Category: Poems & poem-like things

Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Morning Porch, the book?

UPDATE (10/20): You can now subscribe to the Morning Porch via email.

The Morning Porch will be one year old on November 5, and I’m starting to think about what I want to do, if anything, with my first year’s worth of jottings. I think I’ll probably keep up the discipline — it’s a good exercise and a great way to wake up — though it’s possible I could change the form or focus a little. It’s also a fun way to participate in the Twitterverse and defy its reputation as a repository for disposable ephemera.

Though I’ve always thought of my Morning Porch tweets as prose, many readers have taken them for poetry, so I decided to see whether they might pass muster as short poems. The following were selected using the Random link, and all I’ve done is rearrange them, swap in ampersands, and change the punctuation here and there. What do you think? Do they work better as prose or as poems? (I’ve linked the dates to the original posts in case anyone wants to compare.) If I were to enlist the help of one or more editors and publish a book of these, would you buy a copy? If the answer is “probably not,” don’t be shy. I am supremely lazy and would be happy for an excuse not to bother.

Feel free to use the Contact form or leave anonymous comments if you prefer.

***

December 6, 2007

Clear and very cold.
I hear squirrel teeth
on walnut shell.
The Carolina wren’s happiness motor
turns over once, twice, then putts to life.

*

July 24, 2008

Fast-moving showers; the light
changes from minute to minute.
A distant rumble
turns out to be an A-10 Thunderbolt II.
Our modems are safe.

*

April 7, 2008

Gray sky, the smell of rain.
Two insomniac screech owls
exchange trills.
The low-frequency thumps of a grouse.
An enormous silence.

*

August 26, 2008

The hollow sound of claws
on loose bark:
another furious squirrel chase,
this time in the dead elm.
The chaser pauses to lick its genitals.

*

January 11, 2008

Hard rain. Under a monochrome cloud ceiling,
the colors are intense:
laurel green,
tree-trunk sable,
dried-grass yellow,
leaf-litter rust.

*

October 12, 2008

BAM. BAM. BAM.
The red crest of a pileated woodpecker
flashes into view from
the dead side of a maple, sunrise
orange on the hill behind.

*

January 2, 2008

I sweep snow off my chair,
then look up to see the crescent moon
appearing & disappearing behind the clouds.
Trees creaking in the dark.

*

December 23, 2007

Thick fog at dawn,
gray against the snow.
Slate-colored juncos call back & forth:
Where are you?
A wind comes up.

*

September 15, 2008

Where daffodils bloomed in April,
goldenrod sways—
a more worldly yellow.
The distant hurricane
makes a roosting monarch flap its wings.

*

April 3, 2008

The feral cat is back from
wherever it goes for the winter.
It crouches on a fallen limb,
eyes fixed on the weeds,
gathered for the spring.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woke up this morning (blues haiku)

dead junco

Woke up this morning
to a thump on the window:
false sky. A dead bird.

*

Woke up this morning
with a fierce new itching
on the soles of my feet.

*

Woke up this morning
from someone else’s nightmare —
I was the monster.

*

Woke up this morning
to the shapeless summer song
of a winter wren.

*

Woke up this morning
& stared into the clock’s blank face:
the power’s out.

*

Woke up this morning
several hours too early:
the moonlight tricked me.

*

Woke up this morning
to the murmured sweet nothings
of an empty stomach.

*

Woke up this morning
with yesterday’s shoulder ache
settled in my spine.

*

Woke up this morning
to patches of frost in the yard.
I got your letter.

*

Woke up this morning
with the reds & the yellows.
Another autumn.

***

Thanks to Leslee for the idea. (And by coincidence, it seems she did wake up with the blues this morning.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What is Main Street?

From the Google.

Main Street is mad
Main Street is a state highway
Main Street is too broke to pay them back
Main Street is white hot these days

Main Street is fed up
Main Street is part of the iconography of American life
Main Street is blinded
Main Street is upside down too

Main Street is theirs
Main Street is already gridlocked at certain times during the day
Main Street is hot and trendy
Main Street is not there

Main Street is an earnest, homey spot
Main Street is a limited, inadequate and inapt metaphor
Main Street is skeptical
Main Street is going to take over paying the electric bills

Main Street is already feeling the pinch
Main Street is looking for an 18-20 foot tall evergreen
Main Street is hosting its inaugural Scarecrow Decorating Contest
Main Street is becoming a row of refugee camps

Main Street is the first bank to fail
Main Street is open or closed
Main Street is so true now
Main Street is set for reconstruction and some watermain work

Main Street is not so bad
Main Street is also getting angry at itself
Main Street is wider and more exposed
Main Street is at risk

Main Street is excited about the falling price of gasoline
Main Street is where the mansions are in your town
Main Street is in real trouble
Main Street is the patsy in this deal

Main Street is also a good incubator
Main Street is now at stake
Main Street is about to get hit
Main Street is crowded with wood awnings

Main Street is taking a stand as of today
Main Street is speaking out
Main Street is so busy being angry that it isn’t sufficiently frightened
Main Street is still waiting to exhale

Main Street is a self-help program
Main Street is scheduled to continue
Main Street is running right past us
Main Street is hurting very much.

In partial response to ReadWritePoems’s echolalia prompt.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Harrier

This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

Dear Todd,

Again this morning, a northern harrier
haunts our forty-acre field,
coursing low
over the spent goldenrod & brome,
the white flag on her rump flashing
as she banks & hovers, her wings
in a fluttery V:
mixed signals for those who would see her
as nothing more than namesake
for a flying weapon.
She drops
into the grass
& reemerges with a squirming meal.

Old fields like ours
are rarer than they used to be, & perhaps
she would prefer marshland,
but most of the marshes were drained
a hundred years ago, & so
for four days we have watched her
appear & disappear like
a magician’s handkerchief
along the top edge of the field.
Left alone, the land
reinvents itself
in ways that contradict all expectation.
The cool wet forest felled
for charcoal in 1813
would’ve held — in root-nets,
in yard-deep humus & baroque
superstructures of wood —
as much water as
a small lake.
But with the recent arrival
of the woolly adelgid, we know
the old-growth hemlock will never
come back. Best
to make our peace
with light & drought,
with openness,
with curled flourishes of grass
& a migrating harrier fishing for voles
under the bluest skies.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Location, location, location

You Are Here, says the sign,
& a red arrow
indicates a dot.
This is the familiar dot
from the letter i,
from the hole
in the paper where
the compass pirouetted,
from the spots on your retina
where the sun returned
your gaze. The arrow
never quite touches it —
not because it’s too small
or too far away, but
because it’s too likely
to spill. You are here…
& you, & you, & you,
& you, & you:
the possibilites
are both endless
& predictable.
It’s a whole note, freed
from the five-line staff
to sing its monotone
song of yourself
for as long as
you’ll listen, thinking
it’s just you,
thinking you’re all alone
on this head
of a pin.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Planned Obsolescence


Video link.

It’s been a while since I made a video postcard. Both halves of this video were shot from the same location, right outside my door. The flying ants emerge from my weed garden every year about this time, around 4:00 p.m. on a warm afternoon in early October — in fact, I spliced in a little bit of footage from last year’s emergence.

Posted on by Todd Davis

Lake

This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

Dear Dave,

The lake is half drained
and now looks like the mud
puddle of some enormous child.
Where water slid away fast, cracks
appear, as does the detritus
of our living. Geese find
the few places fish still swim,
and killdeer have set up home
near the cinderblocks and tires
that once served as nests
of another kind. Tree stumps
line the lakebed, solid despite
their years underwater. I imagine
this grove before any saw cleared it,
before the stream at the far side
was dammed, before this depression
in the earth accepted the weight
we filled it with. A blue jay
in an ash tree sneers at our efforts,
and I smell the harsh smell
of wet earth drying.

—Todd Davis

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Apocalypse 1492

When the Caribs appear
suddenly in our midst,
garish & silent as vipers,
I hurl myself into a tree,
find refuge on a high limb.
All night I sit straddling
the trunk like a lover,
one ear against the bark,
& at daybreak look down
into a hammock of leaves —
the ground is lost to me.
My only view is of blue:
the sea, the sky, & on
the line between them,
a strange new island shaped
like a moving hand, fingers
webbed like the claws of a seal.
In the sign language of the islands,
an open palm means
We have nothing.
We seek hospitality.
That’s what the Caribs said
too, at first, their weapons
hidden in their canoes.
How have we offended you,
I want to shout, but I know
we haven’t. We simply happen
to taste good, like the seals —
though at least a seal can hide
among the waves.
The island draws near,
& I can see it’s lousy with men.
The sun flashes off their bodies
as if they brought their own seas
with them. I hear shouts
in one ear, & in the other,
something deep & slow
that has nothing to do with us.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wet city: haiku sequence

Isolated
under our dark umbrellas,
we eye each other up.

*

I still remember
the way she flicked her cigarette
into a puddle.

*

Honey locusts stand
naked in the rain, surrounded
by shed yellow leaves.

*

The hiss of tires,
the slap of curb-surf against fire plug,
the hush.

*

Fountain in a downpour:
a homeless man in a poncho
fishes for change.

*

Wet footprints lead
to every other table
in the coffee shop.

*

A clear plastic sheet
keeps the nude cover girls dry
at the news stand.

*

Sun shining through rain:
umbrellas rise to reveal
astonished faces.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dispatch from the golden age of postcards

sunflower postcard

I’ve been looking at a lot of old postcards lately. I found my dad’s collection up in the attic: several thousand postcards, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. Turns out that it was once very common to write things on the front, as we encourage people to do for Postal Poetry. Originally, the U.S. Post Office didn’t allow anything besides the address on the back, so the front was the only place where one could add a personal message. Depending on the quality of the sender’s penmanship, sometimes the effect is almost reminiscent of a classic East Asian painting, with calligraphy encroaching on the subject. This practice continued for a while after the advent of postcards with divided backs in 1907. “The Golden Age of American postcards […] lasted until about 1915, when World War I blocked the import of the fine German-printed cards,” according to the Wikipedia.

Here’s a card my Great Great Aunt Mildred Albertson, a Methodist missionary, sent from Japanese-occupied Korea (though it depicts Kobe, Japan) in October 1907.

1908 postcard from Kobe, Japan

The message says, in part, “Every thing seems so different here from home. I feel like a baby in every sense of the word. Have a teacher, and am studying the language. Have not heard from any of home folks yet.”