Gentle February

Go, gentle February, tell them
we are grateful for winter's passing.

Tell them we have raked the dark earth
in readiness for sowing.
Tell them last autumn's leaves
have been cleared away into piles.

We have walked our sidewalks
and been grateful for sunshine.
We have watched over the early blooms.
We have greeted the first butterflies.

February, we have said good-bye to frost
and kissed the crocus. We have
observed all the signs of spring
embroidered on your grey robe.

Gentle February, sweeping your hem
across this midnight, send us
a kind March. Send us warm rains
and rock the new leaves with soft winds.

Go, gentle February, tell them
we are grateful for winter's passing.

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Big Dreams

My avarice is puny, but my dreams
are plenty big. I dream of depthless ocean
where lamplike fish, in slow but endless motion
swim through waters darker than the sky.
In cold upwellings of abyssal streams
they glide and turn so slow they seem to fly.
No lines or nets have ever trawled this deep
but I, a dreamer snagged upon a hook
of sunlight, dragged into the realms of sleep
am brought here every night. The giant eyes
of deep-sea fish cannot express surprise
but sometimes roll back for a second look
at my misshapen ghost. I render thanks
in darkness, for their phosphorescent flanks.

--for Sunday Scribblings
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Innocent Time

The first image above is by NapaneeGal via Weekend Wordsmith, the second is by h.koppdelany via Read Write Poem. They're eerily resonant, I think.

You don't expect an angel to age
hair turning to snow under the relentless pendulum.
You don't expect a child to die
and lie spread-eagled in the dirt
clutching a broken toy.
You don't expect an angel to die
and lie broken on the pendulum like a child's toy
or a child spread-eagled in the snow.

In the center of the clock-face, a faceless figure
bends over, fleshless face half-hidden by its cowl
and strips away the flesh. In the land beyond
the dark boat, the fleshless meet the dark.

Pendulums might as well be scythes
and snow angels, skeletons. The faint impression
of a child's body in yesterday's snow
is ghost enough for a legion of mediums.

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Dowry of the Bride

Can these crumpled leaves really hold a flower?
A fist clenched this tight would crush any flower.

A glimpse of sky through the roof of a bower
naked to the wind and unclothed with flowers.

Emerald enamel sheathes the walls of this tower,
this bud that imprisons the thought of a flower.

And the hopeful search, and the desperate scour
their hearts for a glimpse of a beckoning flower.

Last summer's savor has turned to sour
for want of the perfume of opening flowers.

And no-one can dream yet of a tranquil hour
when bees might rest upon an outspread flower.

The Bride of the Beloved will reveal her dower
when God calls "Open" to the sleeping flower.


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Butterfly Watching

It's early yet. So far this spring, I've seen
some little household moths and one
brave fritillary at Alberta Park.
The pupae that the caterpillars spun
and hung from branches in the days between
the autumn's last light and the winter's dark
are mostly still unopened, presents wrapped
in precious stuff. When summer tears the silk
they'll come: the black-and-yellow scalloped shapes
whose shadows interlocked and overlapped
against the unmarked linen of the drapes
that hung as cool and pale as mother's milk
that night among the February gales,
the night I dreamed a flight of swallowtails.

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Caribou Shadows

Cold shadows gather under the trees,
caribou tracks print the fragile snow.
Twigs shiver in the evening breeze
as the last of the winter light lets go.

Caribou tracks print the fragile snow
each hoof is edged with electric blue.
As the last of the winter light lets go
the woods path gleams where the stag walks through.

Each hoof is edged with electric blue
and leaves charcoal scribbles on flawless white.
The woods path gleams where the stag walks through
dissolving into the embrace of night.

Twigs shiver in the evening breeze
and leaves, charcoal scribbles on flawless white.
Cold shadows gather under the trees
dissolving into the embrace of night.

Apophysis fractal
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Tease, Meager, Generate

It's another syllable sestina... this one for 3 Word Wednesday.

Tease, Meager, Generate

Ate teaser. Me ginger
grrr-eat! Jetty's men, er,
urger me 80s gen.
Jenner teas gyrate me,
smidgen ate ergotty.

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Novelties

So it's often said that you can't write a new story, because all the plots have been used. The number of plots laid out by Aristotle is usually quoted as twelve, but I can't find a source for it: in his Poetics, he defines six components of tragedy, of which plot is the most important, and later divides plots into simple and complex. At another point he defines three possible character types and two possible movements or trends, resulting in six possible plots.

A more recent source lists seven plots:

1. Overcoming the monster -- defeating some force which threatens. e.g. most Hollywood movies; Star Wars, James Bond.

2. The Quest -- typically a group sets off in search of something and (usually) finds it. e.g. Watership Down, Pilgrim's Progress.

3. Journey and Return -- the hero journeys away from home to somewhere different and finally comes back having experienced something and maybe changed for the better. e.g. Wizard of Oz, Gulliver's Travels.

4. Comedy - not necessarily a funny plot. Some kind of misunderstanding or ignorance is created that keeps parties apart, and is resolved towards the end bringing them back together. e.g. Bridget Jones' Diary, War and Peace.

5. Tragedy - someone is tempted in some way (vanity, greed, etc.) and becomes increasingly desperate or trapped by their actions until the climax, when he/she usually dies (unless it's a Hollywood movie, with an escape to a happy ending). e.g. Devils' Advocate, Hamlet.

6. Rebirth - the hero is captured or oppressed and seems to be in a state of living death until all seems lost, when miraculously he/she is freed. e.g. Snow White.

7. Rags to Riches - self-explanatory. e.g. Cinderella & derivatives

(Note: Wikipedia credits this list to Christopher Booker, "The Seven Basic Plots", but doesn't give any more information about this source. I don't know if it's a book, an article, if so where published, or a publication date.)

I'm inclined to agree that it's hard to come up with a new plot, unless you slice the definition of “new” extremely fine. A story about a poor-but-honest boy who wins fame and riches through the clever schemes of his talking dog? Not new. Giving Puss-in-Boots a canine grin doesn't change the story. (Actually there's already a similar story about a Russian prince and three dogs... never mind.)

But there's more to story than plot, as Aristotle recognized. The modern novel doesn't tend to include song and spectacle, and doesn't rely nearly as heavily on speech (dialogue) as classical Greek drama (although movies may include any or all of the above). For now I suggest that besides plot, character, idea, theme and setting are important pieces. Now, obviously these areas overlap quite a bit, and especially in fantasy and SF, the idea often creates the setting. But it'll do to go on with.

SF and fantasy still come up with new ideas and settings pretty regularly. (For the purpose of this discussion, I'll call something “new” if I think it's unique to 20th/21st century literature.) Consider Robert Adams' On. Consider it carefully if you're prone to vertigo; I'm not, and I got dizzy reading it. The idea there is that gravity's been distorted such that the attraction is experienced at right angles to the force.

Uh?

Gravity is parallel to the surface of the planet, instead of perpendicular to it. People in On experience the earth as a huge cliff. Every day the sun appears at the top of the cliff and rolls downward. I'm sorry to report that this fascinating book ends unresolved-- on, wait for it, a cliff-hanger...

Anyway. Novel and intriguing idea, great setting. Plot? Boy sets out to save world from evil wizard. Sound familiar?

A couple of other examples: Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, which postulated that classical Greek understanding of the physical world was literally true: Aristotelian mechanics, Ptolemaic astronomy, etc. The part where the spaceship crashes into the crystal spheres is great. Stephen Baxter's Flux, which is set inside a neutron star. I love the part where the inhabitants are thinking about us-- so huge and tenuous... China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels starting with Perdido Street Station, and his more recent The City and the City.

Okay, the “science” on which Garfinkle's book is based is classical, not “new”. But the way the concepts are brought to life in the settings of all these books is new, and brilliantly imagined.

There's nothing new here plotwise. Celestial Matters is about a desperate mission during wartime, with spies, betrayals, disasters and victories, and ultimately at least the hope of a peaceful solution. I don't remember much about the story in Flux, but I think it was mostly a young person's wanderjahr, in the course of which many expository lumps are dispensed. Perdido Street is a monster novel, a classic Thing Under The Bed story. The City and the City is a whodunit with a cop for a hero.

So, what about characters and themes?

They don't come along nearly as often as ideas do. The most recent brand new character type I can think of for sure is the Good Robot. Traditionally robots had been viewed as soulless, not very bright, and either carelessly or maliciously destructive-- cf. the Golem of Prague. Asimov and others pioneered the robot as morally equal but socially subordinate, and as a sympathetic character. A characteristic cluster of themes revolves around this character type: what is a soul? What is the essence of humanness? What is free will? And most important-- as a robot, do I have any of the above? Heinlein's Mike, Clarke's HAL, and Asimov's R. Daneel all might have paused to ponder these questions between chapters.

More recent literary generations of robots and AIs seem to have outgrown the question rather than solved it. One gets the impression in Iain Banks' Culture novels that the AIs regard humans with the kind of exasperated affection one usually has for one's out-of-it, but dear, elderly relatives. The ones who keep asking you to fix their computer.

Arguably, the Alien is a new character. Here I mean Alien in a very specific sense: beings of intelligence comparable to humans, but with a distinct biological origin and with no (or only very recent) shared history. That lets out various mythological beings from elves to centaurs; we're supposed to have had lots of history (and in some cases, shared ancestry) with them.

I'm not sure (and here we get into “how fine do you split it”) whether the Alien in this sense should be regarded as a different character than the “folks over there”, the Other, who's always been a part of our mythology and folklore. But if so, then the First Contact story may actually have qualified as a brand new plot when it came along.

Another possible candidate for new character: person of human biological origin, but whose personality is completely programmed. Is such a thing even possible? Depends where you stand on nature/nurture-- but as an SF-nal premise, it's perfectly reasonable.

Cherryh's azi stories, especially Cyteen and the recent sequel Regenesis, are the most fleshed-out treatment of this concept that I've seen. (Probable first appearance, Huxley's Brave New World). Cherryh doesn't take a pure nurture-over-nature stance: the azi programming overlays the gene-set and interacts with it, but ultimately neither genetic potential nor behavioral programming is the whole story.

Another character who's been showing up a lot lately is the Bad Angel. By this I mean, not a Fallen Angel or demon: those have been around in literature for a long time. I mean an angel who's at least nominally in God's service, but is nonetheless a real SOB. The first place I remember noticing these types was Gaiman's Sandman: Duma and Remiel show up to take over Hell. Duma's resigned and dignified. Remiel is a complete jerk. (He gets worse in the Lucifer spinoff.)

Bad Angels have been all over DC Comics (Preacher, Hellblazer) and have showed up in a couple of fantasy novels/series. Plus I keep seeing the trailer for this movie Legion...

I don't know if this is a new character, or if it's just new to be able to portray such a character in mass-market fiction. If you don't attribute free will and human personality traits to angels (classically, they're not supposed to have much of either), then this kind of fiction implies some things about God that religious folks may find disturbing. Like, in medieval times, burn-at-the-stake disturbing.

Angels in medieval writings were instruments of God's wrath at least as often as His mercy, and even when they were on your side, they were pretty scary. But I think it's modern, although maybe not exclusively 20th-century modern, to imagine angels who take personal and sadistic pleasure in dispensing divine retribution.

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Unearthed

You see, I have remembered it at last--
a thing forgotten, brought to light again.
Too long it's lain deep-buried in my past,
you see. I have remembered it at last,
as potter's hands remember what they've cast
though sometimes eyes forget: you touch it, then
you see. I have remembered it. At last,
a thing forgotten's brought to light again.

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Swine Flew

I heard the thunder of porcine wings
as the moon shone down, as blue as blue
and I knew we were seeing impossible things.
Oh, the pigs they flew, yes the pigs they flew
Oh, the pigs they flew in the sky.

Ice was growing round the gates of the Hell
and the Devil he shivered in his overshoes
while oak trees grew from the ocean's swell
and the pigs they flew, yes the pigs they flew
Oh, the pigs they flew by and by.

The time had come, so the people said:
it's the end of the world as everybody knew.
There were signs in heaven where the sky was red
and the pigs they flew, yes the pigs they flew
Oh, the pigs they flew up so high.

Well, the rocks fell up and the sky fell down
while the snakes came walking all straight and true
and the sun was shining way deep underground
and the pigs they flew, yes the pigs they flew
Oh, the pigs they flew-- so did I.

--for Sunday Scribblings. "When pigs fly."
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Penny Moon

Do you prefer the bud to the flower
the new-penny moon to the midnight dime?
Or is fulfilment in the fullness of time
sweeter to you than a promising hour?
Seed is tender in the hand of the sower
but harvest is generous; a well-aged wine
is mellower than new vintage, but vines
cast soft shade in the spring bower.

Do you prefer the kingfisher's diving
or the hover of kestrels hunting a field?
Do you like setting out or arriving,
an open letter or an envelope still sealed?
Silver's worth more than copper—but I
prefer the penny moon, low in the sky.

--for Weekend Wordsmith's penny prompt.
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Snaggage

3 Word Wednesday: Occur. Ragged. Tidy.

stockings ragged with
runs that occur at random
otherwise tidy

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A Rigged Match

Ain't the tin spanking decks
decent? Con these panting
tinned eggs. Pungent, the con:
counting the descent span.
Pan: king gent decks ten. These,
the spandex contingent.

...must...stop...
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Break Me My Bounds

Break me my bounds and let me fly-- "A Career", Paul Laurence Dunbar

"Break me my bounds, and let me fly!" I heard
a carol from an egg. An unhatched bird
was singing of the vast triumphant sky
he knew was his by right. The will to fly
cannot be crushed in feathered things. The herd

may call a child's dream of flight absurd
and wean him on the pap of hope deferred
but chick or calf, you'll know him by his cry:
"Break me my bounds!"

In February's darkness, Death had spurred
to Dunbar's side. His vision was too blurred
by illness to perceive the hollow eye
that fell on him: Death said, "It's time to die."
But Dunbar only answered with this word:
"Break me my bounds."

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Hazel Hall, 1886-1924

From the threshold
the stairwell rises into gloom, curving banister
upon spindled uprights.

In the rooms above
a crippled woman inhabits a chair with iron wheels.
She watches

from the window as
people pass below. Perhaps she loves them, perhaps
she only dreams it

while her pens
and needles ply colored strands of passion
through her solitude.

Her dreams explore
anteros, while the fall winds strip whirligig seeds
from the maples.

Hazel Hall

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Embedded

Married 19 years this weekend.

Embedded in the rhythm of each day
like breath in laughter and like salt in tears
are all the words I ever need to say.

Communication sometimes goes astray
but when we pay attention, words appear
embedded in the rhythm of each day.

No need for fancy language to display
my erudition. Simple, plain and clear
are all the words I ever need to say.

Each time I curse, each time I kneel to pray
I find it easy, for the words are near,
embedded in the rhythm of each day,

the ebb and flow, the toss and swing and sway,
the up and down of life's adventures. Here
are all the words I ever need to say

to my true love, my angel clad in clay
with every indrawn breath. I love you, dear
embedded in the rhythm of each day
are all the words I ever need to say.

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The Other Frog

Leave him alone, you foolish girl. You think
your precious kiss will turn him to a prince--
maybe it will. So what? As well turn quince
to crabgrass, lemonade to ink.
You call it an improvement? Hairy skin,
a throat that cannot swell with calls of love,
a stilt-like figure teetering above
the ground God gave us creatures to live in!
It's vanity that would remake a frog
to something like itself: that would extract
guiltless amphibian from honest bog.
And I, his mate, forsaken, can enact
no better vengeance on your fairy tale
than this: to make a milkmaid spill her pail.

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Fro-mance

Red-painted nails and frosted hair hide
frowsty decay and slow panic.

She'd been a girl in ribboned frocks,
his lubricious patter made her froward.

Now he frowns and mutters. She walks on
eggshells, smiling frozen fictions.

He pulls a hacksaw from the footlocker
and waits for her in front of the house

but she has kissed a crowned frog
and frolics joyfully in the swamp.

words courtesy of Read Write Poem

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That's a Wrap

Cuts, if loose, tingle would.
Woodcut ills: if tin glows,
lose wood thing. Cut civil
elusive woodcutting.
Thing: ill-cut, loose wood sieve.
Sifting would all lose. Cut.

These syllable sestinas are kind of addictive. They look so small, you figure one or two won't hurt...

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The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

Do the diamond seas of Neptune
glitter in the endless darkness
of the vacuum between planets?
Do the oars of pirate vessels
gleam with drops of liquid carbon
brighter than the dim and distant
sunlight? Doesn't watching Saturn
sigh with envy, craving jewels
though he wears a shining halo
girded round his vast equator?

Tales of travel and adventure
may be set by future writers
on the frozen islands floating
in a vast and lightless Arctic,
cubic crystal-lattice landmass
lit by pure imagination—
Neptune! world of hoarded glory!
Ancient trove that every dragon
weeps to think on! Glassy gazes
from our planet search your secrets.

Neptune's ocean gems the heaven
rivalling the lands of legend:
valleys in remote Montana
(in that story by Fitzgerald),
Shangri-La and deep Atlantis,
Avalon and El Dorado.
Isn't human nature funny,
always seeking distant treasure
on the outskirts of the solar
system, off in Terra Incognita?

In response to Read Write Poem's prompt this week. If you'd like more detail about the thought process that got me here, you can look at this post.

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Incoherent Midnight

This is a syllable sestina. I just came across this form in a contest that's being held at Wag's Revue. This is (probably) not the one I'm going to submit, but I'll have to see if I can do better.

Night in mid-Corinth. He,
her knight renting comet
'mid her con. I, tenant,
rent midden. Her knight coo-
coo! And night-mad here in
incoherent midnight.

Obscure, no? Here's how the syllable pattern works:

123456
/Night/ in/ mid-/Co/rinth./ He,
615243
her/ knight/ rent/ing /comet
364125
'mid/ her/ co/n. I, t/en/ant,
532614
rent/ midd/en. /Her/ knight/ coo-
451362
coo! /And /night-/mad /here/ in
246531
in/co/he/rent/ mid/night.

I started with the phrase at the end and worked backwards.

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Art, or the World

3 Word Wednesday: Lucid. Righteous. Salvage.

from damaged canvas
saints gaze righteous and lucid
waiting for salvage

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A little research

Read Write Poem has an interesting exercise up this week. Here are the essentials:

Print off one copy of each of your newest poems. Make it a significant chunk of no fewer than eight, but perhaps no more than 20 poems.
1. Identify five words that you use often in your writing.
2. List the settings found in your poems, if place is an element of your work.
3. Note the point of view used most frequently in your writing.
4. Create a list of stylistic decisions — both good and questionable — that you make in many of your poems. (Use of the same stanza length or form, writing an unnecessary, throat-clearing first stanza, having a random, disconnected title, ending a poem too soon, and so on.)
5. Discern whether your poems have a primarily lyric sensibility, or a narrative approach, or a combination of both (and if so, measure the proportions).
Write a poem that uses:
None of the five words that most frequently appear in your work.
A setting that you have never used before, or that you haven’t used lately.
A point of view that departs from your usual tendencies.
None, or very few, of your usual stylistic decisions. (If you usually have a brief title, try a long one. If you always write in one long stanza, try dividing the poem into smaller groupings. If you often write lyric poems, try a stronger narrative, and vice versa.)
Bonus: Do something in the poem that “puts you outside your comfort zone.” Interpret that however you would like.

I haven't written a poem yet, but I've discovered some interesting things in answering the questions. I pulled the 16 most recent poems off this blog and worked with them.

#1 was unexpectedly difficult. The sample included two sestinas and a villanelle, which tend to skew word occurrences. A sestina end-word is required to appear at least 7 times in the course of the poem, and though I interpret the form loosely (eg. foot, feet, footing), there were still quite a few exact repeats.

Here are the 29 commonest words in these 16 poems:
the, of, and, I, a, to, in, from, my, that, you, like, on, with, at, not, this, for, is, we, all, it, or, by, he, up, be
(Note that there's a lot of slop in these numbers. Among other things, I counted "I'll" as a single occurrence of "I" rather than an "I" and a "will". That probably wasn't right. I also see that I wasn't careful about plurals; I have "bridge" and "bridges" in as separate entries, which should really have been two occurrences of "bridge".)

No nouns, no verbs except "is/be" (the occurrences of "like" are comparatives). Articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns are generally the commonest words in English, and poetry is no exception to the rule. If anything, I think these words are slightly rarer in poetry compared to normal English: consider "Orchids":

frantically seeking
source of bogus sex odors
wasps lurch toward orchids

Proper grammar would require at least a couple of "the"s. Likewise the last line of Trellis should read "a rose to a trellis."

At 30-36, we have a cluster of words: could, foot, time, was, where, each with 6 occurrences. At least there are a couple of nouns in there. But, wait! Both "foot" and "time" were featured in repetition: "foot" was one of the end-words for Drowning Sestina and several repetitions of "time" occur in Wolf Time.

So, there are a couple of ways I could go with this. I could take the assignment literally, and ditch the top 5: the, of, and, I, a. That would lead to an interesting poem that might sound a little wonky (whole novels have been written without the use of "the", but they've been remembered as curiosities rather than for their literary merits). Or, I could dump the top 5 nouns and verbs, on the reasoning that the intention is to keep us from reusing themes, images, figures of speech etc. But if I used a word in a poem whose form demanded repetition, should that count as one use or several?

Here's a list of words culled from the 16 poems I'm working with, each of which occurs no less than 4 times in at least 2 poems, and which I think are characteristic of my poetry: city, sky, earth, seen, sound, thought. They're not at the top of the rankings, because of all the articles and particles and sestina end-words. But I think this list gets closer to the purpose of the assignment as I understand it.

One other interesting fact: out of about 800 distinct words in these poems, almost 600 were used only once. I have no idea how that compares with normal speech or normal writing.

On to #2. I have two poems that reference specific geographical features of N/NE Portland. That's actually fairly unusual for me. Canyon Blues is about north-central Oregon, specifically the Deschutes area, but you couldn't necessarily tell that from the poem. I think it's fair to say that place isn't a strong feature in most of my work.

#3. No strong preference here. I count 7 poems in first person singular, 6 in omniscient narrator voice, and 3 in mixed or indeterminate voices.

#4 was more fruitful. I've already alluded to the fact that I use a lot of repetition. I count 7 poems using repetition: 2 sestinas, a villanelle, a refrain (Canyon Blues), and two poems that repeat to no particular pattern (The Earth Still Rings and Like This Leaf).

Besides repetition, I note a preference for short stanzas. Leaving aside the poems whose formal requirements include stanza length, I find six out of seven poems have stanzas of 4 lines of fewer (the exception being Corned Beef, Cabbage, Free Wi-Fi).

I definitely prefer short titles, 10 out of 16 have a title of only 1-2 words: also, all of my titles refer to a thing or event in the poem and/or the form of the poem. (It's fairly rare for me to name a poem "Villanelle Such-and-Such" or "Something Sestina"-- odd that there are two such poems in this small sample. I do have a lot of poems named "Something Blues", though.) Titles, and this is definitely a weakness on my part, are something I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.

Of course, there's a lot of formal poetry in the sample. I count 6 free verse out of 16, although some of them display form-like characteristics. (A glance at my labels suggests roughly a third of my poems overall are free verse.) Of the 10 formal poems, three are sonnets.

#5. I've written before about the shifting definitions of "lyric" in the context of poetry. For the purpose of this assignment, I'm assuming the meaning is something like the following:

"Lyric Poetry consists of a poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now commonly referred to as the words to a song. Lyric poetry does not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feeling, state of mind, and perceptions."

If you read down that page, they give an example from the poetry of Emily Dickinson... that I would say is clearly a narrative. Obviously I'm having trouble telling the difference. Part of the problem is that the definition poses an arbitrary and, I think, counter-productive separation: in good writing, the story would support the expression of feeling and vice versa. I'd rather work toward that goal than stress the divide.

Anyway, by my count, 6 out of the 16 poems could be described as primarily lyric and 6 primarily narrative, with 4 that I can't really assign to one category or the other.

I don't know if I'll get around to writing a poem, but it's been a worthwhile exercise so far.

Update. I wrote a poem and posted it here. I avoided the words on my hit list and used a completely novel setting. The voice of the poem is pretty much omniscient narrator: that's a minus. But the poem is mostly phrased in questions rather than statements, which is a departure for me. The title is longer than usual, and really only tangentially connected to the poem. (Can't stand for it to be completely disconnected.)

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Drowning Sestina

A fogbank swallows the nail-paring
moon. Seagulls line the frosty wires
shifting from webbed orange foot to foot.

The path is muddied by the many feet
that came and went from the riverbank.
They dragged the water with tight-woven webs
and finally went away, despairing.
The body was trapped in a tangle of wire
beneath the outwash from Sullivan's Gulch.

Other search teams had gone up the gully
scanning for clues, every square foot
under the menacing hum of the light-rail wires
and the blank earth stare of the steep banks.
Meanwhile the fence crew was repairing
the hole that was slashed in the steel web.

No-one saw the gap in last year's cobwebs
or the smear where someone skidded on gull-
droppings. The plain trace of an uneven pair
of shoes; the drag of a limping foot.
That's where he came down the bank
sliding and clutching at the fence-wire.

He'd had money he tried to wire
not trusting to transfer it over the web
but somehow it never arrived at the bank.
He couldn't guess how he'd been gulled
but it cut the ground from under his feet—
cash unexpectedly disappearing.

A shock for which he'd not been preparing
like grabbing onto a live wire!
He shook all over, head to foot
feeling the same as a fly in a spiderweb
or rat staring into a snake's open gullet,
trembling at the thought of the bank.

Unexpected curve-ball, tricky bank-
shot: really there's no point comparing
this disaster to some game-play. The poor gull
thought of suicide by coat-hanger wire
but chose to drown in the oil-webbed
waters that churn at the bridge footings.

Now the gulls watch with unsparing
bright eyes as the web of submerged wire
bobs at the bank, exposing a foot.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Like This Leaf

Before the flesh was put on
I was a line drawing
in the mind of my Creator.

You could see right through me
like this leaf.

Now the flesh recedes and leaves
veins, tendons, and bones
standing above skin.

Obscuring tissues dissolve
and I become transparent again
like this leaf.

Will I remember the tree from which I fell
like this leaf?

--image credit Hilton Pond Center
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

An Argument of Trains

In a late-night dialect of shrill whistles
we debate the tracks' declining quality
and the weight of brakemen's hands.

We crouch and drowse in February drizzle,
slow freights dreaming in the dark and gritty.
We're not up to this century's demands

not like the overseas futuristic missiles
that hurtle supersonic from city to city,
silver trains leaping across silver spans.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Bamboo

My hair is bamboo, alive and rustling in the breezy rain of spring.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Orchids

3 Word Wednesday: Frantic. Lurch. Odor.

frantically seeking
source of bogus sex odors
wasps lurch toward orchids

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Wolf Time

The hero Hawking offered his hand
to be placed in the mouth of Wolf Time

while they bound him in a chain forged
from the death-cries of unstable atoms.

The fragile hands of clocks could not hold him.
Slime dripped from the gaping jaws

and poisoned Hawking: he rides now
in the sky-chariot of his own mind.

Wolf Time waits to be freed by the wild-
haired trickster who stole the dice of the Universe.

Wolf Time waits to devour the sun and moon.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Spam comments!

I've closed this blog to anonymous comments. Dagnabbit. I didn't want to have to do it, but I'm really, really sick of having to delete half a dozen spamments a day.

I hope this works. I don't want to have to institute a captcha or comment moderation.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Wallpaper

the old-fashioned kind
stippled in sage-green with
a border of rosebuds.

Look again: they could be
pink baby-fists, clenched
on pale green flannel

or glossed lips pursed
for a kiss from a neat beard
above a tweed jacket.

They could be hearts
laboring toward stillness
under a favorite quilt

or sunset clouds
hovering over haymeadows
or just rosebuds after all.

It all depends on the story.

--for Read Write Poem's prompt on narrative wallpaper.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside