NaPoWriMo Day 2: A poem that asks questions

Love in the second half of life

 

Will I overhear you only listening, your thoughts

better left unspoken, except to me?

Will you turn to me, eyes light up,

with bewilderment, and the shyness of a man?

After a while, will you hold my hand

Your warmth penetrating more than words?

Will I watch you talk with a brother, mother, daughter

Of old days and half-grown dreams?

Will I love the boy you were so long ago

Tenderly hold you wonder, and your pain?

Will we savor seasons, no more rushing?

Will time be flowing backwards, forwards, standing still?

 

A poem that asks not answers

How can we know the past?
By its tailings, lying by the hole?
Do seasons really come again??
Only higher up, burying the one before

Is it worth saving this bit of plastic by filling it with ink?
I could carry it everywhere
and those I left behind would not know
I had ever been there.

Is this the end of lovely?
It is the universal force, and we
wish the stars above were nearer
to overcome it.

Why does the freeway sound rise in the damp
Riding on the vapor all the way to my window?
What is the hissing in my ears?
Either blood, or memories smashing together.

Why do visitors wait for me to come
to a sound I have not heard?
This one I will bring indoors
to last until I die.

 

Your lips

You set your mouth like your grandfather when you write.
Do you know that?
Look at that photo your father sent;
see how he holds the pen
and his lips
stiff in concentration?

And when you sit at the sewing machine, you bite a little of your bottom lip
as if it might fall under the needle
if you didn’t hold it still.

I can see your emotions in the set of your mouth
They are not full lips like magazine women,
not pleased and relaxed
like you see in your reflection

You don’t even know what your mouth looks like most of the time,
except in photos, and that look surprises you,
so you practice photogenic positions,
in case of candid shots

Now relax, release,
and kiss me.

 

This Dream

I do not claim to have developed an airtight business plan

for this dream.

It was a dream, and it came from my root

although up in the air, before you, it has proved to be so fragile.

It wanted nourishment, encouragement,

A chance to live and grow.

 

I see now I should be thankful for those strong blasts of hot air,

If they have strengthened stems,

the lack of light, at first, that made it reach higher,

and your crap, that turned out to be

nourishing, after all.

 

Poem for my crotchety neighbor

This time I should call her first,
To pre-empt her from texting me with the usual
“Turn down the racket! What’s wrong with you people?
You don’t live on twenty acres!”
I would say to her, “Pam, would you pah-lease
get those crows in your yard to cut out that racket at seven in the morning?
and your cypress is shedding all over our woodpile.
What do you think this is, a public park?”

 

Ten second poem based on discarded packages

You’re the 70% cocoa of us
He’s the Kraft Dinner
But I? I’m the pickled beans.

 

I had no idea where this was going. I remember you said it would be like that sometimes.

I drank another glass of that tangy, sparkly, just a little sweet, juice,
which was defrosted, bottled, pressed from apples and aronia–September and October,
then mixed.

Couldn’t get enough, though my gut ached, unaccustomed to filling up
After going all day on nothing but coffee, tomato soup, and roasted almonds.
Barely time to pee between classes.

I sip again, then, hands to the keyboard, keyboard on my lap,
lap on bed, shoulders propped by pillows
against the headboard.

It snowed today, five inches or more in early November.
A wet, cold, day, windy like home, except without the smell of the bay
and red sandy loam tuning the snow pink in the ruts.

This morning two of my fingers turned dead white and tingled
even inside my wool gloves, and I shifted my weight
off surfaces irritated due to the failure of certain inner hammocks.

I don’t like you any more.
It’s not your fault–it could have been anyone,
present at the failure of certain other inner hammocks
like the one held up at one end
by you.

 

A poem made with geological vocabulary

I meant to look up just a few words for a poem about a geologist friend, but the language was so rich, I couldn’t resist.

The Eruption

We are absolutely dating, he said
As they glided across the abyssal plain.
In the aftershock if that, she
turned on her earphones to an acid rock channel
an aggregate album recommended by Amber.

It’s your angular unconformity I object to,
he continued, and your acting
as if all of us, your Achaean companions,
are just an archipelago about you.

It was a basic, bedrock complaint,
and she buckled a little, inside, like
some kind of breadcrust bomb.
She cast about, cleaved clean from her continental crust.
She was shaken to the core,
He could be so crude.

Don’t think I mean to degrade you, he continued
as he prepared to drill to her core.

It seemed an eon (it was erratic at her epicenter)
Then the erosion began.
The exfoliation of one layer, another,
she fractured, froze,
Her guts as if gastroliths ground them.

In the half-life it could have taken for her heart
to turn to hardpan, something creaked,
a hinge line opened to something inside
a hotspring, an isotope of her essence till now hidden

A kettle, steam kinking upward within,
Then, lava, a liquefaction of the lowland of her soul
Mantle, oozing massive, moving toward
a sudden metamorphosis

Mica, he wanted to mold her
but her orogenic beginnings were leading to a piercing point.
It was plutonic, yes, but now, what a
pneumatolytic,  pyroclastic rift!

 

 

Stop fighting fires

Stop Fighting Fires

It releases the minerals, you know.
Let it burn, snap, roar, blast back out again the sunshine
that’s been trapped in there for the past forty, seventy,
two hundred years.

Who wants a cold, clammy forest
shading nothing but its own dry twigs
and dead brown needles,
sheltering nothing but cicadas
and a few hungry birds?

Let it burn to ash, and then
burst into wildflowers, grass, and tree seedlings
inviting small scampering things
leaping crickets, slithering snakes, bees,
and releasing a thousand smells.

 

A poem about having more than the usual fingers

Standards in the classroom

When I learned that the gene for six fingers per hand is dominant,
I thought about all the children who, in infancy and in secret,
Had had two of their twelve fingers cut off
so they could be normal.

Five fingers plus five equals ten —
the basis of the decimal system and Arabic numerals
and Metric, all very clear-cut.

But why not let twelve digits be the norm
and count in dozens?
(Could it be that the dozens we do count
are because of dozens of fingers in some baker clan?)

Or, some could have theirs amputated at the knuckles
and count by fractions.
The teacher would say, “My aren’t they sharp!”
and divide the class into sections
so they could teach their five-fingered friends
(who would wear prostheses to get a slice of the action).

This would be better than listening to the dull teacher
as she lay equations on the board
and told everyone to do their exercises,
“Chop-chop!”