dainty things in blue

Poetry * Photos * Day-to-Day Life

Monday, January 30, 2006

Poetry Exercise

I love to invent poetry exercises, and I hope to post many here. Feel free to use and change this however you wish – the original content on this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 license. Also, if you try this exercise yourself and want to share your results, I would love to read your poem. If you email it to me and send your snail-mail address, I will send you a postcard.

Have you seen Amazon’s new Concordance feature? Find a book that interests you and has the Search Inside capability. If you scroll down to the Inside This Book section, you can click on Concordance and get a list of the 100 most prevalent words in that book.

-Write down the 25 words you like best from that list.
-Write a poem with 5 stanzas of 5 lines each and use one of those words in each line.
-Each line should have 10, 11, or 12 syllables.

Monday, January 23, 2006

3rd grade



1981-82

Things I remember:
-the 8th graders all saw Bye Bye Birdie on TBS the night before (as did I) and they walked by our classroom window singing "We Love You Conrad."

-Renate D. allegely stole Jeannine H.'s colored pencils, and Jeannine told Renate that she was taking her to People's Court.

-Mrs. Baisley put a Hershey bar on your desk before you got to school in the morning if it was your birthday. She also gave Hershey bars as prizes for classroom contests, which I often won. For instance, I won the contest to see who could write down the most pairs of homonyms in 20 minutes.

-My Dad had his first heart attack while we were in Maryland for my Aunt Rita & Uncle Jerry's wedding. That was scary, but I got to go to school with my cousin Nancie. Being the little know-it-all that I was, I kept raising my hand to answer questions in Nancie's class. Her teacher kept saying, "You all are in 4th grade and Heather came all the way from 3rd grade in SOUTH CAROLINA and she can do your work better than you can." And I kept having to chime in and say, "NORTH Carolina."

-News trickled up from the little school that there was a strange little boy in Kindergarten who was obsessed with rock music, especially The Beatles, and he had brought his guitar for show-and-tell. Any ideas who that was?

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

View from my apartment in the Wilma, Summer 1998

Fostering

written spring 2005

Fostering

Taken from where they supplemented
‘stop barking dammit dog’
with ‘mercy oh mercy mighty’
and there might arise
kedgeree from the squeaking
saucepot -- our spaniel’s vacant belly
believed this as we believed
that uncle drilled auntie until
she poured forth cousin Lucy,
red lichen swabbed behind the medulla
oblongata, born scarcely distinguishable
from the Aleutian sandpiper save for
the umbilicus and her soft, featherless bottom.

Be focused now on water led past us
by the host population, wiseacres
sown with summer squash --
one of a dozen noted substitutions
for tangy oblong fruit. They ought to have
a duller word for that. Easy to see
the fulfillment of a brown pod tipped palish
and escaped caged birds flying toward
the sea, their beaks positioned for bathymetry
and meat in streaky sea waters. If we could
watch long enough for proof, the tongue
would freeze between predator and prey,
rattling the corner between two flashes.

After

written summer 2005

After

With nowhere to stop, I drove to the Laundromat.
A succession of molded orange chairs
opposed a row of avocado washers, their
mouths like Communicants, thrust wide
for quarters. A boy in rubber clogs brushed
his mother’s long, red hair. I perched
with my knees tucked into my armpits
atop the washer nearest the plate-glass window
and watched the reflection of the bristles
dividing the strands while her hands paired clean socks.
Hair has no lungs and neither does flame.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Missoula, Montana. Summer 1994. Really.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Poets & Poetry-Lovers:

Please recommend a poetry book. It can be a chapbook, too, or even a literary journal -- just something that you love, and that you think I would love too. It doesn't matter if you don't know me -- I will investigate all leads.

Thanks very much.


Friday, January 13, 2006

rejection letter

written summer 2005



rejection letter

never late enough in the day the drowsiness
however it clusters between my throat and eyes

marks the afternoon with unexpected cloudfall
which puts the cat in a position to exit

the smooth lap where I sigh us through a Tuesday fog
out through the visqueened back window as I begin

the remote half-letter you neglected to send
until your unpleasant in-laws arrived with damp

kitty-litter stuck in their soles which suggests you
have summarized us as birds in a rainstorm or

wind through a birdstorm but not necessarily
asylum again from charmless hometown parties

December 1978



It's around this time in January every year when I start to realize, "Damn. Christmas is really over."

On the plus side, only 11 months until my birthday.

Postal Sestina

from spring 2004

Postal Sestina

I’m never well on Sunday when you don’t deliver mail.
I skitter through the kitchen making peach
pie, lime tarts, and I listen to my spy-
story tape. (They’ve bugged the mayor’s pillow
and tantalized him with arresting blue-
eyed women.) But listen to me chatter –

my husband plugs his ears from the chatter
of girls. On Monday when you bring the mail
I’ll recognize the script on a bright blue
note stamped with a commemorative peach.
Perhaps I’ll read it seated, the pillow
rigid against my back, and when I spy

a line of Basque poetry I will spy
the psyche of a lunatic. Chatter
with loud mocking through the crazy pillow
he left in our bed. He’s the yo-yo, mail
carrier, not I. Won’t you stay for peach
pie? Lime tart? Your uniform is as blue

as my January fingertips, blue
like a bathtub daisy decal. I spy
your smile, mister. You have one lovely peach
of a mouth. I jest! My silly-girl chatter
will keep you from delivering the mail.
Could you leave me to ravish my pillow?

What stain is this ruining our pillow?
A yellow tinge has seeped into the blue
ticking. I’ll have to send away by mail
to find a solvent worthy of a spy
like me. When I worry I chatter –
I could chatter the fuzzy off a peach!

Do I dare to decorticate a peach?
His brain drained from his ear to the pillow
and deafened him against my sad chatter
and I turned to find his lower lip blue
and his upper lip stiffened like a spy
at night, this man who never sends mail.

I’ll never chatter to you, my brave peach,
when you bring the mail. Lie on this pillow?
Everything gleams blue when you’re a good spy.

2 Sonnets

from summer 2005

What She Remembers Well, But Not Fondly

A face appeared to hover in the town’s
Marsh Hawk preserve behind the softball field,
way back beyond third base, a reluctant post
for an emaciated visionary
who wore a ring on every digit, thumbs
included. Glove between her knees, home plate
just an obscure echo of “swing batter”
behind her, that face grew encephalitic
and red. Was this a burning beachgoer
off-course with sun-poisoning? A balloon-
seller’s gimmick? She aimed her topaz ring
toward the sun and caught a glint to fend off
the face’s mad advance, but it heckled
and spat back whatever weapon felled her.



What She Remembers Fondly, But Not Well

Black cowboy boots. A floppy blond hairstyle
that covered one eye. A name sewn over
his pocket: Beau, or Glenn, or was it Rhett?
The May humidity intensified
the scent of marsh marigolds and the boy’s
hands, washed recently with black Lava soap
and hose-water in the gas station lot.
He looked too young to work there, and too clean.
It might have been the final day of school
because the sun was right overhead, noon,
and she had never been brave like the kids
who skipped out in nice weather. An embrace,
her first good kiss, and the discovery,
later, of spearmint gum in her pocket.

Why We Do It

Fall 2005

Why We Do It

To see you leave, I keep my compass in my eyes.
I string the scarf you left around my bed like garland.
To feed the army, you chop and char the trees.
You provoke her beehive with a birch branch.
To recognize the bridge, she farms beneath its roadbed.
She informs the monk that she believes in him and his.
To standardize the slang, he deafens the population.
He scares it into the drawers of an antique desk.
To treat the latest blight, it meets the forebears.
It stocks rifles and brown paper for our motorcade.
To rise before twilight, we savor Ackerman’s cherry tobacco.
We rely on the mail for your private speculation.
To keep them out of the street, you run their dogs.
You draw your plans on ninety-pound vellum.
To prophesy the weather, they telephone Poland.
They brush back embarrassment from their bald and yellow heads.

Dance, Liana, Dance

from Spring 2003

Dance, Liana, Dance

This morning you’re the queen of pitch.
Around the room without your shoes

you carve a naked dance-step, in time
with suspense between the braking

of cars that yield to morning glare.
There’s trouble in Bolivia,

catastrophe on Mt. Rainier.
You press the message into motions

of head-to-knee and hand-to-wall,
the screen of your skirt eclipsing

gardenias on the wallpaper.
The left arm a comma, the right

arm an apostrophe. The clefts
between the floorboards never pinch

your toes the way they pull out threads
from stocking feet. My mistakes

repeat themselves with clumsy tread,
so dance, Liana, dance again.

4 Very Short Poems

Written during Spring 2004.


Today in Public Works

One Baltimore street

smoothed so thin it cracked
with cumin-colored
and chocolate-covered
night-squandering rats.


You Were Missing in My Latest Dream

He collected bracelets, gold

mined from a tourist beach
where poems never belonged.
He hung them from the willow
with twine. I sharpened my comb
in search of permanent waves
to weed. These dangle from trees.


10,001 Days Before My Birth

It may have rained and ruined someone’s
best pillow, and made her cry again,
another little knife in a month
spent swallowing hard. She lit the stove
and pruned the kitchen garden. There may
have been a thumb-pianist with her
in the room, releasing note after
tin note. Someone may have photographs.
A cricket species may have gone extinct.


Window Sill

Cilantro spills from a blue china dog.
A pink plastic razor and shavings
of crayons curled into small scrolls,
melted into traffic light pools. Paint,
chipped, the kind you should never eat.
What do you see, from your perch
in the balsa tree? Only the golden glare.

Relief Effort

Another one from Spring 2003...


Relief Effort


The iridescent sheen of maritime
disaster held the landscape under glass
while every child required swimming lessons
and every woman craved bouillabaisse. Men
absconded, bearded with mountain knowledge,
and deigned to bring their wives thick sprays of ferns
for table exhibitions. Summer oozed.
The unctuous bursts of wind refused to settle.

Along an arm of the harbor, a girl
lay drowned, her braid looped on an old crab trap,
the water there no deeper than her knees
when she still breathed. Her brother brought her there
to photograph old rowboats, rotting piers,
and trash that docked itself between the stumps.
She’d swum to get a better shot of tugs
against the backdrop of the smooth green water,

and then? The Gladiolus Ladies from
a church across the county brought cream cakes
and flower boxes. Not knowing what to do—
who did?—for the kids, policemen set up
a water-slide on the park’s only incline.
Twelve sheets of black plastic slick with the stream
from a garden-green hose in the crabgrass,
the children shivered down the hill to mud.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

My letter from the Pope


The Aftershock of Something

Written spring 2003

The Aftershock of Something

I ran my hands through pounds of rice, the rough
grains abrading the feeble tissue at the crotches
of my fingers, the freezing water turned milky
from starch. I pleaded for some gloves or salve
but she, the mistress of that game, had toughed
out swallowing a boiler of briny soup,
and so her bitten heart enjoyed my ache.

They salted the bed sheets. My swollen appendages
were not my swollen own. The rapt voyeurs
had much to say about Nevada’s blind,
like, “Grapes for eyes,” and “Stole my hogs,”
so I was left to foxtrot for my reputation.

I swathed my legs in gauzy paper lace,
allowed to be evacuated North
and tie the tent-straps tight, and tie the vines

before weevils mastered the knotted stalks.

Moptops, 1981


Moptops, 1981
Originally uploaded by sharkycharming.
My brother, Tony, was three years old when he taught himself to read. He couldn't stand the idea of not knowing what it said on the back of my mother's Beatles records. Ever the completist, even at age five he was desperate to fill in some gaps in our Beatles collection -- hence this photo of him beaming on Christmas morning in 1981. Rubber Soul is also my favorite Beatles record, in case you were wondering.

Are You a Pink Cloud Now?

Another one from spring of 2004.


I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe
you haunt me – not very grandmotherly
of you, but you were more inclined to fix
a frozen pizza than a latticework pie,
and we both scoffed at the biddies wearing
tight blue curls and shopping for big, modest
panties. Tell me – I’ve always wondered – how
do they decide which clothes your ghost will wear?

Do you iron silk blouses and fix your hair?
When you visit Pop-Pop, are you twenty,
just months before your wedding, or would he
not recognize his bride on the cusp
of the second half of the century?

But maybe you haven’t kept that body,
and that’s why I’ve heard you scolding me,
smelled your cigarette smoke in the hot night air,
felt you, a spicy warmth below my heart –
the place I’ve always thought of as my soul –
but I haven’t seen and can’t recall your eyes.



Congregant

I write a lot of poems about religion. That's what 13 years of Catholic school will do to a girl.
This one was written during the spring of 2004.

Congregant

On my back, having procured
my weekly Mass-time Tic-Tac
from my grandmother’s pocketbook,
I watched the white noise of Father’s homily
bounce from wooden beam to crucifix
and tried to keep my patent leather shoes
from tapping this song into the pew:
Oh, life could be a dream (sh-boom)
If I could take you up in paradise up above …

That realization! life
could be a dream, like the one
I dreamed the night before, the one
where the fisherman statue came to life
and chased me until I fell off the pier—
the idea burned, a small mint
lodged between the Gospel and the Creed.

First Day

This is something that started in 1998 and was revised in 2004.

First Day

One glance proclaims it: I am unwelcome here.
I trespass, my fly-fire dim amid the halos,
a parasite shunted from chorus to heavenly

choir. My language is clatter. I caterwaul.
My tongue bloats in the fine air of paradise,
a litany of mispronunciations, elocution

disrobing the minstrel sinner. They herald
the influx of beasts from the famine:
godwits and zebu and one jumping mouse.

Blessed be I? Never mind my felicitous past?
I invoke the words of Sister Carmen Cruz:
“Heaven will be candy-studded, dark chocolate

doves and boulevards paved with divinity.”
One strong wind could suffer me into darkness,
away from the tedious aspirations

of the born-again. Others have failed
before me, they say. Others could not
be scrubbed clean. Some brilliance fades.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Running for a Bus

written Spring 2003:

Running For a Bus

Who prizes nickel treasure more than I?
That which satisfies a slight desire for figs
creates extended longing when the palate
dries. Uncap a sigh, trigger the lens.
Recant that covenant with modest men
who never sullied names or sheets of white

kenaf. Those whistles in my head produce
a dirty laugh. No Cadillac? No skates?
I’m running for a bus to keep a date
with Old McCoy the Sailor, former pitchman
for Cartoon Classics on the UHF dial.
He keeps a pack of Tareytons under his hat.

The seaman knows I’d rather fight than bitch
about my lunar folly. He harpooned
me once before I left my native alleys,
but no one saw my bliss. They sent a powder
to cure me of the blight, and that’s the night
the last bus sent me here to lead attacks.
 
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