1.1.16

In an effort to avoid what I was complaining about yesterday, here is a semi-weekend-words post for you (semi given that it is still Friday, but I am off work). I couldn't find the poem that I wanted via the highly scientific ctrl + f method, but here are some that are in the same vein. Enjoy!

6/21/10

I rise from what stagnant strangeness

To the surface.

The sky was lacewing-blurred

Till the cold cleared my eyes.

A gasp of understanding,

And then a stab of pain, emerges

From the jagged breaths

That are crystalline with ice.

This one is so old it doesn't have a date as a title, I can't even remember when I started doing that. I think this one may be from 06 or 07, I know it was a school vacation when I was in college. I went back 3 dump-documents on the cloud (they're not anthologies because I shove every darn thing into them) to find something good! Check out how different it is.

The stark skeletons of trees against the sky

Now bare and reaching in the wind

The air is crisp and cold and full of clouds

High and perfect and pure

And bright and barren.

Pine arms like compass points to the horizon

Proud and sharply scented like the air

My presence on the great curve of the earth

And of the latitudes drawn over like a map

I have never been more beautifully aware.

No fair-weather friend, the frost enthralls

Wind-chill keeps the mercury busy

The gulls on the waterfront match the clouds

With the cold cries

Of my northern city.

I am not a poet populist. Not in the news

Of voice and risk and symbolic legislation

Not even a poet, really,

Just a winter Washingtonian

Who looks out on the season with joy-

And tempered patience.

And another random, from Berkeley, this was an assignment (or at least peripheral to something I was doing in a poetry class at the time, on the Modernists, the reader will see their imprint here). Oh, I thought I was awfully clever (this makes me laugh, now).

I blow my nose and leaves fall from the trees,

Wondering what will follow when I sneeze.

*

The moments that dripped from narcissus last

This season can be seen in salted frost.

*

I crouch and watch the faces that debate

From north and west in the hanging handkerchiefs.

*

Fog plays house as a petaled cloud,

Admires herself all the length of Williams street.

*

At the empty bus stop I shuffle pebbles on the ground

And sketch the passer’s portraits for a pound.

This sort of derailed into "lets read old things and laugh at how silly they are". If you like it, I'll do it again. I have thousands of poems, most of questionable quality. It feels weird to say that!