not-particularly-vibrant nature of the first-draft [it turns out] haiku I posted a few days ago, about a haiku-book stuck in an un-opening desk drawer. I was at a birthday party yesterday, and started to speak of the stuck drawer because I wanted to speak of the trapped book, and probably about trying to write about it...Somebody in the room informed me that in summer the lid of a drawer can swell, so one option I have is to wait for the change of seasons. I appreciated the scientific enlightenment, and the conversation swerved so I never completed the rest of the little story.

So on the way home I was thinking, yes it's certainly good practice for a haiku to have a season-word, and in fact, I had already been lamenting not having such a word in this, probably my first attempt ever to write one, so how the lines might read [after exploring several different possibilities], could be:

Hopeless tugs on handle,
Summer's swelling, Beary's sparkle
Caught in unbudging drawer!


So now my First Haiku's not so bad, I believe [and please don't tell me, a haiku has to be exactly 5-7-5, that's ignorant]. I don't know if these three lines have any place within the community of poems I've published, or would like to see published--or for that matter, what the title, if any, could possibly be.

Labels: haiku, my own poems

This being the Jewish High Holiday season--Rosh Hashanah, the New Year (literally "Head of the Year") having been last week, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, beginning this very evening, I thought it would be nice to post my most Biblical poem, written in 1984, and later published in John (Jack) Clarke's poetry journal intent., which was fitting, because it is also the most Clarkean poem I ever wrote.

Beginning with yesterday's first imagining of this post, I wanted some sort of title such as the one I have finally chosen, "poem for the new year". When I finally laid my hands on a copy of the poem (I couldn't find one in my apartment, nor my copy of the appropriate issue of intent., so I had to go to my Safe Deposit Box at the Dime Savings Bank for the copies secured there), it was a charming surprise to be reminded by the date at the bottom of the poem that it was written very close to the start of a New Year as in January.

I am probably not telling the reader anything that she or he does not already know, but allow me to point out that "minyan" refers to the quorom of ten men that traditionally is needed to conduct a Jewish prayer service, and here connects with the Biblical narrative of Abraham pleading with The Lord to save the two condemned cities if there are ten worthy people there. "Intellectual tears" evokes Blake's lines from "The Grey Monk": "For a Tear is an intellectual thing,/And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King".

Lot's Wife Turns to the Lot of the City

Murderous fire and sulfer from the skies
not deflected by the force of enough
satisfactory citizens forming a minyan
as minimum constellation to
serve as shield of wonderful light for
the city's living flesh against
the knuckles of judging flame
the lucky woman couldn't take in her
stride, so halted,
turned to witness, with body and heart
bleeding as instantly she
solidified to
bitter intellectual tears standing
firm as eternal
saving saline
mercy of all
health and preservation.

2 January 1984

Labels: Blake, Hebrew Bible, Jewishness, John Clarke, my own poems

To get things started again, (again), I was thinking of posting one of my own poems, and for some reason or other I've decided on the Emily Dickinson imitation exercise I composed for Bernadette Mayer's Spring '97 St. Mark's Poetry Project workshop, and later published in the Ohio magazine that's printed much of my writing, Ken Warren's "House Organ" (the asterisks in the poem's title are intended simply as asterisks):

Euphony Variations *Orbiting Emily*

When Fiddles shoo 'way--their Spikes of--Pride--
Where--Bells let fly their Knots
Might Clocks--forego--the toxic--Traps
Hide nestled--in their Tocks?

Praise--best Trumpets abhor--the Armor's Gleam
Rapped Drums--rebut the--Fight
Shout Grace--when abject--Throats still weak
Can grasp--soft--pliant Bird Song's--Might.

15-18 April 1997

Labels: Dickinson, Mayer, my own poems, St. Mark's