Caravanserai

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Caravanserai

Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling

miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me—

economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids

in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,

I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear

spirit through the flutes of my bones—
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots

on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know

I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you

and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.

In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl

before recommencing our planetary
journey, a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask

what you know of the soul’s trade—
its breakdowns, its tinkerings

its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
Tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,

a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.


April 2012

Note: One of the thrills of my life was staying with Don, our two children, and my sister in a Caravanserai in Turkey, an outpost along the Silk Road where for centuries caravaners were given three nights free lodging, food and fodder for their animals. It was far from “free” as a hotel when we lodged, but worth every penny to me. These stone fortresses were built in a huge square, with one front portal large enough for camels to pass through. Rooms for sleeping were around the outer edge on the second floor, while service rooms, including a Turkish bath and shops to repair horseshoes, filled the lower floor. In the middle was a courtyard where goods and animals were kept. When we stayed at the Caravanserai in Kuşadası, transformed into a hotel, we dined in the courtyard. The best part of the experience for me was the two-foot thick stone wall that made our room’s window wells large enough for a small child to sleep in. My imagination has never rested since those nights.

Posted for DVerse Open Link Night, hosted this week by Brian Miller. Join the community.

 

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Letters from home

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Maybe it's because of National Poetry Month that I've been reflecting a lot on why I write poems. This blog has changed dramatically since I began in 2006, and these last couple of years it has become almost exclusively a poetry blog. I never intended it! It's just how things want to come out, a sort of shyness, not wanting to say things directly. I don't apologize, but I do realize poetry isn't for everyone. Funny, this write began as prose. I had every intention of writing prose! But it shaped itself into a poem. What is a person to do when a poem asserts itself?

Letters from home

That’s what poems are.

We are migrants from

somewhere that loves us.

Poems come from there.

News of a death,

news of a birth, both

in one letter. We want only

the truth, and nothing

held back. Things that

have come to pass,

and dreams held fast.

Read them again;

read them over again,
softened with time

in the shifting dust

of this foreign place.

April 2012

Note: The painting is Saudade by Brazilian painter José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, painted in 1899.

The word saudade is a Portuguese-Galacian word that has no true equivalent in the English language. Wiki calls it a "deep emotional state of nostalgic longing" for someone, or something absent. Saudades are woven in the fabric of Brazilian music (I've shared one below). There is a fine, in-depth write about saudade at wiki here. However, I get the feeling that it can never really be understood by anyone who doesn't come from a culture where it is profoundly felt by its entire people. For instance, Brazil has a day of saudade on January 30, out of longing for the Portuguese homeland. I only recently discovered the word, and its melancholy and provenance have put me in a state of saudade for saudade, it is so beautiful. I find this helpful from wiki:

The "Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa" defines saudade (or saudades) as "A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived."

The Dictionary from the Royal Galician Academy, on the other hand, defines saudade as an "intimate feeling and mood caused by the longing for something absent that is being missed. This can take different aspects, from concrete realities (a loved one, a friend, the motherland, the homeland...) to the mysterious and transcendant. It's quite prevalent and characteristic of the Galician-Portuguese world, but it can also be found in other cultures."

The similar feeling of morriña is defined as "Feelings and mood of melancholy and depression, particularly when caused by nostalgia for the motherland".

Maria Bethânia sings "Saudade" in Portuguese
(sorry I don't know who the gentleman is with her).

Music is the language of the heart, so for us

who don't know more than a few words of Portuguese,
even without understanding the words
we can feel the melancholy.
But if you're curious like me,
you can put the lyrics, below,
through an online translator.
There is moon, and sea . . .

Saudade a lua brilha na lagoa

Saudade a luz que sobra da pessoa

Saudade igual farol engana o mar

Imita o sol

Saudade sal e dor que o vento traz

Saudade o som do tempo que ressoa

Saudade o céu cinzento a garôa

Saudade desigual

Nunca termina no final

Saudade eterno filme em cartaz

A casa da saudade é o vazio

O acaso da saudade fogo frio

Quem foge da saudade

Preso por um fio

Se afoga em outras águas

Mas do mesmo rio.

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Dancing at dawn

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Dancing at dawn

I sit alone, like a pocketed wheel snail
snugged in sandy dawn, the sun
angling for salmon behind the barn’s thistle weeds;
off to the side the sky is the color of shallow tide
around the moon soon to be a filament
of film clipped on daylight’s floor.
The birds sing all at once and more, without
bounds and oversound the shells
of my ears with sea.
I bob and skim my chest at the edge
of the hot tub, the way seahorses slowly rock
intoxicated with love on YouTube
for us who only swim among the kind
of coral that grows neon in the sky.


April 2012

Poetry should be heard.

And a less "produced" version, after a few helpful comments...

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How to read a poem

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It's the middle of National Poetry Month, time to pause for a lesson. Believe it or not, my grandson is nearly three months old. He's a good teacher, and I should not keep his lessons to myself.

How to read a poem

Take him in your lap.

Look deep into his dark eyes.

Watch his arms while they

loop orbits in space

for no apparent purpose.

Let him ride his invisible

bicycle somewhere far—pumping,

pumping, pumping tiny legs,

making your thighs tremble.

See how still his eyes remain.

Fossick the meaning in his fists

where unknown words

are hidden and twirled.

(Don’t worry about the meaning

of those incomprehensible words now.

You can look for them later, together.)

He is telling you something

of where he has so recently been,

where you are desperately

trying to go in your perfectly

silent and heavy red chair.

He is showing you every truth

he has ever known

in a very small package.

When at last he smiles

in the otherwise motionless

residue following the flailings of his body,

you will understand what he means.

April 2012

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Driving with pink angels

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Driving with pink angels

Pink of the dissolving petals, pouring out of the tree
and pink in the palms of my hands. Pink dangling
tongue over lips,
coffee spilling into my throat;
spring and pink allergic eyes
tearing in the presence of fragrance.

Sing for us, Joni,
with packed pink linens
in your traveling bag.
I do not move
here in this weighted world
but only through our music.

Your pink sunset is my sunrise
ahead of the weekday road, what lowers
my feet into slippers
morning by morning; black crow
wings and a beak tearing pink breakfast;
rise again, pull again, lift the
pink-skinned sun across the sky
into night as satin as your wings.

April in wind, April in rain.
April pansies and hyacinth;
phlox, quince, alyssum;
crystal vase on a black piano,
pink tulips opening, floating
like windblown hair, or
jet trails from California
to Michigan, traveling on
a blue string song.

My body pink under
freshwater pearls; the painted stripe
on rainbow trout in my rivers,
wiggling like ribbons;
hands spilling over ivory stones
in your memory, every song
a fish swimming into my next poem.

Mother, where have you gone,
pink woman of the keys,
white and even like your teeth?
My poisoned hands play jazz
out of your hymns
in this sobbing flesh of ours. Pink mother
with fragrant goodnight lips,
pink moon of hearts
cracked in crater-places
healing under black-winged nights
that rise with the crow
every time I pass.

An angel in pink walks up to me
in my satin wedding gown
with pink ribbon ‘round the waist,
her pearlescent high heeled shoes
bright as the diadems of her eyes,
pink lipstick and raven hair.
The rush of her wings says

Poems live.
Flesh from soul.
Sing, body.
Play the fractured song,
pour Brandywine and redbud,
maple fringe and weigela,
pink as a baby just out
of her mother’s bleeding peony.

April 2012


Poetry should be heard.

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after the lame goat in Rumi's poem

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after the lame goat in Rumi’s poem

not everything is beautiful
said the gods of guilt
and fear

and I understood
suddenly
after the mountain’s
height over the misty blue valley
and its rocks underfoot

that I like this hobbled life
with its three legs of joy
and one of wounds

for the pace
drummed slowly and syncopated
by that one


April 2012 

art note: "composition with a goat" by Marc Chagall
Rumi note: I am referring to the poem "The Lame Goat"

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April wind

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April wind

On a day when April wind
has tumbled clouds into mile-high
snowy hills like in Chinese paintings

I wonder what strength
and precision it costs the honey bee
to aim his hovering windblown tongue

into frail blossoms fluttering open
out of tight Brandywine buds.
And how he does not spill nectar-

drops on me lying on the blanket—
a risk under sky and tree to him, to me
and to the small gold star of a spider

walking ellipses across my gold pillow
suddenly visible in movement
like the satellite we wait and watch for

every night, “There!” as it crawls
toward the sun on the other side
of the world on its articulate path
that looks so random to me.


April 2012 

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How to Bloom: chicks, blossoms, and a Rilke poem

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After a couple of years Don has resurrected the chicken yard with 22 white Leghorns, 2 Barred Rocks (these photographed are a Leghorn and Barred Rock), 4 Aracaunas, 2 Rhode Island Reds, 2 Isa Reds, a white turkey, a bronze turkey, and 12 quail. It is good to have their chirps again, and soon enough, eggs. The quail will lay by June, and the chickens by September.

The ornamental crabapple and many other fruit trees are bursting.

On Easter Sunday morning, I feel this blooming, and marvel, along with Rilke.

How to Bloom

The almond trees in bloom: all we can accomplish here is to ever know ourselves in our earthly appearance.

I endlessly marvel at you, blissful ones—at your demeanor, the way you bear your vanishing adornment with timeless purpose. Ah, to understand how to bloom: then would the heart be carried beyond all milder dangers, to be consoled in the great one.

    ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

Happy Easter

--

Acrobat

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Acrobat

I have nowhere
to put my arms away
for the night and so I avoid
taking them off, which
only causes more problems.

Lying on my back is novel.
I could write a poem in my sleep,
for instance.

Sooner or later, however,
my spine takes on a limb of its own
and the inferior mattress is just too much
there.

I have considered a futon
of the roll-up variety in my Zen arcs.
Head on oblong block. Face open

to the closed eyes of night,
floating along in space
in tandem with the poem
that flies through the air
with the greatest of ease

and gets up and walks
on its hands
come morning.


April 2012

 

Art notes:

top: blue acrobat by Picasso

second: acrobat by Picasso

third: acrobat with flowers by Marc Chagall 

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Resurrection

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Resurrection pulses through me like a river
pushing aside moments of death. My foot steps
ahead toward the Russian olive, solitary, about
to bloom in the meadow, fresh-mown for summer.

But for now it is spring, the season of risings.
What good are prayers for the already dead? Where
does that love go? I see the raccoon’s den-hole
beside the grass-covered log long fallen,

its dark opening only he can trust. I hear
the watery throat of a cowbird and know it
as the same stream, already across the pasture
where I follow. I watch her fly away, and disappear.


April 2012

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Poem: Losing what we may not know we have

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Oxford, England

Too late I heard that yesterday was the last class of one of our treasured professors. I don't know what I would have done had I known. The colleague who told me it was Tess's last class also told me that back in the day, the department's faculty and staff would gather in the hallway outside a retiring professor's classroom at the close of their final class, and then erupt into applause as a collegial and hearty Well Done. I'm sad that we don't do this now in our department, and that I didn't even know what I'd missed, like so many things that have flowed off downstream and become part of our subconscious past.

Losing what we may not know we have

for Tess

Today I imagine you
in a late April room,
oak-trimmed and bright
with towered light leaning
on wide, flaking sills

your courageous falsetto,
the tone of women
from a certain age that is gone,
a time of white
gloves and great human

decency one to another.
Your final literature class
at university, and you, the last
medieval scholar. A boy
slouches, his phlegmatic leg

stretched long toward the girl’s
desk across the aisle
where her graced contours in black
leggings make him melancholy.
You incant the mysteries

of the humours, while blood
springs in these children
like fountains, splashing. I see you
last summer in Oxford,
your white-gloved finger lifting

the edge of parchment
of an ancient book in a Bodleian
room where the same sun
through oak windows
backlights the stirring leaves

of a plane tree, applauding you
in whispers from the splash
of its heart — O blood-sap,
Our lady professor, the river
of life through

your body of work,
your gravid body, the spray
of wrinkled hair, your
crackling voice, its spatter
on heavy stone where a black

bird lifts off, wings
billowing like a don’s sleeves,
silken, rippling against the sky.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

NOTE: It may well be that if one has to wear white gloves to touch a medieval book in the Bodleian Library, that sunlight is not allowed any more than a finger's oils. But humour me in your bilious objection, my friends, as I take poetic license.

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Poem: The Past speaks

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The Past is a prayer
for this future,

his flannel cuffs
rolled up to the elbows

where tattooed forearms
descend
and veined wrists
rise up like a sunrise,

his knuckles chapped
rocky hills

with outcropping
thumbs hooked in belt loops
on a pair of corduroy trousers,

their velvet
time-scraped
at the knees.

He shifts his big-boot feet
and finally raises his eyes,
staring straight from under

hooded brows
at me
his reckless daughter,
removing his belt,

I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this . . .

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Must we choose?

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April wind sounds like a jet plane outside the window,
so near I can feel the hum on the pane.
I am happy to sit under an afghan
on my heavy gold chair
Sunday afternoon
like an old woman awaiting visitors.

A ladybug alights on my lap, tucks in her wings,
and we are quiet together.

On my tongue are memories of lunch.

What else should occupy
our time on a Sunday afternoon
but the memory of food, and succumbing to sleep
as it drones us under its cloud?
I feel myself traveling through the sky
to a snack bar in Florence.

I have decided not to choose favorites, I say to the ladybug.

What would lime be without avocado? Onion without fried potatoes? Can you imagine basil without tomatoes, or cheese without vino rosso? How pointless to think of pesto without crostini— just Vaudevillian plaid pants dancing from a spoon onto the stage of your tongue, no toast, dry and white, to spread it upon. You open the cupboard for crostini again and again, only to remember with disappointment, Oh yes, pesto was our favorite food, we thought we had to compare and choose, forgetting
that pesto is nothing without the vessel of toast to carry it
farther into our being.

The ladybug is fast asleep,
the roar of wind is gone, blowing somewhere
over the Atlantic on its way to Florence,
the favorite city of someone,
and my memories from there join me as visitors.

Florence —

a physical place apart, a presence in the heart,
never lost,
a stone bridge, a painting, a dome, a statue,
a young groom and his bride carrying calla lilies through a square
toward their new life, that
in their existence alone, rebirth me

— What would Florence be
without this ponte of a stone white sky between us,
an ordinary white wafer carrying the salty tears
from Michelangelo’s pietà, never lost, to my tongue
on a Palm Sunday afternoon?
What would my window be without the sky,
the bridge to everything.

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Poem: A world, and you in it

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A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts
of maps parenthesize
us

as if we are together
though you (you)
are on the East Coast

and you (you)
are on the West —
as far from me as when the thin

membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you (you & you) —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with yours (yours & yours)
inside its coasts.

With many thanks to Brendan for his suggestions, I have revised the poem to what I feel is a better version, and recorded it. You can listen here.

A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts

of maps parenthesize 

us

— mother, daughter and son
as if we are together

though one of you

is on the East Coast 


and the other
 is on the West —

as far from me as when the thin
membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with both of yours
inside its coasts.

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Diane Wakoski's poetry lessons

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To read a poem is to stroll on a warm October afternoon into the artist square Place du Tertre in Montmartre in Paris, and have an artist tap you on the shoulder and ask if they can sketch your portrait. You read a couple of lines, shrug and say Sure, why not. You hear the poet scratching away with their charcoal pencil, and when you’re done reading, you either say, Yes, I recognize myself! Or you say, Who the hell is that?

Reading a poem by Diane Wakoski is like putting on a long flowing hippie dress of Bohemian cotton and walking through an orange grove in southern California or a book-lined New York City apartment where your friend is making an apple torte while you talk about a movie you just watched together. You become a woman who navigates her life through the sensualities of love, food, movies, and popular culture.

In one of her many, many books of poetry, The Butcher’s Apron, you dance through sensual visions of food and drink, sampling Viennese coffee at a train station or figs on the Adriatic Coast. It is in these poems of hers that I most recognize myself. At Diane’s real pine table, I have drunk blooming jasmine tea and eaten countless fragrant green salads with divine vinaigrette that I can never replicate, and pesto made with twenty-five cloves of garlic and basil her husband Robert grew in their front yard. I have also workshopped poems, first as a student in five of Diane’s poetry classes, then with former students around her supper table, pens in hand and minds ready to try on poems and see if they fit. It has been brilliant to study with a teacher who still maintains personal relationships with her students, inviting them into her home lined floor to ceiling with books.

The essentials for writing good poetry that Diane hammered into us students week after week are: A good poem must at the very least have lyrical language (added note after Robert's comment: lyricism in a limited and minimal sense of "the sound of the words" being important) and a trope or metaphor. (Another note: the poem itself can be the metaphor.) Then it must have absolutely NO clichés. If you write about tears as rain or love as fire, you're gonna really get the belt. Don't forget William Carlos Williams' advice: No ideas but in things. And, if you can possibly include something of your personal mythology, you might have a winner.

Professor Wakoski is teaching for three more weeks as Distinguished Poet in Residence in my English department, then she retires. One evening of her last week of class a bunch of former students will stand under her office window outside our building and serenade her with her own poems. Below is one of the three I’ll be reading, from The Butcher’s Apron.

The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful biography of Diane here.

Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives

by Diane Wakoski

for Walter’s Aunt Libby’s

diligence in making olives

As some women love jewels
and drape themselves with ropes of pearls, and stud their ears
with diamonds, band themselves with heavy gold,
have emeralds on their fingers or
opals on white bosoms,
I love the still life
of grapes whose skins frost over with the sugar forming inside,
hard apples, and delicate pears;
cheeses,
from the sharp fontina, to icy bleu,
the aromatic chèvres, boursault, boursin, a litany of
thick breads, dark wines,
pasta with garlic,
soups full of potato and onion;
and butter and cream,
like the skins of beautiful women, are on my sideboard.

These words are to say thank you
to
Walter’s Aunt Libby
for her wonderful olives;
oily green knobs in lemon
that I add to the feast when they get here from Lebanon
where men are fighting, as her sisters have been fighting
for years, over whose house the company stays in
and whose recipes for kibbee or dolmas or houmas
are passed along.

I often wonder,
had I been born beautiful,
a Venus on the California seashore,
if I’d have learned to eat and drink so well?
For, with hummingbirds outside my kitchen window
to remind of small elegance,
and mourning doves in the pines & cedar, speaking with grace,
and the beautiful bodies
of lean blond surfers,
dancing on terraces,
surely had I a beautiful face or elegant body,
surely I would not have found such pleasure
in food?
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
than like a sapphire?
But with mockers flying in and out of orange groves,
and brown pelicans dipping into the Pacific,
looking at camellias and fuchsia,
and abundance of rose, and the brilliant purple ice plant
which lined the cliffs to the beach,
life was a “Still Life” for me.
And a feast.
I wish I’d known then
the paintings of Rubens or David,
where beauty was not only
thin, tan, California girls,
but included all abundance.

As some women love jewels,
I love the jewels of life.
And were you,
the man I love
to cover me (naked) with diamonds,
I would accept them too.

Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter’s Aunt Libby’s wonderful olives from Lebanon.

Thank you, Aunt Libby,
from a failed beach girl,
out of the West.

from Waiting for the King of Spain
and Emerald Ice

Diane's "Sapphos" when we all read at a reading in 2009

—Courtney, Sarah, Carrie, MJ, Diane, me, Heather—
I am old enough to be mother to everyone but Diane.

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Poem: The Great Gray Owl

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It was disappointing Sunday when I was sitting outside in the summery breeze, writing on the laptop, and Don came rushing up to call me back to the pines where he had seen a great gray owl. I went with him, also rushing, then creeping quietly when we got to the pines. We searched high and low in stealth, but he was gone. I have never seen an owl outside a zoo, though I have heard them at the farm. Don looked into eyes just like these. We did find three pellets on the ground, things that Don's third grade students dissected in his classroom last year, and that was thrilling. (Owl pellets are regurgitated; they're not poo. You can read about owl digestion here, it's fascinating.) As the experience worked in my consciousness, other things floated up and into a poem.

The Great Gray Owl

When I was a girl, at night
I stood in the shower
like a shivering field mouse
afraid of yellow eyes
behind the curtain, the man who wasn’t
there
          the man
not from the street, or the window,
but from the shadowed attic,
or the basement, clammy and dark,
the invisible one who came behind
my skittering heels
while I carried a can of beans upstairs. If only
I had the swiveling head of an owl to always
see the predator,
though what good would a swiveling head do
if he is invisible?

There was a great gray owl in the pines
on a summery day in April
when the wind pushed the bamboo
like dainty bending ballerinas in a row,
first this way, their thin arms up, swaying,
then the other way, leaning at the waist.
My husband came running to me, to pull me back
to the woods to see those black and yellow eyes,
staring as my grandfather’s
had from a sepia portrait
at the top of the stairs
when, the youngest, I had to go to bed
before everyone.
          A man
I did not know, a figment, a phantom.
Handsome, dignified, staring, terrifying.
How could I know — That he,
if he had really been there,
not just gray eyes in yellow skin, flat
man on a flat wall, if he had been full and flesh
as he was at last one year visiting from New Jersey,
that he would torment me on his aging,
bouncing wool gabardine knees with foolish mischief,
teasing until I would gasp
between a giggle and a sob. O too soon
when we buried him he was skin and bones, leaving me
to wonder if ever, ever
I would know for certain that a man was really there,
and whether he was benevolent, or cruel.

The owl was not there.
He had flown. On the ground we found
three owl pellets — hair-covered remains of mice, rabbits, moles —
cocooned bits of skull, white ribs, vertabraic knuckles, teeth.
No eyes. Nothing
but gray shrouds of fur.
What the owl could eat, he ate, then gratefully,
even compassionately it seemed,
delivered them up — whole, like small torsos
without need for arms or feet, beautifully
and purposefully wrapped, woven in wool, napped
and cowlicked, tweedy, suited for the earth,
elegantly prepared for burial.

one of the owl pellets we found; owls regurgitate them, they're not poo;
for more on owl digestion (fascinating), read here

Great Gray Owl photo found here.

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Poem: Timbre

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Timbre

It was at the pinprick
of dawn when I removed the pot to pour my cup —

an overflow of coffee sizzled in vibrato
on the heated element of the coffee maker,
the high-partialed wind chime
on the porch tinkled brightly,
the fore-eye of the firebrand sun singed
the tips of low-lying needles on pines behind the meadow,
rising up at just the same exact slow heave
as yesterday

that I thought

This is constraint without limitation,
the sound of the sunrise
that prolongs my life
even one more day.

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"April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, plus a poetry game: Oulipo

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Central Park, NYC, April 2009

April Rain Song

by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

 Me in Central Park, April 2009

I appreciate the childlike pleasure in rain of Langston Hughes' lines. When do people learn to dislike rain? When I was little I played outside in it, stomping and sploshing in the wade-able gutters. Or I played indoors—Chinese checkers, Sorry, Scrabble, crosswords and word searches, or "house." I created divine and elaborate "mansions" with folios for walls, and my mother's jewelry boxes for furniture. (An open necklace box makes a perfect Davenport sofa for a paper doll, and embroidered handkerchiefs make elegant bedspreads.) Having to stay inside the walls of our house during inclement weather made us focus our creative attentions differently, and it was no less enjoyable to me than running in yard games or riding my bike 'round and 'round the block. In fact, I preferred the quieter play and bodily stillness of the cozy indoors, though I broke into somersaults and head stands if there were too many rainy days in a row.

I've been looking into poetic forms this poetry month. Part of me likes the "walls" and constraints of formal poetry like sonnets or villanelles. Focusing on a limited range of words that rhyme, or fit a certain metric, points my focus on what's inside me that wants to be written by eliminating the clutter of unnecessary material, and illuminating language choices in a smaller more limited range.

In these wanderings I discovered Oulipo. This "workshop of potential literature" (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) was begun by a loose group of mathematicians, mostly French, who seek "new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

I played their N+7 game, remaking a couple of poems. (It's sometimes called S+7; N=Noun, S=Substantive.) What mathematicians and I like about N+7 is how it's both fixed and random. (How thrilling to have something in common with mathematicians.) What you do is this: Take an existing poem, like Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" and replace each noun with the noun seven entries after it in the dictionary.

The point is to shake up language and open it up. What crazy new potentialities do you see? What do you discover about the original poem? What thought paths or inspirations reveal themselves like beckoning white rabbits down a hole, or songs of larks that make you pause and listen? I confess that besides these intriguing questions, I just really enjoy the nerdy pleasure of opening the dictionary and seeing what the seventh word away will be! By the way, you can eliminate all the words with the same root as your noun. So, for instance, I jumped past all the entries with "rain" in the word.

When I performed an oulipo on "April Rain Song" I was so happy that the noun replacing "rain" was "Rajasthani" because I remembered my dear friend Rauf's blog post about the manly herdsmen of Rajasthan and Gujarat who wear lots of big gold earrings ("Macho, Macho Jewelry"; Rauf let me borrow his photos below). For me, this game didn't "undo" Langston Hughes' poem, or poke fun at it. It shed light on his method of repeating a word for its sound, like continuous raindrops. The nouns that come seven entries after Hughes' nouns, in their fixed yet random aspect, blend into interesting play of syntax and word meaning. There is something synchronous and wondrous about the result. After reading Rauf's blog post about these shepherds, I see the "aqua" turban, I hear the "lumber-room" of the herded animal feet beating and mouths bleating like a rhythmic drowse-inducing lullaby, and I see the "poorhouses" of the Gujrati herdsmen in their fields of hard work and survival. And although the penultimate line of the oulipoem seems nonsensical, I hear the skill (sleight) of the sonny-herdsman, playing a shepherd's song that hovers around him like a shining halo (nimbus) in a dusty pasture at the end of a long, hot, sunny day.

By the way, Gandhi was born in Porbandar in Gujarat. Gandhi said:

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves."

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again;
Rauf knows how to shake things up

Aqua Rajasthani Sonny

An Oulipo N+7 response to Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" — replacing each noun of Hughes' poem with the noun seven entries away in the dictionary

Let the Rajasthani kiss you.
Let the Rajasthani beat upon your heap with silver liquid drowse.
Let the Rajasthani sing you a lumber-room.

The Rajasthani makes still poorhouses on the sierra.
The Rajasthani makes running poorhouses in the gym.
The Rajasthani plays a little sleight-sonny on our roomette at nimbus—

And I love the Rajasthani.

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again

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Poem: I dreamt you were eating dirt

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I dreamt you were eating dirt

I
I dreamt you were eating dirt.
But it was all right.
It had been refrigerated in earth.

II
My body is ten billion years old.
You were watering me with this old rain
which made us new.
Then we watched.

III
I am sitting on a bench in the meadow.
You are sitting in a boat on the sea.
In and out. We are the same.

IV
Grass greens. Sea grass. Olives. Garlic.
You are weaving with your fingers.
Waves.

V
The smell of rosemary
is not to be confused
with the sound of crows.

VI
If I had died yesterday
would I still have dreamt last night
that you were eating dirt?
Crumbled with the stars.

VII
Salt on your tongue. It’s my fault.
The memory of the word “snow” made me cry.

VIII
Was that Wendell Berry just now?
Soil sweetened
by his hands and his horse.
Delicacy.

IX
I dreamt that you were eating dirt.
Your mouth was a misty valley,
your teeth fences,
your tongue the sandy bed of the sea.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poetic genre: Aubade

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For National Poetry Month, I am writing and sharing samples from different poetic forms and genres. I like putting myself inside new walls to find something new in the world, and in myself.

Today's choice is the aubade, which is a love song of the morning. (A serenade is an evening love song.) An aubade could be welcoming the morning, or lamenting it, as when lovers part. There are no rules of form; it's a genre for a theme and is not a structure.

A perfectly gorgeous aubade was written by Philip Larkin. It's rather hard to say if it is an aubade to life, or to death. The text is here. His deep and lovely reading of it is here. If you do not especially enjoy reading poetry, do try listening to it. When you hear his voice, rich and clear, you understand that poetry is meant to be heard.

I am posting a beautiful aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen, a poet who also wrote poems about unbeautiful things (like murder, which I've linked below his photo at the bottom of the post). My poem has elements of both a love song and a lament, on the order of Larkin's, about a thought that has haunted me: that our children at conception and birth are given no choice about what we might assume is "the gift" of life.

L'enfant Malade, by Eugène Anatole Carrière

Aubade

What have we done, my love, in the sigh of night
when heat from our bodies pressed
the window’s black—
an oil lamp, an irresistible yellow thumb of fire?
Our skin like wings of moths, beating
to get inside the damp. We begin a new life, fluttering
in the dark bean of my belly.

Our desire begets our desire:
A child, first flight into the family tree,
bouncing, bobbing on the boughs of glee.

But what of her desire? She grants
no permission for this heaviest coat
at the highest height.
We’ll push her out, to fly!
She’ll wake up in the gray room of dawn, and fight—
with a wail for milk, and then she will sleep,
and get up to strive again, soon enough
with the sound of coins dropping
into the well of work and wishes.

She will crave what makes her live,
yearning even for the human race,
her skin beating, like ours,
hot in the last sigh of night.
Then like me she will walk out in dawn’s silver-gray,
following the jay’s howl from the woods,
turning at a pine, as I do now,
to stumble onto a scatter of blue feathers
torn by a hawk, and feel her life.

Listen to a podcast of my poem here.

 Woman Leaning on a Table, 1893, Eugène Anatole Carrière

And here is the aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen.

As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other

by Kenneth Patchen

As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

~ from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, copyright © 1942 by Kenneth Patchen.

Booker Ervin (1930-1970), left,

tenor saxophone player, with

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), poet;

Patchen often read his poems

accompanied by jazz;

Listen to one here.

Listen to Booker Ervin

play "Stolen Moments" here.
Moments stolen in the morning
are the best, in my opinion.

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