Poems & poem-like things – Page 1125

February 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ode to a newspaper article

Below the fold you continue
in two columns, the body of your text
committed now to carry through
after the titillating lede. What’s next

beyond the jump, that brief
moment of vertigo around
your midsection? Briefs
for neither side. You sound

a note of caution at partisan-
ship, strive for balance, blend
levity with gravity. It takes an artisan
to reach such a well-rounded end.
__________

Written for the Read Write Poem prompt, an ode on the body. Links to other responses can be found here.

UPDATE: Just now, catching up on the Christian Science Monitor, I came across a grim reminder that odes and journalism both remain very serious business in some parts of the world:

Saw Wai is a Burmese poet known for his love songs. His eight-line Valentine’s Day ode, about a brokenhearted man in love with a fashion model, was a particularly tender one. But there was one problem.

If read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.”

The senior general himself, head of Burma’s (Myanmar’s) military junta, could not have been amused. The head of the censorship board was urgently called to the capital; the weekly “Love Journal” has been shut down and copies of the offending edition were yanked from newsstands.

Saw Wai is now in jail, where apparently he will spend Feb. 14 in isolation, behind bars.

February 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Yucca

Aboveground, I am all blade,
shedding filaments to keep
my edges keen. I can go months
& months without water.
My connections to this sand-
stone ridge run deep.

But I don’t know why when I blossom,
nothing happens. My nights
have never turned incandescent
at the touch of fabled wings.
My panicle is a pale flag
that no one ever salutes.

This couldn’t be exile, could it?
There’s desert enough here
for those who wait.
All through the dry season,
my flower stalk’s bony shadow
creeps over the smooth white drifts.
__________

Written in response to Read Write Poem’s Lenten prompt. Links to the other responses are here.

February 6, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Golden eagle with transmitter

golden eagle with transmitter
For background on this photo, see here.

After the unasked-for grooming
by that mob of wingless birds,
their strange soft claws reaching deep
under my feathers, they let me go.
The rock field dropped away
& I thought for a moment it was over.

But I still feel
that fleshy insinuation across my breast.
And something rides me, a small weight,
the same way I ride
this snake of wind.

What kind of clutching
doesn’t still the heart?
Its unshakeable presence makes me know myself
apart from beak & talons
as a thing that throbs,
a thing that chafes & pulses
here here here here,
the mountains circling below.

__________

For the Read Write Poem prompt on dressing up. Links to other responses are gathered here.

January 30, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Wind power: four movements

Allegro

Out on a sailboat
secure in her windbreaker
she enjoys being buffeted so much
that her husband grows sullen & points
the boat toward shore

Andante

The wind took all my money
& threw it
in the gutter
says the poplar tree
& I’m left swaying like an idiot
with my arms still up

Adagio

He came home from Afghanistan
& couldn’t find the mountain at first

old Backbone Mountain had shrunk
almost to nothing

pinned down by 400-foot turbines
moaning through the night

Largo

Stiltgrass spreads like cancer between the pylons
a green feathery shroud for the clumps of feathers

the beaks & talons
blue as old ice

the delicate finger bones of forest bats
stripped of the brown parchment
on which they flew

What profit hath he
that hath labored for the wind?

& overhead the bone-white blades scything the air

__________

For more on the ecological and social impacts of industrial wind plants, go to windaction.org and browse the important documents section.

January 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta

God of Wealth

Fushimi Inari Torii
Photo by Fg2 — public domain

From the train station all the way up the hill, sacred gates are lined up like hollow dominoes. We are the spots, our pale acquisitive faces bobbing atop suit coats & kimonos. Vermillion, the color of success is vermillion, & it hurts our eyes.

As we near the shrine, we hear the tin hail of one-yen coins, which are minted for no other reason than to feed the bottomless stomachs of the offertory boxes. And that splashing sound is no fountain: every day, in the name of purity, thousands of mouths are washed out with the same few dozen bamboo dippers. We take them from the hands of strangers with the slightest of bows. Water is the earth’s own currency, & we swallow with reverence. Our words must be clean when we speak to the god, even if the tongue barely twitches in its lurid cave. Our desires must be pure as pressed rice.

I’m here to accompany my homestay family, whose eldest son is about to take a high school entrance exam, but they encourage me to pray, too. “Whatever you want the most, say it in your heart. Use pictures! Inari won’t understand English.” Indeed, I am the only foreigner here. It may be a major shrine, but tourists prefer thousand-year-old temples from which the last traces of paint have long since faded away, & where the aesthetic of enlightened poverty reigns unchallenged. What do I want? I go through the motions, clapping my hands to get the god’s attention. A white fox flickers in my mind’s eye.

January 26, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Big Buddha

Buddha is bigger than you. His scalp is great with child, & his patriarchal breasts bulge with dharma-milk. His arms multiply exponentially like the mother of all Swiss Army knives, & he juggles odd objects: fly whisks, vajras, capacitors, USB flash drives. The Buddha is bigger than you, and easier on my wallet. I found him at the landfill & brought him home & placed him on top of the television, & he’s been growing ever since. Now I can tune in the weather from Colombo and Phnom Penh. The Buddha is bigger than you, & whenever he touches the earth with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand, shit happens. Under those rust-green robes, he’s got an Elvis tattoo — don’t ask me how I know this — & the balls of a brass monkey. Like the number zero, he is both real & imaginary. Ask him anything! He rings when struck.

Prompted by (but not based upon) Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s short film “Daibutsu” at qarrtsiluni.

January 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Call to Prayer

Flame tree, smoke tree, a sky like sandpaper. Mobile phones have been programmed to issue the call to prayer: God is great. A man grazes horses where a lake used to wrinkle in the breeze & stares into the dry cup of his hands five times a day. God is great. The future has been recalled; too many people were dying of natural causes. All weather will now be provided by the private sector, they tell us, as trees belch with flame around the ancient temple of Artemis. I bear witness that there is no God but God. Lines of footprints in wet ash tell a story, but not ultimately a very interesting one. The wonderful thing about movies is that they are always true. I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of God. Here you can see where lizards went on pilgrimage to a puddle of water, steering with their tails. Here you can see where the toymaker’s assistants have been poaching charred olive wood. Hurry up please it’s time for prayer. Notice how the shadow grows smaller & blurrier as the bird gains in altitude — hard to say at what point it’s gone completely. What kind of bird? The black-diamond tail makes it a raven, I guess. The point is that weather-related incidents may no longer be ascribed to acts of God, thank God. Hurry up please it’s time for success. And if that’s the case, someone must do something about the suddenness of nightfall in the tropics & those ridiculous short days we have in winter, where applicable. It has been duly noted that the naked Germans on the beach are happy with the extra sun, although the locals are not: God is great. Flame tree, smoke tree, a sky like alabaster now that the last contrails have been delivered to the museum of blueprints. Ah, & the boys from the village are stalking grasshoppers with wooden machine guns. There is no God but God.

January 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Travesty

This dance they do
it turns them into holy caricatures
the clowns proclaim that up is down
& the end justifies the beans
everyone drinks until they see
two of everyone
& their arms shake
unable to choose which
delightful lie to lay
& hey
this year even us USians can imbibe
because Carnival reaches
its riotous climax
on Super Tuesday

January 19, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Sugar Baby

Download the MP3

She was clothed in a shift of worms and whispers.
I circled once & crept away, four-footed —
no hands for anything but the road.
That was one dream. And the night before,
a minor lord of the underworld saying,
Of course we take them down with us.
How else do you suppose they taste
eternal youth? Grinning like one of those
candied skulls from the Day of the Dead.
Such melodramatic dreams, I said,
& wrote one yellow word upon the snow.
__________

Don’t forget that the deadline for submissions to qarrtsiluni for the Hidden Messages issue is January 31.

January 17, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ephemeralia

What swims under the ice of an ephemeral pond, watching the slow shadows from below? Nothing that can’t live half the year without water, suspended, provisional, like a word from a language that nobody speaks anymore. But some find ephemerality desirable, if it means the absence of predatory newts & fish. One rainy night in March the mole salamanders arrive by the hundreds, the males entering the water merely to sow their spermatophores across the bottom: so much moisture at once is not a thing they’ve learned to resist, living under the ground. The females then take what they need — choosing on who knows what basis — to make their masses of gelatinous eggs, like the compound eyes of an enormous insect.

But not here, not at this mountaintop pool, where the acidic soil provides no buffer against the nitric & sulphuric acids that arrive with every rain or snowfall. This pond has almost as little in it as a geode, sliced open so we can feast our eyes on the unrepeatable, inorganic growths.