POET IN GARRET, NOVEMBER
~attributed to Jan Vermeer, 1703
You see at once that she’s cold,
the way she hunches
over the table in the fireless
room. Light from one small
window slants across her page.
She is half-turned toward you,
her lips are parted, her eyes
focused on a word appearing
just above your right shoulder.
PRACTICE
Let there be no routine.
Let the white cat disturb
your meditation,
the black cat interfere
with your tai chi.
May the dog demand
to go out while you’re trying
to pray.
May your husband knock
on your study door
because he cannot find
his glasses.
Your old friend will call
while you are chopping onions
in a mindful way.
Answer the phone.
ADVICE
Write until you’re tired.
~Janice M. P.
Write till no more words
come out of your pen.
Till the skin wears off your fingers.
Write through the banal, the tedium,
the common feelings every animal knows.
There are no new feelings.
Even love is old.
Write until the metaphors are used up,
until the symbols are nothing but stupid.
Write until there is nothing left.
Not a wish, not a thought, not a care.
Then start the poem.
PASSAGE
She went to the oracle
bringing an offering
of incense, a white pebble,
a drop of blood
on a leaf of thyme.
I am empty she said.
Go deeper the oracle said.
But I’ve seen the crystals
growing from the floors
and ceilings, I’ve slipped
into the green waters filled
with white salamanders
and blind fishes,
I’ve touched the walls
covered with luminous worms
and spiders with legs
as long as my arms.
Go deeper the oracle said.
I’ve been all the way in,
she said, all the way
to where the walls
are covered with paintings
of antlered men
and dancing women,
of suns and moons
and disembodied hands.
I’ve tripped over the bones
of wild bulls and giant bears.
Go deeper the oracle said.
But there is no door,
no passage,
leading beyond that deepest cave.
The only way left
is the way back out.
Ah then, said the oracle.
Ah.
THE STORYTELLER
Oh, the wildness of the teller in her cave of bone!
She finds dragons in stumps, faces in every carpet—
how will she make it cohere?
Was it once upon a time, or ever after?
Snakes and bears are real enough,
and mirrors trying to reflect what’s fair.
She searches her fallible senses
entwined with shadowed remembrances
and pieces a pattern, a dream, a tale— something
that might be true, or that someone might believe.
The smell of whisky, the texture of satin,
a whisper behind a half-closed door—
10 RULES FOR POETRY, #9
Don’t keep anything for yourself:
the scent of white iris or wild grape flowers,
the empty spaces between stars,
the russet tail of the crested flycatcher
and his raucous, tuneless voice. Don’t keep
linnet’s wings, or the hummingbird
who bathed this morning
under the spray of your garden hose,
or the scarlet tanager, always just
out of sight in the oak.
And don’t keep uncertainty. And tell us
when you mourn. When you are afraid,
don’t hold it close. When the world
is too much with you, when darkness
comes every morning, when the center
cannot hold, when everything
you love is falling away, when dust
is rising and settling on every inch
of grass and skin, when the brief
candle flickers, don’t keep it.
Tell us, tell us how we aren’t alone.
Honorable mention Comstock Review contest, Fall/Winter 2016
NOT POETIC
~after a discussion with fellow poets about the uses of euphemism
If shit’s not a poetic word,
then how about excrete?
How else can one describe what’s left
of things we creatures eat?
For water one must often “make”
urine ‘s not elegeeic;
and piss though not poetic,
is onomatopeeic.
I’m sorting through my old poems and posting a few that I still like. Including this naughty one, written maybe nine years ago.
