Stay

Luisa A. Igloria — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 21:53:24 +0000

Dawn: in absolute silence,
a pileated woodpecker
hitches its way up
a locust trunk, silhouette
pivoting like a pawl
on an invisible ratchet—

consider this early
summons, this parking
ticket—momentary stay
before the hubbub
and transmission
of gears.

—Luisa A. Igloria

* * *

I auto-post links to new blog entries from all my sites on Facebook, to the annoyance of some of my contacts there, I’m sure. The Morning Porch, with its entries designed to fit into a single tweet or Identica notice, also fits handily in a Facebook update, so is probably read by almost as many people there as it is on Twitter. This morning, one of those Facebook readers was Luisa A. Igloria, who was moved to reorganize my words into lyric verse and add a second stanza of her own.

One sometimes hesitates to use a mechanical image to describe a wild creature, but I was quite pleased with the ratchet image this morning when I finally came up with it, after a couple hours of off-and-on mulling, because I think it accurately conveys both the shape and motion of a pileated climbing a tree to someone who has never seen one — the vast majority of my readership, I imagine. Also, how often to you get to use a cool word like “pawl”? How wonderful then to see my lines remixed into a poem! And I was impressed by how much multivalence Luisa was able to pack in with her deft word-choices.

—Dave

Alien

Dave Bonta — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:28:40 +0000

Botticelli's Birth of Venus

The sea beneath your minimal spacecraft turns adamant, grows scales like a lizard. A superhero saves you from a swarm of devious roses, cape flapping melodramatically, his last client still clinging to his side. A green-skinned native emerges from the shelter of the trees, offering to wrap you in the flag of her country. This is clearly a very dangerous planet for a would-be goddess. Everyone wants to enlist you in their battles, & I have a suspicion they won’t take love for an answer.

My response to the Venus Poetry Project, an experiment in anonymous, open-content poetry composition. (Thanks to Dana for the link.) Since I posted this three days ago, someone has already reworked it, with interesting results:

The sea
beneath your minimal
spacecraft turns adamant, grows
scales like a lizard. A superhero
saves you
from a swarm of devious roses,
cape flapping melodramatically,
his last lost cause
still clinging to his side.
A green-skinned native emerges
from the shelter of trees, offering
to wrap you in the flag
of her country. Dangerous planet
for a would-be goddess. Everyone wants
to enlist you in their battles.
I suspect they won’t take love
for an answer.

(To make your own changes to the poem, go here.)

collaborative poetry – Via Negativa

Stay

Alien