so … um, er … yeah, there’s this poem-ish thing

There’s this poem-ish thing that surprised me, including how it told me in no uncertain terms that I would end it just as the muse instructed, though my first instinct was to delete-delete-delete. Here goes. It’s been a while. I don’t have a title. I’m in shock that I have a poem. A poem-ish thing!

///

You have said mostly
nothing. Not Please,
no. Not Fuck you.
Not even Good bye.
And I also speak little
about this farewell
we suffer. No damage
from strange summer
earthquakes or hurricanes
but the rubble of this —

I have heard those
who are buried alive
can’t be freed all at once,
the weight upon them
lifted slowly enough
as not to shock
the lungs, the heart,
or flood tissue
with too much
rushing in all at once.

Or is that the theory
about leaving
the knife in the wound? No,
that rule’s about losing
everything, spilling more blood
than is necessary to prove
your point.

///

Or maybe there’s a clue to the title in that last line … I dunno.

a stone in a river, 27

Blind cat doesn’t know
it’s too early
to go

 

/ / /

/ / /

I’m pretty much sucking at this.

a stone in a river, 26

The house is all cinnamon. Stripped of bark, roasted by piped-in artifacts. Organic as if that is enough to crisp granola sweet. Sends this bent frame forward while others diminish, then, hopefully, circle.

/ / /

It’s all I got.

a stone in a river, 24

She’s making a racket:
sparrow youth, fledging
voice a rasp, feather against
any other straight-laced measure.

/ / /

/ / /

Such a strange percussion, long and soft. As if keening had been stripped of tone. (I’d never heard it before today. Cool!)

a stone in a river, 23

So many fly under false notions
yet Crow’s tail feather breaks

then splits
against a sliver of blue sky.

/ / /

Still casting back to Carolee’s line, “the false notion.”

I saw this for the first time, a few days ago. Crow flew in the fir, and his tail spread against air, leaving a glimmer as he sat. It was lovely. And usual, for those with just the right perspective.

Two, crows. Actually.

catching carolee’s plane

How to Set a Boundary in Units of Moisture

It’s not the silvered wings fault
they think they move,
make progress to some point
identified as necessary:
Gate, Oklahoma or Dodson, Texas
near a magical line on the 100th
meridian that separates wet from dry.

Every signal fires the same
starry glimmer through smoke:
Tears well our eyes and we
are as separate as threads
& can reweave our own pattern.
This fluff of time is all one
cosmic tea, but we who live
in clicks of clocks can serge
an edge in our bolts of cloth,
pink the cut edges. Keep
the threads from ravelling.

/ / /

Skipping stones with Carolee — I like her silvered wings that can’t kiss, in combination with an amazing dream last night concerning vast amounts of the most amazing bolts of cloth I have ever seen, amazing sewing novelties that made me squeal in my dream (no, I don’t sew), a thin ultralight bicycle, and living in Texas. I wish I could paint the clothes for you. Or any of it.

Yes. I have too many metaphors in this. But, well. It’s a first draft of a something.

Read more about the 100th meridian, if you are map nerd like me.

catching stone 22 & tossing it back to deb

Plane, twilight

We keep flirting with this word:
Destination. But he will have none of us.
We’ll have to settle, instead, for taking
his rival Retrospect to bed. The trouble
with turning back to the city of departure is
we’ve been behaving as though

…we left it behind.

Silver wings glimmer with the false notion
they fly toward the sun. They’ll never be any closer
than they are now. One way,

…or another,

they’ll come back to the ground without
having kissed a single star.

///

Deb’s stone #22 is here; my leaning toward the sun poem is here. This piece kind of loses interest for me after “silver wings,” but I will work with it.

a stone in a river, 22

Stalks follow the sun
before the bloom

Unseeing eyes point
ears to rustles

Black soil still warm
shadows a slant touch

Lowing roars pursue
a twilight plane

Shaped like a star
time boomerangs

/ / /

And this (forward & back) casts to Carolee’s sunflowers, along with tonight’s landscape.

I didn’t know stalks & leaves did that, either.

from seeds here & in my backyard

Sunflower plants turn
toward the sun weeks
before flowers arrive.

The stalks must convince
the blossoms they know
what they are doing, well ahead
of believing themselves

buds will arrive.

///

My son Jack planted sunflower seeds in the circular flower bed we created inside our fence a couple years ago. We have alternately planted something there and let the weeds have their way. I noticed this year, for the first time, that the plants have been practicing following the sun across the sky. I’d always thought they waited for the flowers.

I wanted to write about it, though not make a poem containing only it. So I’m considering this a seed of its own. And it’s related for me to these (Deb’s 18th and 16th stones). It’s also, of course, not un-related to things going on in my life at the moment and how you can’t always hold the belief that something lovely is going to open up. But you do what you do because something somewhere in you knows.

I want to at least, for now, name it something unrelated to sunflowers. Maybe I will call it, “Hiring movers” or something. Not sure.

a stone in a river, 21

Mid-July and how do I tell juveniles from adults? Frantic flapping casts them as dependent. A fluttering flight-display strengthens wing muscles — play-acting experience they will need for courtship.

/ / /