Poems & poem-like things – Page 1098

October 24, 2009May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Lines (videopoem)

A video adaptation of a poem I wrote back in 2006 and included in my online collection Shadow Cabinet.

This videopoem idea has been brewing for a while. I finally got a chance to shoot the contrail footage last week, on one of those days when some of the contrails remain and others quickly fade, depending I suppose on the elevation of the jet. As usual, though, the most time-consuming part of the video-making process was finding the right music. The wordless, a capella song is by a Belgian electronica band called Silence, who are generous enough to copyleft all their material. The track happened to be just the right length, so I didn’t have to alter it in any way.

October 23, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Earful

A distillation and clarification of last night’s response to the RWP prompt. Now I think I’m getting somewhere.

Oh rare & wild ear, translate these nuggets of noise until they gleam. I am too restless with desire’s ever-shifting surfaces to coalesce around a single planet or communion cup. I hear the ticking in a slab of meat, the crackling of an old 78 record pitted with meteorites of dust. A bird lisps its satisfaction in a minor key & I hear a spare sorrow, a sparrow’s grief. Ear like the ornate lip of a jar, part human, part gyroscope: no matter how I turn, you keep me from falling. Bare twigs of synapses light up until the whole gray cage is aglow, some autumn morning.

October 22, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Ear cage

Oh rare & wild ear, translate until bright
my rival making, my restlessness.
The river bears thousands of planets
& the church lifts an elliptical wine,
reminding us of lust on old records.
Up, bird! Bring pieces of ticking meat,
traumatic presents to fill with our losses.
Carry an uncanny whisk-broom,
utter sparse desires, jump.
Time extends beyond the ornate
lip & jar. One turns, wants, composes,
part human, part gyroscope,
raw twigs exposed together.
The ear spans ignored masters
& incorporates sheer guises of a cage.

For a Read Write Poem prompt, using the cut-up technique. I dug out a Copper Canyon Press catalog (Spring/Summer 2009) and took a few words from each of the book blurbs, none from the poems themselves. I used the list randomizer at Random.org to shuffle them into a new order, arranged them into lines of 4-6 words for easy viewing, and then did the bare minimum of rearranging, addition and subtraction necessary to make some kind of coherent sense out of the whole. What does the poem mean? Hell if I know. But there are a couple of phrases I might be able to use in more coherent contexts, I think.

October 20, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Under the highway

A split in the pavement where vehicles enter the overpass: from underneath, next to the tracks, it sounds like a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Soil in which nothing has sprouted in 35 years. The once-a-day Amtrak gathering speed, faces hidden behind tinted glass, & the blinking tail light disappearing around the bend. Thump-thump.

October 10, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Adirondack haiku

At dawn in the campground,
“The Sound of Music” on a flute.
I’m plotting murder.

Squatting to pluck puffballs
from a stump, her raincoat
pale in the dark woods.

Never mind how
you got here. Just sit,
O glacial erratic.

*
At the back of the store,
a free view of the stormy lake
moving three ways at once.

Not far from John Brown’s grave,
a state prison looms
above the larch.

When I open the Adirondack
pages of my notebook,
two grains of sand fall out.

October 3, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Harvest Moon

ravaged ladder
house of straw
fine hair on the face of a fetus
the thumbprint of God

breakdowns are part of the act
this time of year
the rock concert’s fake fog
taken straight from a Song Dynasty landscape

feedback feedback
captive cormorants in choke collars
unable to swallow even
the ghost of a fish

nobody waxes poetic
under spotlights as bright as these
nobody lies down
under tombstones as white as these

you have to drive an hour to find
a dark enough night for dissolution
poor moon
poor harvest

September 30, 2009 by Dave Bonta

To have and to hold

You can have everything as long as you keep your eyes shut. I’ve been practicing this with horses, with hats, with consumer electronics, with money, with vacations, with specialty cheeses, with weapons of mass destruction. I hear them gather, humming & purposeful, like sex toys or the avatars of deities in which I don’t fully believe.

I start the way an oyster does, mulling over a mustard seed of lust. But it isn’t a seed, is it? It’s a worry bead, a tumor: its growth is by simple addition, & contains no taint of metamorphosis. I conjure, I cadger, I cajole these prodigies of the pituitary gland into being my body doubles & starring in the movie of my life while I sleep.

For Read Write Poem (an ambiguous image prompt)

September 28, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Sea asters

The asters said: We blossom not for each other but for the thief. She had fallen in love with a horse, as young women will do, while I polished a mirror for looking at the stars. The sand flies were terrible that year; the whelks & mussel shells would go uncollected for days. Hoof prints appeared every morning coming out of the ocean.

Have you ever tried to have sex on a beach? Between the salt & the sand & the suntan oil it’s a recipe for rashes… & then there’s the question of what to do with the used condoms and all the empty beer cans. But something about the vast indifference of the ocean excited us, made us yearn for our own, measely throb & release. I remember lying spent among the beach grass & the sea rocket with the Milky Way spread out above us, & hearing the drumbeat of hooves over the hush of the surf. “Did you hear that?” “Hear what?” I thought about the mirror back home in its wrappings, how thousands of random, back-&-forth motions could excavate a perfect trap for light.

September 26, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The dark night (2)

What are you listening for, who
already know everything I have
to say? You are nothing but
a tourist of the night.
What appears empty to you
is in fact a fully inhabited tenement.
Your inscrutable fruit is far
more pungent than you can know,
who do not risk becoming
someone else’s morsel.
Who cooks for you?

Response to last night’s post. (In bird guides, the barred owl’s call is usually described as sounding like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”)

September 25, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The dark night

I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.