Sunday, May 21st, 2006

This poem is the result of an exercise based on my favorite of Cheryl Haimann poems, "Eternity," which is comprised of ten lines, each with just two words.

November

relentless lexicon

essential harbinger

miraculous academy

penultimate entrapment

accidental cathedral

enshrouded circumstance

fastidious consequence

cerulean tornado

barbaric witness

imposed election

Monday, May 22nd

The Lion on the Bus

A man is yelling on the bus.

Someone passed him by

Without meeting his wild gaze,

And the slight, worse than a snarl,

Breaks the cage of his voice,

And once free, it roars.

Though I, pained as the others

Whose dollar fare

Seems now far too much,

Notice in the furor

The way each shriek

Falls pinched in apology.

The next stop is quite popular,

But now I'm curious.

I stare back as the cowards file out.

"What you looking at?" he barks.

I just grin, showing teeth,

And he gets off with the rest.

Tuesday, May 23rd

This was inspired in response to remarks Billy Collins made during the 25th anniversary episode of the City Arts and Lectures radio program.

Summer Window

It's as good as summer:

These last spring days

Made mild only by

The evening's open window.

So it's a fringe benefit,

The song of the city:

The race of wheels

Pressed high with impatience

And stretched into a lazy roar

In passing;

A solo playing slow

In search of a turn

Then joined by the harmonies

Of a light gone green;

The inchoate boom of speakers

Climbing from the open window

Of a car and into mine,

A one way gift of noise

Or a thief of the peace,

Punctuating the lullaby of tires

With a second of insanity,

The single sign that the cool night

Speeding away to tomorrow

Is instead still coming strong,

Rolling impatient under the wheel

Of the strongest city stars

Like summer itself

And life in general,

Racing by with their windows down,

Too soon pulling away with a roar,

Low and ever dimming

No matter how we strain to hear.

Wednesday, May 24th

This was also created in response to Billy Collins' remarks on the City Arts and Lectures program.

Return to Zero

She doesn't mention him.

She avoids the topic gratefully,

Even when knocked into the next room

By the thrill of my completion,

The act of calling it done,

Putting the pen down

Or saving the file,

The pad or keyboard abandoned

And growing cold

Under my smug self-satisfaction,

The belief that the void has been bested

In favor of creation

At this poet's hand.

It's enough to make an immortal cry

That through that veil,

That wall of delusion,

She can't hush me,

Can't warn me of the anti-muse

Already setting up shop

Upon the next page,

The next blank page

Where every live poet must return,

The satisfaction sour,

The smug purr choked

By facing a featureless stare so deep

It spills sideways through time

With its terrible newness,

The sum of every new page a growing curse.

And I can almost feel him,

The muse's bastard brother,

Dancing with joy at being summoned so

To say: You have never written

And you never will.

So says the staring page

And the hesitation of the pen.

So says the question,

What today is worthy of poem?

Says that question's master,

Why even then would you

Be worthy of its writing?

Says that question's god,

It better ring as Shakespeare

Because otherwise, what's the point?

And it might be tolerable

If it was not true,

Or if it was a novel

Or a painting or skyscraper:

Something whose efforts

Set the clock aside

In favor of a calendar

Of questionable precision,

Postponing that benumbing return

To that damnable zero.

What spell must I cast to thwart him?

Set the titter of each poem

Following on her elder sister's heels,

Pages flowing without a break,

A poem of a thousand voices.

A thousand hidden ends,

A thousand pages,

None of them ever clean

Until some random turn

Puts a work to bed

With no room for tomorrow's kiss,

No straggler to allay the expectation

Of the next blank page?

The next new page,

The next pure and pristine page,

The next welcoming, wanting, waiting page,

The next innocent page?

The simple scapegoat coming in

After the muse is flung aside,

Having giving her last to stand before

The onrush of the final dot,

Stopping the final thought

On a speck at the page's end:

The little zero that says I'm done;

That pinprick of ink that seals the spell;

The last dark snowflake

That sets the muse longing

For the return of humility, patience,

And other difficult dealings

Wrestled from deep within

When I prefer to believe

That all that's needed

Is to omit that final, full,

Damnable stop, period

Thursday, May 25th

Opportunity for a Poem

A dozen times a day,

A poem comes knocking,

Having climbed the many stairs

From inkling to idea,

Now begging to be inked,

An apologetic tap

While I'm soaping up in the shower,

Rubbing my whole body

In that innocent way of the owner

Though when the rapping comes,

Too conscious of my hands

Lingering, slick with suds,

And maybe a bit more thorough

Than technically necessary.

And though I don't answer,

The skin is now timid,

The water wasting, soap gone,

And I am no longer allowed to be dirty,

Though neither do I have a poem

Of blue smears running

On a drip crinkled page.

The next time the knock comes,

Small, timid as a child put onto it

By her mother,

Told just what to say

When the door opens,

Though with each lingering moment

I nurse my soup to life on the stove

And keep my grilled cheese

From catching fire

She's forgetting every other word,

The ending, the whole point really,

Making it a weird hash at best

If I bothered now.

But I have a hot sandwich

And soup to dip it in,

And what Swiss cheese poem

Could compete with that?

The next time it knocks

With the fury of one who's been

Waiting all day for my return

And just notices the upstairs light go on,

Where I'm startled from the news,

The mail, the blogs and comics, and stats.

You know, maybe I have one of those timers

That toggle the lights when I'm gone.

And who needs an angry poem

Raging in and giving me some small splinter of hell,

Some indulgent rant,

Some banal blah blah blah

On the NSA or Darfur

When I'd rather be

Googling myself into a stupor?

And on and on comes the knocking until

The next time it comes, well, it doesn't.

Eleven thirty and I sit by the open door,

Poetry books spread from room to room

Like bait or breadcrumbs.

The only tapping now

The restless drum of my pen on the page,

Empty as the doorway,

The hall, the stairs and the street.

Empty as the eleventh hour

For want of a stay.

Empty but for the scrap

I finally notice under the welcome mat

The scrap that reads:

A dozen times a day,

A poem comes knocking.

Friday, May 26th

The Drift

Tired. Sagging.

Waiting outside.

Standing and waiting.

Breathing slowly,

Lamenting my feet

And waiting.

A bubble dances by

And then another.

Waiting outside?

Morning bright,

City busy,

Waiting outside the Service Rent-a-Car

For my van to come around,

Two shining prisms of soap,

Holding their breath

With as much joy and laughter

Tensely contained

As I've never known in anything.

City gritty,

City loud,

City all going along in earnest,

And a bubble rambles by

In chase of another

Already swirling round the corner

And up the street,

The street roiling

With bubbles of its own,

All steel and rubber,

Filled with their own pockets of air--

Some with music, some with silence,

But none of them this

Impossibly happy.

Over the speed limit sign

And toward the highway overpass,

Joining the morning rush,

Bubbles of soap on commute

With bubbles of industry.

No children nearby.

No one washing rental cars.

Two happy bubbles,

Just for a moment

Joined by a third

Standing and waiting:

A bubble of humanity;

A body curved around

A sort of vital nothing,

Now alert, connected,

And swirling along,

Resonant with a curious levity

Of its own.

Saturday, May 27th

Post-Moving Syndrome

Now with the boxes open,

The light bulbs duly located,

The bubble wrap stripped

From the face of the mirror,

I see my many bruises

All at once,

Obvious islands in an ocean of aches.

And later, though well hidden

By long sleeves and a collar,

Smooth slacks and slick-soled shoes,

Arriving at an elegant table

Set for an expensive meal,

I stop short,

Faced with moving another heavy chair.