Rain fell for days, stopped.
This is goodbye,
bare trees like matchsticks
waiting for a flame.
Soon, you’ll burst into
new green, fuzzed like the babies
in your nested branches.
Together may you open, bloom,
take to the air.
Just Like Trees
Broken Home
For the month of April, to mark International Poetry Month, I’m trying to write a daily poem in response to someone else’ s prompt instead of writing about whatever wanders into my head that day. It’s hard, weird, and interesting, all at once. The prompts I’m using are posted by Robert Brewer on his inspiring blog, Poetic Asides. Today’s prompt: write a broke poem.
I let everything in our house
Stay broken for you.
I left everything
In our house
Broken
For you
Now that you’re gone,
Slowly,
Like springtime arrives this year,
Broken latches,
Broken railings,
Broken chairs,
Are cured.
I fix them
Then
Make dinner
Make a poem
Make a home.
In Case Of…
It was an old wooden box, with no key. She found it at a yard sale in a small town fifty miles away and paid too much for it. Back home, she placed it on the kitchen table and smashed the lock off to see what the box held.
Inside were bits of paper, handwritten, full of advice, contingency plans, exit maneuvers. She sorted them into piles, dividing them by types of paper. Each kind of paper, she soon discovered, had its own flavor of advice.
There were blue squares, with roosters in the corner, shopping lists on one side: apples, milk, roasts, white bread. On the back of the lists, in the same flowing script, motherly advice: In case of rain, unexpected company, wrinkled linens. Another stack: Blue-lined notebook paper in childish handwriting, shaky Palmer script advising her what to do in case of lost homework, bullies, bad lunches. There were index cards with neat, blocky printing and instructions on what to do in case of problems with furnaces, rain gutters, flat tires.
Finally, at the bottom of the box, a few strips of thick, cream colored paper. Some with no words at all, only tiny sketches of trees and flowers that had never grown in this world. The advice, if there was any, tended towards what to do in case of infestations of fairies, how to manage elves who came to visit and wouldn’t go home, plans in case of dragons. The very last slip of paper said, In case you are lost….with a hand-drawn map on the back.
At last. She nearly cried with relief. Practical advice, at last.
Suffering
Rich language
stumbles at the same word
describing
injured soldiers, slaughterhouses,
refugees, cancer patients,
Lincoln’s face, toddler tantrums,
boredom, thirst.
No glibness.
I want to invent words to show
the vastness of the oceans between.
Instead, you show me
a map of the universe
where all our suffering
Human, animal, planet
is so small,
disappearing
in all this night sky.
Hunter and Hunted
Instead of gratitude for being noticed,
there are days when the world gets tired
of all this applause and dissection
and tries to hide.
Like us all, now and then the world wants privacy, not
this woman stalking it with a pen, commenting on
every item in the world’s blue-green basket:
Skunks and pineapples,
Blizzards and espresso,
Another pineapple,
Chalk drawings, tennis balls, thatched roofs.
And here’s the trouble with anthropomorphizing everything—
Now I feel sorry for it,
as it scurries away,
like the spider I disturbed in the flowers this morning
startled and on the run, me hurrying to catch it.
And the spider has no idea
whether I will crush it or cradle it gently to a new home
now that it’s captured my attention.
The world says to the spider, I know just how you feel.
How To Interpret Dreams
The baby on the pogo stick at the top of the stairs? That’s your career, teetering, ready to leap into what looks like the thin air of disaster.
Oh, the one where you and he barricade yourselves in the bedroom, barring the door to keep out the maniac with his face, his name? Well, that’s tied to the dream where a mountain lion prowls the divorce lawyer’s office, hungry and sleek.
These other dreams, over here? The goldfish bowl floating on the ocean, or the one where you shelter from green rain beneath the theater marquee? They could mean anything at all.
Last, the dream where you’re scrambling for the right pen in a drawer full, hurrying to write the poem before the door opens and it slips away?
Well, we all know what that one means.
The Wild Couches of Spring
One by one, they escape–couches, sofas, davenports.
They sag by the curb, breathing deep the fresh air of front yards
nonchalantly, as if we might not notice, as if this were their native habitat.
Another sign of spring, shy couches familiar as robins, rain, forsythia.
But one faded floral holds a sign in her lap declaring herself,
brazen as as a teenager with a slogan on her t-shirt:
I Am Free.
Posting A Letter
is the phrase in my head
when I fold this ink on paper
into its clever envelope.
And I say it to myself in a clipped British accent,
and a crisp cotton dress, belted, with a
full skirt. Matching heels. Nylons.
I pick up my tiny handbag,
slip on white gloves, pearl buttons at the wrist,
and go to post your letter.
Days like these, this is me
waving to the past
on its huge island,
while everyone else on my ship
rows frantically forward,
hurling electronic messages into
the static filled sky of now
(except you, posting a letter to me).
Plus: Vacation Shadorma
Shadorma is a poem of counted lines of syllables, like this: 3/5/3/3/7/5
Vacation
plus my same old life
plus you, friend–
wine, laughing
long walks, longer talks, good food,
the plain world blossoms.
Hold That
Here at the Office of Catch Phrases, Cliches, Slang (All Types) and Mixed Metaphors, we are always working, Hard at it, No rest for the wicked, Nose to the grindstone, Concocting new expressions for your pleasure and overuse.
This week we are concentrating on new ways to say Be Patient. Wait A Minute. Don’t Rush In. You’ve used our golden oldies since God was a boy. Remember Hold The Phone, Hold Your Horses, Hold That Thought?
Now try these,new and improved—Hold That Boulder, for the deep breath before tackling a weighty problem. Or how about: Hold That Calamari, before plunging into a situation full of strange tentacles that may wrap you up, may drown you.
We invented Hold That Evergreen for you to use before picking up an idea that is sharp to the touch. This led us to many tree analogies. Such as—Hold That River Birch, for water thoughts and white memories. Or, our personal favorite, Hold That Willow, for the moment before you get lost in a daydream, the breath before you step into the cool, green shadows and stand quiet and drenched within the fall of leaves and water.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 