Wintering in the Baffle

A single phrase has been bouncing around my head for the past several weeks.

wintering in the baffle

The bird feeder in front of my mother's house has a cone-shaped (or skirt-shaped) baffle to keep the squirrels from getting up and pilfering the seeds. Something about crawling up into something designed to confound small mammals intrigues me.

Maybe it's the connection to my father and his garden. I've wanted to write a poem about that anyway. It bothers me that I still don't know the names of any of the plants. It bothers me that I am so unknowledgeable and unobservant and disengaged with life. Not much of a poet.

Maybe it's the skirt shape, and the black-metal confounding of small mammals-who-want-to-steal-seeds is the core of my relationship with women. I don't think that's true, but it might be an easier poem to write.

Maybe the seasonal aspect is more important. Hiding in something that deflects the wind but conducts the cold, something that serves to frustrate throughout the year, except in winter, when it protects. (Of course, it protects the birds year-round.)

I don't know. In addition to being an incoherent, obscure poet, I am also a slow, unprolific poet, and so have no idea when I will actually do anything with this phrase. But, yet, here it is.

The ritual of apology and remembrance (March 2013 revisions)

I've considered, in my more confident moments, submitting this one for publication. I don't think it's quite right yet. As I don't have access to an academic workshop setting, and as all of the "amateur poet" non-academic groups I've seen do not seem appropriate to my material and my issues, I'm just going to post the latest revisions and my commentary here.

1. I'm not sold on the "imperial purple stockings" and "quilted cumulus" to cover the moon in the second stanza. I like it better than what was there, but it seems imprecise, too simple, wrong texture, something.
2. I'm on the fence about "the wedding march decomposes into a pillar of salt." I almost struck it, but there is something about the aural image shifting to a grainy, tactile one, and there's something about the pillar and Lot's wife and the arbitrary notion of sin ...
3. Is the alliteration on "climb to a corner and cast out" too much? Too unsubtle?
4. The Mare Desiderii in the penultimate stanza is obscure. Would the average poetry reader to know enough to at least get that it's an area of the moon? Would they manage at least a tentative translation from the Latin to "Sea of Dreams"? They don't have to know that the Mare Desiderii later turned out to be another, smaller "sea" plus a bunch of dark craters--that it was a misidentification, in effect the dream of a dream. They should get some meaning out of it, though.
5. Is a "breath in amber" meaningful? I'm on the fence. I like it better than the more common "wasp in amber," though.
6. The whole last stanza is problematic. I wouldn't trade "Our gull-feather inelegant as spit-shine" for anything, and for whatever reason (I haven't quite figured out yet), I feel a loyalty to the unresolved last sentence just as it is. Everything in between ... I don't think it works, but I don't know what to do with it.

Once, the moon
          instructed in whispers
how properly to unfold
          a paper napkin into
a heart as thin
          as his breath,
                    hold it,
and let it out.

She lacks gravity, cannot pull on
her own weather as imperial purple
stockings, as the quilt, billowed by the wind
or acrimony, covers quilted cumulus to
cover her face on days when she
is full and cannot stand her reflection.
As she pulls the tethers and teeth of
the seas over the sands.

Once, the moon
          was a shadow,
and cold, and he
          mistook the sky for
a collander,
          straining the water
                    from the world up
through the stars.

Rivers Opium and Lethe, watershed,
the wedding march decomposes into
a pillar of salt. They stand on the flood
plain: she and he. Blue, bitter, too-
bright. January, with-out sin blinded, she becomes
him, a leg of him, and they climb to a
corner to vomit cast out, and to breathe.

Once, the moon,
          hard boiled, bloodless
(why, she's so pale)
          could have sprouted rivers
filling the Mare
          Desiderii, now holds
                    the rain like a wasp breath
in amber.

Our gull feather inelegant as spit-
shine fingertips into the lip of kisses the Great Lake's lip. Named for
Ours is all grief and folly, his all
robes billowed by overspilling grace and
whispers, grace. It is the ascent
to his new father's breast folds
the wings and gives

NovPAD catchup #10: Mentire

Nov 10 prompt: “use a foreign word” in the title of your poem or in your poem.

My response, late in coming, is kind of a toss-off, but was kind of fun to write once it came to me. Whatever it is, it is here, below:

Mentire

Ital. v. intrans., meaning to travel
across the bright spot in the corner, to tuck
the news under one's arm, to greet
strangers in the voice of a nightengale,
to whorl around one's finger another's
sweet breath, to gaze along the edge
of the proscenium and disguise the audience as animals. First

          known use: 1349,
          Siena, Dr. Alonzo Fideli's instructions
          to his gardner. From the Latin mentere

meaning to fold into three parts
on one's lap concealing a weapon of
immense power or a bouquet of dandelions. First

          known use: 0 A.D., a
          passing remark from Pontius Pilate to his
          bathroom attendant about the state of his wife's

vagina. From an Indo-Iranian word the sound and
sense of which has been lost, but
which can be approximated to mean to make the sound

your mother makes when she believes she is
alone and examines the breadth of her dreams in such
a way that it seems as if the prism in her hand
refuses to release light, directing it instead
to play its last hand in the suit of a heart.

NovPAD catchup #8-9: even worse than 4-6

I don't want to say much about these. I feel obligated to post them because they are what I am resigned to call my response to the past couple of the November Poem-A-Day prompts. The prompts were good. I just couldn't make much of them. These, frankly, kind of embarrass me.

NovPAD #8: Talk back to a dead poet. This is in response to Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo,

Your smiling hips,
St. Walt's electric

body, can one hide
in Baudelaire's

million writhing
worms? Impossibly,

in each atom, the
whole, the body composed

of microscopic
homunculi, tiny tenders

feeding tiny fireboxes,
a convention of

will-o-the-wisps, some power to cause
us to glow, to burst like that,

to step forward into a new day.


NocPAD #9: Use the phrase “When he’s gone…”


We never buried, just burned
his body, reduced to a few spare souvenirs from the
event, relics. He was 
no  

holy man. Though when the wind struck up on the hallow
e'en I half expected to hear a pressed laugh, at least to
see him. Is the cancer there still, constructing cities in his

guts, breeding slovenly in the dampened dust
or has he seeped into the wood by
now, drawn through the vegetable capillaries, so that he's
everywhere when he's gone?

NovPAD catchup #7: The story of how the hurricane got his hands

I actually finished this last night, but had no Internet access at work, so had to wait until I returned home this morning. I wanted to post in on the Poetic Asides blog, but there's some glitch with the registration process. Anyway, here it is, following the prompt: Write a circular poem. I actually kind of like this one, a little.

M. Coriolis bore

the mystery of the water

wheel in his cells, and

knew the river was a

golden chain and the chain

a snake and the snake

a brightly feathered songbird, the

direction of her song the

product of Ω, the end,

the ultimate and v velocity

from the Latin vegēre to

quicken everything being a

predatory circling of the drain.

NOVPad #4-6 catch-up: Three dissatisfying prompt-poems

O, this prompt-poem stuff is hard. I have to write even when I'm not in the mood to write, for one, and even if I don't feel "inspired." Then, I have to respond to prompts that may or may not generate ideas, or generate bad and unworkable ideas. None of this reflects on the prompt-makers, Robert Lee Brewer, Writer's Digest, or the poets who have responded to the prompts in a timely manner. It's all about me. Aside from the challenge of being creative in less than ideal circumstances, I also have to face the challenges of letting go my perfectionism, remembering to play and not take it so seriously, and sharing my work to be part of a community and not to "show everyone how great I am." (as that sets me up to feel not so great) Anyway, here are poems 4-6.

#4: "Just Beneath": I had a lot of trouble with this one, and I'm not at all satisfied with the result. Stumped, I went to one of my regular cheats, the random Divination generator. The text is from or based on the text of my random I-Ching reading. I asked the I-Ching What is buried?

Just beneath the present

dragon lying

hidden in the

deep. rest.

slowly, yielding

Heaven transforming

to Sun (Wind)

give way, be pierced,

and filled, and follow.

#5: a txt msg poem. Part of the instructions said to "compose a poem in several short sections," but I skimmed and didn't see that part until I had already written the piece below. Anyway, this is often how I tend to write txt msgs: long, strange, idiomatic. I originally just wanted the middle panel as its own poem, leaving the rest of the message to the reader's imagination. Maybe that's a good idea. But anyway ...

triptych

(1/3) how is ur day my <3? much coffee &sing &sing. i contain all, F8, &c. & ur dust blu oerlaid th dawn & i let it go 2 voice. remember th dry cleaning, (cont)

(2/3) pls, & th orchids. 2 many shadows, &c. ghost, machine, &c. I m mtg my F8 w/shadows. No vaseline on th lens no beauty, no truth, all ye know on. ur (cont)

(3/3) nails my palm. stigma. stigmata. & all ye need 2 know. remember coffee, &sing &sing. remember i contain all, &c. remember th dry cleaning. darling <3

#6: a left poem and a right poem. I don't like this prompt. This is sort of a toss-off cheat. I went back to the Divination site and did a "Two Paths" Tarot reading (one set of cards on the left, one on the right) and again took the text and words based on the text and molded them into something. Really unsatisfying, though. But it's done, and I'm caught up. Maybe I'll even post something in Robert Lee Brewer's comments sometimes soon.

Two Paths

The Hanged Man, reversed,
                              Ten of Cups, right,
half in shadow,
                              emerging,
the snake eating its tail,
                              full.
King of Pentacles, reversed,
                              Six of Wands, reversed,
an old and
                              indefinite delay. fear
a vicious man.
                              ask again later.

NovPAD (catch up) #3: Mid-Air

Here's for Day #3, "a poem that scares you" ... it's not very good, but I've posted lots of things that aren't very good just to post something, so why should I mind?

The aerialist
          pauses with
                    her teeth in full
smile around the
          bar, suspended
                    like red cells
in plasma,
          or disbelief.
                    She recites to herself
from memory,
          A Crow, half-dead
                    with thirst, came upon a
Pitcher which had once been
          full of water ...
                    it's the emptiness
the lack of limbs
          and ledges to catch you,
                    nothing but the
                              rocks, the
                                        floor, the
                                                  void

NovPAD (catch up) #2: Actaeon feeds the pack

Still playing catch up, for the NovPAD Day 2 prompt: Write a full moon poem. The titles a joke, but I don't know if it's a good enough joke to make a good title. The poem's ... whatever the poem is. Frankly, better than I thought I'd do. Based on a Roman myth recorded by Ovid in Metamophoses. Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt (her Greek counterpart was Goddess of the Moon also, but I'm not sure about her offhand) turned the hunter Actaeon into a stag for getting a glimpse of her while she was bathing, and his own hunting dogs killed him. The structure: I like setting the sentence against the line. I'm not great at this yet, but I do like trying to work with it.


All for a glimpse at the swollen
naked moon. His dogs drink

at the pool, claret trailing
off their muzzles

in fingers.

NovPAD #1 (catch up): He did this trick with matches

This is my response to Robert Lee Brewer's November Poem-A-Day Chapbook Challenge. The prompt was "Write a matches poem." The structure is inspired to some extent by the 3-part structure of a magic trick (assuming The Prestige has that right: The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige). I don't know if it works. But it's something.

Strike-anywhere,
but aircraft--
phosphorus
sesquisulfide
blossoms into
light between fingertips, then

down the esophagus--
the light pours
out his
eyes as if
they were hollow,
a ravaged pumpkin.

Among the crowd
a phillumenist, his dark eyes bore into
the matchbox cover
a henna tattoo of a wraithy waif in gauze
borne by twin-
headed tiger, tiger burning bright 

Ghosts, Fourth Wave

I've abandoned marking up the changes, because it's more important to me just to work toward a final version than to accumulate a series of documents that show the piece's evolution. This is about ghosts. The things seen in our peripheral vision, half-understood, shadowy and shifting. And the stories we tell about them, in science as well as myth. About the things we can't quite hold on to. About the inconstant human heart. It's framed with Harry and Bess (Houdini), who, if he would have contacted her from beyond the grave, would have been so much more dramatic a love story. As it is, it is a story of desire unfulfilled, magic dissipated, anticipation deflated. The lover becomes a ghost, impossible to hold, impossible to forget. I don't know what it's about.

I.           Rosabelle
                              believe.

Not long ago, this was all open sea.
          Then, of a sudden, this little to-do, this dust-up on the water.
                    Raven sat upon this, and spoke, and

it became a mountain range, preserved
under glass. Gamburtsev rises
like broken teeth, the Ocean its
tongue, what will
it say?

Under miles of Eastern Antarctic
Ice Sheet the ghostly slopes sleep, dream
of erosion. Ladies and gentlemen, We cannot
see. We are blind. We map the scars
of tectonic disruption on fingertip,
with radar and magnetometers. We find
a crack in the ice and look, and see
the beginning
of the world,
of the word,
the story, and its telling.

Raven will take you now,
to the dead, to Memory.
You must understand, how ever,
Raven is a liar, a trickster, and a great shapeshifter.

And what is the heart?

If you are to understand the heart,

You had better understand the
chest, the muscle, the skin, the ribs and intercostal space;
the aorta, the vena cava, bullet trains through the empty city;
Frank-Starling (the more you fill, the greater your capacity to empty);
the sino-atrial node, the Perkinje fibers; a tin can, some string; the heart
is a Raven, a great trickster, a shapeshifter, a liar, containing no secrets

          (All secrets are written on the skeletal muscles, in striations, in movement)

The heart will take you now,
to the dead, to Memory.