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

Caraway

skyline

I can’t seem to figure out what to do with my head. It is too small to carry the right sort of luggage and dangerously prone to spills and injuries. I was thinking I might rent it out for micro-idea transmission, but I’m not sure how well I’d like sitting on top of a metal tower during thunderstorms. Then there’s the whole issue of bird droppings. Perhaps I could put it in a breadbox to keep it fresh. But lately it has this alarming tendency to weep, which could promote spoilage. …

I wrote that after a trip to the Adirondacks back in 2004. Some people don’t like to travel due to the lack of comfort. For me, it’s the lack of sleep. A mere four or five days with less than five hours of good sleep per night are enough to turn me into a humorless emotional wreck. Then for days after I get home, I mope around wishing I had seen more and been more outgoing.

heads

Fortunately, this past weekend’s jaunt had been in the company of fellow bloggers, most of whom are also social misfits of one kind or another, and we tolerated each other’s lapses, if that’s what they were. Lorianne writes about the pleasures of ditching one’s friends to walk the streets alone, something I wish I’d found time to do myself. Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi, on the other hand, eulogizes the joys of communion. Leslee seemed most affected by the heat, but still managed to take a number of good photos of the area of Brooklyn where we all crashed. Other photosets from the trip include Lorianne’s photos of MoMA, Velveteen Rachel’s Brooklyn set, and Frizzy Rachel‘s NY September 07 set (which includes two photos of my head). And Dale has a poem up called Pilgrim in Brooklyn.

UPDATE: New posts about the New York blogger swarm are up at 3rd House Journal – part 1 and part 2 – and the cassandra pages.

always read the label

Halfway home on the train,
my tongue discovers something hard
between the molars, left over from
a rushed breakfast
at a diner in Brooklyn.
The molars break it open
& the tongue remembers: rye toast.
Our last meal together.
Caraway seed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

From the Book of Missing Hours

In the before-dawn
stillness of the crickets,
thin sickle-moon, the thistles in the yard
inseparable from their shadows,
from under the front porch
comes an urgent metronome —
Ow?
Ow?
Ow?
Ow?
Ow?
— pure supplication
addressed to no one
in particular, poor feral
cat in heat
counting the ways
in which this endless moment
might be illuminated.
__________

Update: For what it’s worth, this was Via Negativa’s 2000th post.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

After the War

They made a desolation and called it peace.
–Tacitus

In a urine-soaked military bedroll under the bridge
the wino lapses into an uneasy slumber,
twitching & curling up
like a caterpillar in its final instar
when the wasp’s hungry children
start in at last on the nerve centers, having made
a desolation of the rest,

& that warm feeling one had taken for love
turns out to have been nothing but the fires of corrosion —
the wrong kind of digestion in the gut

or the wrong kind of metamorphosis, in which
the very cells are changed, yes,
but no chrysalis will ever be spun

& the light spreads like a chemical spill
above the river,
blotting out the stars.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Confession

      after the waterboarding

When a promise broke me
I was ready to confess
to the darkest thoughts
just to clear my head

I was ready to be lifted
by my own explosive charges
simply for the rush
of air back into my lungs

I was ready to hang
by my own rope
if only to feel the steadying
pull of the earth again

& I confess
their promise was nothing other
than that the atrocious weather
would change

& it did
I have been changed
into something
I do not know
__________

[Poetry Thursday – dead link]

The challenge this week was to begin a poem with the last line of another poem. I used the last line from today’s poem at Poetry Daily, Promise, by Judson Mitcham.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Hard Way

Our barefoot summer
ended at the edge
of a mowed field
in August: goldenrod stubs
like freshly sharpened pencils,
hay salted with thistle barbs
& the odd nest of baby
meadow voles orphaned
by the mower’s blade,
pink as erasers.
We learned the hard way:
one quick dash across
the stubble left holes
in our horn-tough feet.
They bled just a little,
but sprouted taproots of pain
under every step
that lasted into September,
when buses the color
of goldenrod bore us
back into waxed hallways
& the squeak of rubber.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What he said to his friend

in the style of the classical Tamil

Like a knot
of yellownecked caterpillars
on the underside of a witch hazel leaf
responding to the approach of danger
by arching their soft bodies
& freezing into a clump
of sudden thorns,
hoping to ward off the caress
of a wasp’s antennae:
that’s what happens
to me whenever
she smiles.

[Poetry Thursday – dead link]

For background on Tamil love poetry of the Sangam period, see the Wikipedia. Unfortunately, none of the late, great A. K. Ramanujan‘s translations seem to be online, but some earlier, public-domain translations are available at the Humanistic Texts site.

UPDATE: I’m wrong. Nancy at under the fire star – a Tamil Nadu-based blog – has shared a few of Ramanujan’s translations, and was kind enough to include the links in a comment below. See especially the poems at her last link.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Tunnel Vision

The trail is a straight tunnel
through dripping woods.
In last night’s dream, I’d been
ready to cross a mountain
where roads & trails
hadn’t yet been thought of,
not even by the animals.
On the far side, my brothers
had found another hollow
parallel to this one, where
riotous growth pressed
against the windowpanes
& light-starved houseplants
rotted in their pots.
But this morning,
the trail ends as always
at the crest of a ridge a-bristle
with dying laurel bushes
& brown & yellow bracken.
The valley full of fog
glows in the weak sunlight
like the belly of a carp.
The woods are silent
except for the patter of urine
where a deer grazes,
her pelt already quivering
under the feet of her daily flies.
The camera around my neck
travels the length of the trail
in both directions, far heavier
than its credit card-sized
counterpart in the dream,
& just as empty.

[Poetry Thursday – dead link]

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ode to Scrapple

Sing scrapple: buckwheat-
& cornmeal mush-stuffed
relative of head cheese,
the hog’s gray matter.
Plus every part
that couldn’t be cured
into ham or crammed
into sausage casings —
some good foot meat, perhaps,
a corkscrew piece of tail —
up to & including
the oleaginous grunt.
Always the butt of jokes
for the ignorant mass
of weiner-eaters who prefer
their pig scraps pink
& prefitted for the throat.
This is a square meal
the color of earth.
It’s what’s for supper
when you haven’t eaten
since breakfast, & want
something you can
slap in the hot
fat of a griddle & fry
until it grows a thick
brown skin. Then
serve with Grade-A
maple syrup, go hog-
wild, wallow in the gray
& gritty mush.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Baffled

The house spider
was on the inside
& didn’t budge
when the phoebe flew up
& clung to the window screen,
jabbing fruitlessly
at a meal turned to metal —
or rather, subdivided
into orderly
impenetrable holes,
as in a physics
textbook account
of the structure of matter.
Chalk lines on a blackboard,
rows of blank faces
at their desks.
But it was right there —
the spider,
the phoebe,
the rattle of wings.