In The Kingdom of Wind

The hills are burning,
burning. There's haze draped
all along the knees of the Cascades.
There's ash falling in The Dalles.
I can taste smoke from here.

A storm sideswipes the coast
and pushes air through the Gorge
like toothpaste through a tube. But no rain
this far east, just the wind
that drives the fire on like whips
and makes the trees throw up their arms in terror.

Across the river, on the freeway
a truck hauls a windmill vane
more than twice the length of a semi.
What a puny slice of this vast current,
this river of air, this kingdom of wind.

River-smoothed stones rattle across
the splintery top of a picnic table
at Horsethief Lake. In the grassy flat
behind me, a killdeer calls.

--Columbia Hills State Park/Horsethief Lake, August 28 2009
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Wine Air

Why do they bother selling wine?
They could bottle this air--
mountain air crisp with the cidery smell of ripe pears
and fresh-cut grass. And the flowers!
A riot of fragrance more vivid than their colors,
invisible tidal wave of tangy-sweet spice.

No wonder the bees are drunk,
staggering through the lavender like the one
that just blundered into my arm
weighed down by her orange pollen pantaloons
and with her golden fur all disheveled. She mutters,
"'shcuse me, 'shcuse me... I'm gonna jusht, jusht resht here... 'shcuse me..."

Child of the sun, I know that drunkenness. I too
am feasting, gluttonous, gorging myself on nothing but air,
wine air.

--The Gorge White House, August 28 2009
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Sculpture Garden

Inspired by sculptures seen at the Maryhill Art Museum. Please click on the links to see pictures of the sculptures.

wind-shaped metal points
to a line of leaning trees
iron echoes wood
("Brushing" by Mike Suri)

this taco's tasteless
but it doesn't matter, for
the bell has no tongue
("Taco Bell" by Tom Herrera)

face-on, he's solid
turned sideways, he disappears
truth is in-between
("Quantum Man" by Julian Voss-Andreae)

they preen and scatter
eyed feathers more brilliant
than any sculpture
(Peacocks by God)

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Willendorf Pear

Pear courtesy of Robert Radermacher; Venus of Willendorf courtesy of Wikimedia
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Dropping a Glass Armonica

3 Word Wednesday: Fracture. Noise. Vanish.

music vanishes
swallowed by shattering noise
fractured symphony

Glass armonica courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Balloons

Reposted for Miss Rumphius' back-to-school prompt.

A bunch of bright-colored balloons rises,
like a spray of October maple in the wind
silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky

of fall. Out of sight, around the corner
a string slipped from someone’s grasp and freed
a bunch of bright-colored balloons to rise

like firebirds above a clearing in a Russian
fairy-tale. The wind carries them away,
grey silhouettes lost against the sky.

Children weighed down by backpacks trudge
through leaf litter and faded hopscotch diagrams.
Summer's bright colors and hot air balloons rising

are gone into memory. Inside the schoolhouse,
dusty figures frieze the chalkboards
like white silhouettes against skies of grey slate.

At recess, desks sit lonely amid spilled glue
and discarded string. On the windy playground
bright-colored clothes balloon around children rising
on swings, silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky.

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Higher Text

School? I never left. But nowadays
I copy lessons from the windy sky
where God works out divine arithmetic
and sentence diagrams. My textbook's page?
The living world. My class, the human race
carving our names on desks at Terra High.
My notes are flesh, all scribbled over thick
lined with the shorthand of experience and age.

All that we knew, we're made to lose at birth
to study life, the largest sacred text:
a school where every student graduates
with or without diploma. Leaving Earth
is leaving one school, moving to the next.
Somewhere beyond, the higher learning waits.

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Wind Farms

From a distance they're spiky white heiroglyphs
that seem to stitch blue air to golden earth.

But up close, they're giants
swinging triskelial arms far above the head
of a man on a swaybacked horse!
Sucking down power from an endless sky
they spin kaleidoscope shadows across the thirsty ground
on days when whitecaps lie on the Columbia
like fine lace on a table, and the cars on I-84
shake in the cross-gusts at the mouth of the John Day.

The black gushers were a harvest millions of years
in the making, only decades in the spending.
Wind farms are not a cycle of sow, cultivate and reap.
Wind is a gift of the eternal Now.

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Cupcakes

I don't know why they came out so different. I followed the recipe exactly.

Original images: muffin by Horváth Dénes Péter; eye outline by Jef Bettens; green eye by sofamonkez; fiery eye by Knakharses
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Beach House

A beach house should be built from driftwood,
cedar logs rust-red at the heart and bleached to silver outside.

A beach house should be floored with water-smoothed cobbles
bedded in mortar one step up from hardened sand.

A beach house should be thatched with dried dune grass,
windowed with brown and green glass worn to milky opacity.

The beds should be hammocks woven of kelp holdfasts
and lined with down gathered from the nests of brown pelicans.

We'll take a blue glass float that drifted across from Japan,
(arriving miraculously unbroken among the rocks below the lighthouse)
and fill it with sprigs of sea star and beach fleabane.

A beach house should fall down at the first good winter storm
and leave no trace.

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13 Observations in Summer

1. Keep your dandelion wine. Give me fresh-picked blackberries.
2. A tint of copper, taint of smoke on the dawn wind.
3. Window fans purr in the evening; morning finds us under the covers.
4. Summer green frays away to let autumn colors peek through.
5. Flies and giant moths stagger through the open windows.
6. The river is low and clear and cold.
7. Marathons crisscross the city like shoelaces.
8. Soccer camp was cancelled today due to the intense heat.
9. Movies feature big explosions.
10. Restaurants feature sidewalk seating, public dog dishes, frozen coffee drinks.
11. The line between the outdoors and air-conditioning is sharp as a knife.
12. At eight o'clock in the evening it still feels like afternoon.
13. Lupine and poppies clothe the earth in the colors of royalty.

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Fall Equivocation

3 Word Wednesday: Decay. Graceful. Riot. I offer a sonnet instead of the usual haiku.

Summer poises on the cusp of fall.
Beneath the trees, a riot of decay
proclaims the graceful aging of the year
from green to gold to orange, brown and rust
from canopy of leaves to crumbling dust.
As leaves dissolve, their skeletons appear,
a web of veins in fragile, bold display
awaiting final dissolution's call.

The weeds have dried to shriveled husks and splinters
filling yards with evidence of drought
and autumn heat equivocates, concealing
change of season. Still, we can't help feeling
shortened days. The time is running out
and soon we'll need to make our plans for winter.

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Pink and Orange Deshabillé

I'm languidly composed, I'm of Rubenesque proportions
evocative and sensual and quite without volition
a pink and orange abstract of an article on art
imaginary angel with a graphic for a heart.

I'm a model modern model with no contract or consent
superior amusement of the mock-intelligent.
I'm an odalisque in rubies in a classical position
flamingo-feather boa with a habit of constriction.

The artist tried all his techniques, a dozen different poses
with a linen drape as backdrop on a bed of thornless roses.
He labored fruitless to defeat my resolute vulgarity
my déclassé appearance, pink and orange déshabillé.

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city that never was

invisible traffic loud as storm surge
swirls round monuments
snapped off jagged at the knees

on the horizon a high-rise ghost
dances like a heat mirage
there are no footprints in the sand

colorless, but full of sound
the memories of the dead
and of the city that never was

Inspired by an image created by Meri; you can see it here. Via Poefusion.
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1968 Pontiac GTO

Sticky vinyl upholstery
and a glove box full of 8-tracks
glide homeward on a country lane.

Diodes blink on the dashboard,
rancid Kentucky Fried potato salad
coagulates around a plastic spoon.

Drunken rant from his dad,
coarse winks from the younger brothers,
mama asks if he's going to get hitched

or is it just a fling? She used to
have good Sunday-school elocution,
wear bustles and frothy lace.

Let them enjoy their salacious fantasies.
I was just out looking at the stars.

Thanks to Eugene O'Neill and Eric Burdon.
Words courtesy of Read Write Poem
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Wash Me

A night of rain. Today the leaves are glossy
clean. Like glasses from behind a bar
that sat for years accumulating dirt
and spiders, till one day the barman took
them down and washed them. Like the unused dressy
shoes that hid their dust in closets, far
from public view, until a brand-new shirt
called for a polished pair, to make the look.

An unattended heart can gather grime
and rain won't sluice away the hidden layers
that build up like the black-lung in a coal
extractor's chest. It's lethal stuff. It's time
I paid some more attention to my prayers.
A finger's writing "WASH ME" on my soul.

window courtesy of Karin Lindstrom; texture overlay courtesy of Pedro Simão
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The Mortician's Son, on the Custom of Burying Bodies Barefoot

If you have been to funerals, you know
the body's buried fully dressed. Except
for shoes. Once, while relations keened and wept—
you understand, I was a kid. A show
was all it was to me. I'd yet to grow
into my own griefs. Anyway, I crept
behind the coffin where the corpse was kept,
pulled up the satin to reveal... a toe.

I screamed. The family rushed in from the wake
and father smacked me. Later on, he said,
"I wouldn't have you think we rob the dead.
Tradition says the shoes are ours to take.
They're clean, you know. Don't be afraid of germs."
But I had thought that corpse's toe... a worm.

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Captcha Jinx

3 Word Wednesday: Capture. Jinx. Qualify. (For a very good Scrabble score.)

Check out Dave Bonta's post on Read Write Poem today where he talks about Captcha among other things.

i'm jinxed by captcha
my comments can't qualify
yet i'm no spambot

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The Human Genre Project

Check it out here. A poem from this blog ("Callus") is under Chromosome 7, and there's lots of other good stuff.

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Indefinite Deferral

Predicted rain's been rolling back, of late:
for two weeks, each day's forecast said "tomorrow
or the next day". Maybe they just borrow
yesterday's report and change the date.
Indefinite deferral, constant promise
are the weather's standard stock in trade
and every weather forecast ever made
is greeted by at least one doubting Thomas—

but this is nuts! Two weeks expecting "showers"
any day now; put-off camping trips;
a garden full of desiccating flowers
waiting for the rain. The radar clips
show "weak disturbances" along the coast,
while green suburban lawns have dried to toast.

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I and Ragnarok

Read Write Poem's prompt this week is to repeatedly use a vowel. The technical term for this is assonance. I thought it would make an interestingly non-traditional vehicle for a look at Norse mythology: Norse/Germanic/Old English poetry used a lot of alliteration, but strictly based on consonants.

This poem also borrows elements of villanelle structure.

Ragnarok, the Norse end-time,
when gods and giants meet to fight
is equal parts of ice and fire.

As when two continents collide
and crumpled edges slowly rise
to mountains tipped with ageless ice

or are forced down, out of the light
to join the mantle's molten tides
that feed volcanoes spewing fire.

Or comets, in elliptic flight
through frozen trans-Plutonic night
slow-spinning balls of dirty ice

are drawn, like moths to something bright,
down, sunward: frozen flesh sublimes
with every kiss of solar fire.

A slow, but world-reshaping strife,
a sudden shock of comet-strike,
or mythic battles ending life?
New lands rise in fire and ice.

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more fun with images...

I like this effect so much, I may replace my avatar... Check out BeFunky

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Rethabile's questions

Rethabile at Poefrika has put up some questions for poets. I'm going to add some answers. Pop over there and offer him yours, as well. ("I" in the last question is Rethabile, not me.) 

Question one: Why do you write poetry (or literature) at all?

Because if I don't, confined divine inspiration will burn a hole in my head.

Question two: What is your favourite poem? You know, the one you'd have loved to have written, the one by whose standard you base all other works of art. If your life depended on answering this question, what poem would you suggest to the person holding the knife to your throat?

That's a tough one-- but if my life really depended on it, Shelley's "Ozymandias".

Question three: According to you, what is the state of poetry today? Is poetry flourishing or dying?

The writing of poetry is flourishing. The market for poetry is being splintered into increasingly narrow niches. The craft of poetry continues to develop into newer areas such as multi-media and performance poetry, without entirely losing its grip on traditional technique; however, the proportion of poets who attach importance to craft may not be on the rise.

See also Bruce Sterling's comments. I don't agree with everything he says, and some things that I do agree with I don't think are bad. But there's much food for thought.

Question four: What kind of poetry (or literature) do you dislike, and would not consider buying?

Confessional (as distinct from autobiographical). By that I mean poetry that has nothing to offer other than the poet's own experiences and responses.

Question five: Between the styles of Come (by Makhosana Xaba) and word speaks (by Kojo Baffoe) which do you prefer? Care to tell us why? Obviously, Makhosana and Kojo aren't required to answer this question.

I like them both, but would use them for different purposes. Style should be a tool, not a straitjacket. 

In both these poems, there are deliberate stylistic choices that I think enhance the content.  In Come, the varied line length gives the poem a playful, relaxed feeling that a stricter stanza structure might have stifled. In word speaks, the absence of capitalization, punctuation etc. adds to the general bleakness of the piece, and also calls attention to the fact that the speaker is in fact a word, sort of an ur-word that precedes (and will exist after) language, therefore need not (or cannot) observe typographic conventions.

Question six: What was the last poetry book you bought?

Ray Bradbury's "Farewell Summer". Don't tell me that isn't poetry.

Question seven: Where do you go for poetry on the web?

Check my sidebar for the list of blogs I follow.

Question eight: Do you talk poetry (or literature) with friends and family? "Hi honey -- Hey, I read this incredible poem today..."

Occasionally with my husband, rarely with my friends-- although I do post a poem a month in our office, and sometimes people want to talk about them.

Question nine: What one piece of advice would you give to a beginning poet (or writer in general)? One. What would you tell them to do or not to do?

READ!

Question ten: What line comes to you after the following two verses (in other words, please write the third verse -- these are spontaneous lines from me and are no part of any poem I'm writing or will be writing).

When the light from the lantern
beamed and fell upon the child,
abcd efg hijkl mno p qrst uvwxyz

he scribbled knowing he had only
moments of light in which to practice
his precious letters 

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Terminal Diagnosis

They told him that the test was positive


and so he feared it was...


terminal.
That night in bed beside his wife


he dreamed that all his friends


had gathered in formal garb


around his coffin.


Then he dreamed of a terrible skull shape


followed by a crowd of faceless ghosts!


He saw himself alone in the shadows...


The next day after studying the X-rays

they told him there was no immediate cause for concern.


At once he felt renewed


quit his job at the office


and joined the circus!



Original images:
positive by Charlie Rivell; terminal by Jeinny Solis; bed by Keran McKenzie; friends by Ginny Warner; formal garb by Brian C; coffin by Kerem Yucel; skull by Eyup Salman; ghosts by Ryan Heaney; shadows by Brian C; X-rays by youmat; no concern by Tijmen van Dobbenburgh; renewed by Alessandro Paiva; office by Carin Araujo; circus by Christopher Rayan
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Practice Pieces

Yes I have been writing
in black chalk on a cloudless sky:
HERE I AM
but the rain turned my words to soot
streaking the faces of buildings.

I wrote the calligraphy of willows in gold leaf
stroking pavement:
HERE I AM
scattered by the wind and piled
into smoke-flavored heaps.

I'm practicing to learn how to write
large and small in each viscid swirl
and echoed thump thump in the flow of liquid
through the first chamber of four:


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What Color am I?

I am all the colors of the restless sky,
blue, white, slate-grey, thunder yellow
indigo velvet, translucent celadon, abalone iridescence!

I am every color reflected in God's eye.
Brown earth, green water, flame-colored tree
saffron cat, spotted horse, peacock magnificence.

Ask what color is rain, glass or mirror.
Look close. Look very close and you may see
the colors you could be.

Reposted for TOP.
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Glamours

3 Word Wednesday: Accentuate. Glamour. Pitch.

it's the glamour pitch:
accentuate your features
hide your character


Elfland's pitch-dark woods
accentuate fey glamours
don't follow too far

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