Week 9 - Fragmented

I sit in my dim matchbox,

Crowded around the glowing open mouth

Of the electric oven.

The blazing coils dim and intensify

With each wandering breath.

These are the duties of the righteous,

The ways of the anointed.

And she pulls me away from the oven

And she rubs my burns with ointment.

Last night she’d been

Ironing shirts and trying her best to explain

Something important to the children

And you waited

Behind a pile of linen.

The word linen seems inherently clean.

Soiled linen is no longer linen –

It is a rag.

Just as to spit-clean is inherently not clean.

And here I am filled with my own spit.

My house floats on a lawn.

In the icehouse I'd clear my name

From a scruff of ponderosa pines.

Week 8 - Ford

Ford's "Last Breath at Dawn" was a bit trippy. When I first attempted reading it, I had to stop and go back, to start over again. The thing with it is that it is not syntactically conventional. The lack of punctuation and the lack of line breaks as a substitution for the punctuation makes the thoughts string together. One word does not necessarily lead into the next, logically. It plays with expectations and immediately goes against the norm with its form. But then it sets things up, allowing you to momentarily be lulled back into predicting where it's going. But no, no, no. Don;t get fooled. That word isn't wives, it's lives. I just loved how this poem played with conventions and how the back and forth allowed it to be a very interactive reading experience.

Self

You know when the air smells like rain but instead of density all you feel is crisp, brisk. You see it in the distance, but instead of shifting streaks of falling water, gravity made visual, just mist. Breeze and goosebumps and trembling. Everything is moving and yet the silence makes it all seem still. Then breathing. Even if you weren't sucking on that cigarette, the air in front of you would still turn into a plume of fog. Ether escaping a dying being. Warmth leaving your body. Inside your head, just a hum. Words don't exist there. But thoughts do. Humming thoughts. Feelings so primitive that words aren't necessary. You just realized you smell like soap. That scent so particular to you and you alone, that one that you and you alone can't notice. It's soap. Soap mixed with popcorn and a bit of grass. Or is that just the grass you're standing in that you smell? You submerge your face into a pile of hair and it's confirmed. You smell like grass. And soap and popcorn.

Odyssey

The sun hides behind bright grey fog,

hovering low above the receding tide

and it's not raining but the air is wet.

Cataracts of cigarette smoke and lack of sleep,

warm breath expelled into the Pacific morning,

steam escaping from double-walled tumblers.

The levy path is littered with bodies,

the streets with wandering sand,

and I have to remind myself that this is home.

Not even the wet currents rushing in

compare to how quickly I rush out,

leaving Santa Cruz behind for Sierra Azul.

The bus out of town, up the hill, down into the valley,

picks me up every morning at 7:30

to carry me away.

We pick up cyclists who sit beside their helmets,

bag ladies who sneer at sleeping students,

demanding that they "stop it".

Forty-somethings type up charts,

twenty-somethings crack their knuckles,

and I look out the window.

We leave a wake of exhaust to float above the pavement

as we get pulled away from sea level

to waltz with the mountain roads once more.

When I drive highway 17 myself

I always light up a cigarette at the summit,

a rare stretch of flat, straight road.

Now the clearing atop the hill

is accompanied by a no smoking sign

and a woman's voice reciting "Now passing - The Summit".

The road finally starts to wind down

and I begin my descent towards

home.

But home keeps passing by.

I see Summit Road, but I can't drive onto Mountain Charlie.

Just a mile down and I could be on Old Santa Cruz Highway.

I know Holy City is in there,

but have I passed it yet?

Are daffodils still blooming by my grove?

It would be lovely to drive on Old Santa Cruz today,

the rising sun hitting the redwood canopy,

shadows like lace on the grayed road.

Flora and fauna and fawns and ferns

and not even the radio can drown out

the rustle of woven branches connecting.

The wind whistles and pine needles wander

to the red forest floor and it's a wonder

this was called the blue range, Sierra Azul.

But it's just hydraulics and brakes

and the grunts of passengers

trying to not slide out of their seats.

By the time we reach down to the belly of the fog,

the valley lies sprawling before us

and there's a layer of smog.

Redwoods are replaced by Oaks,

except for the edges of Lexington

where Eucalyptus drip their boughs,

their bark peeling away from themselves

like stale wallpaper clinging to old walls

for so long, but gliding away so easily

in the end.

Two in the Morning

It's a long walk from Vacaville to Stockton.

I wouldn't recommend it.

Especially not when starting out at two in the morning

on some July evening, because you know if you do anything

at two in the morning you're probably not just waking up.

The hollow darkness of it,

the ambient hum of absence,

do not scream bacon and eggs and a newspaper, please.

Nights in Solano County and the San Joaquin Valley

are cooler than the days, yes.

But the air is heavy with mosquitos

and what I imagine to be

condensed sweat vapor left over

from the 100 degree fahrenheit

day that preceded this

two in the morning night.

So, needless to say, I would avoid making the 60 mile trip on foot from Vacaville to Stockton at two in the morning on some July evening.

My brother might tell you otherwise, though.

He's the one who decided to embark upon this journey along the 12.

That's another thing about the Valley -

you don't say "Highway 12" or simply "12" like you do here.

It's the 5, the 99, the 160.

Well, my brother started walking at two in the morning

along the 12 one night this past July

and I have a few ideas why.

There's a picture of my grandfather as a young boy

in front of a bar with a cowboy hat on

playing an accordion for change.

The photograph is muted black and white,

which I suppose means grey,

but when I envision my grandfather

standing on the streetside

busking at the the age of four,

that hat is red.

Everyone always says my brother

was the spitting image of this image

of my grandfather as a young boy

when my brother was a young boy.

My brother was named after my father.

My father went from Rick to Richard,

my brother from Ricky to Rick.

When my brother started having trouble with pot,

his room constantly emitting an odor

of something dried becoming damp

like a tanned cow hide

soaked in the first rain of the season,

my father raised his voice,

he moved in too close,

he allowed himself to clasp his swollen fingers

around my brother's collapsing shoulder,

but only for a moment before releasing his grasp

so each Richard could walk away to their respective corners,

my father towards a beer,

my brother towards a joint.

Eventually my father decided

to smoke some marijuana with his son.

After that, trimmings that looked like

mint tea leaves would sprinkle the kitchen counter,

the coffee table, the computer desk,

no longer confined to my brothers

damp and dried room.

When he was six he practiced his karate moves on me,

punching me so hard in the abdomen

that not even gasping could catch and release

a hidden breath.

When he was eight we left him behind at a gas station

in Yosemite where the attendant fed him ice cream

while he waited for us to remember.

When he was 12 my father and second stepmother got a divorce.

When he was 16 he told me he wanted to join the air force.

When he was 18 he moved in with his mother in Vacaville,

leaving my father alone in Stockton.

When he was 20 he tried to walk home

at two in the morning

along the 12.

9/11 Exercise

I had to be the one to tell my mother. As I watched the news, she slept in bed. Although I knew something big had happened, something that made me go into my mother's room and wake her up, it didn't hit me until she started crying, in the dark, still recovering from a dream. It hit her instantly. I didn't understand how she could react so viscerally without even seeing that image - one plume of smoke, one flaming puncture. Some people were kept out of school that day. I went around laughing and asking people if they were Pakistani. I still feel sickened by that 12 year old reaction to something too grave for her to understand. Not long after the event occurred, the memory became absurd to me. My friend's little brother would say the pledge of allegiance at 9:11 each morning, each evening. We'd eat hot dogs off paper plates with printed red, white, and blue.

Who is this Nobel Prize Winning Swedish Poet?

I am not exactly an expert on poetry (okay, I am no where near even proficient), so I wasn't surprised that I hadn't heard of this Tomas Transtromer. When I read this article I became curious about what this guy has written that made him worthy of such a prestigious prize. Here's one short poem:

National Insecurity

BY TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X

and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground

so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.

The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

Interesting... From what I can see, he seems to mix the banal with the surreal with the political. The language in his poem November in the Former DDR is quite evocative to me, but the poem itself seems scattered. But I sense the translation aspect might be partially responsible. Plus, who am I to criticize a Nobel Prize winner for literature?

Week 7 - Hass

I rather like Robert Hass's "Dragonflies Mating". The way each section, pretty much, just jumps right into it. The first section, for instance, places us in a place, but we don't know where, and in relation to people, but we don't know who, but it is written in a way that doesn't care. It assumes familiarity. I really love that first section. The "probably" in line five that adds a colloquial, personable aspect to the beautiful imagery and lulling pull. Here's an attempt at imitating:

Father brought me to our first house,

the one I can't remember, but that he assures me

was where I spent my first night.

I don't know if that accomplishes what I mean't...

Week 6 - Self-Consciousness in Donne's "The Flea"

I love this poem. It is both absurd and completely understandable. A hard feat to meet. This is a love poem in the form of an argument. It is an argument for love. The speaker is trying to persuade the object of his affection to be with him and here's why: we've both been bitten by the same flea. Absurd. And great.

The reason this poem is self-conscious is because it is playing with the typical love poem. It has the elevated diction that can be viewed as a trope of this type of poem. It has the sentiment of unrequited love. But its central image is a flea. The argument is not the typical argument you would make in favor of yourself. It is, in a sense, grotesque. This poem uses the cannon of love poetry and it succeeds because it knows what love poems typically do, and then does something very, very different.