Indian Rope Trick

 As a child, it was always expected that I'd climb.

For the rope trick to work, the jamoora assistant must be obedient,

but I was always more likely to be a burning bride,

going up fast, but on my own peculiar vertical gradient.

In the trick, a rope is left coiled in a basket

at some distance in an open field like a baby at a fire station.

It will then begin to rise like a bhoot as the fakir tasks it,

straight up--it's only disbelief or cartoons that add the ululations.

I was the skipper's little daughter, my father in his linen suit

who read me Longfellow--The Wreck of the Hesperus--

and planted without knowing it, the ghost, the bhoot,

that sank my obedience and scotched the trick for both of us.

When the rope has risen, the child is sent out to climb,

disappearing in the clouds, not answering the fakir's call,

He follows behind with a knife and rose in his smile,

to chop her up, bring her down, and reassemble her after all. 

Do you believe in all that?

Or the tales the Upanishads tell?

Do you believe the Victorian accounts as fact?

And the zombie obedience of jamooras as well?

Of course, the trick is just bullshit.

I disappeared into Ginsberg and Grover Lewis--that's real--

reassembled myself, got high then got straight,

and put my queer shoulder to the wheel. 

________

For First Poems: Door To The Wilder Eye at Earthweal, hosted by my dear friend Hedgewitch. She wants to know what instilled in us "...the  maker's rage to order words." 

Notes: The earliest poem I can remember being thrilled by was Longfellow's poem about the Hesperus. My father read it to me and showed me the book--which I still have--so that I could find it again and read for myself, which I did many times. Later, I found the same visceral feeling of discovery when introduced to Dickinson, Ginsberg (from whose poem "America" I have taken my final line), and my man Grover Lewis, all of whom crashed into my orbit and altered my trajectory by the time I was 18. I come from a family of achievers, and my great love of poetry, music, baseball, and not much else came as a sharp disappointment to my parents. But, the die was cast, and as Emily wrote: "The Soul selects her own Society--Then--shuts the Door"

The Indian rope trick goes pretty much as I have described in the poem. It is probably a Victorian fiction from the time of Empire, but who knows? A jamoora is a child assistant, blindly obedient to the fakir or magician performing the trick. The term can be used simply to describe a mindless conformer. A bhoot or bhuta is a ghost. The Upanishads tell a fable similar to the rope trick, except this time it's a juggler whose juggled objects disappear, then come back down and reassemble. 

 

Leaving

 

We have been

leaving

for a long

time. First,

we

left the

fragrant grass of

lawns

and the 

copper smell of

pennies.

Later, we left

fine 

kisses

as if they were

old 

soda cans

first loves in 

aluminum bodies

10 cent refund in MI and IA.

Jobs, apartments,

houses, 

appliances and

various gods 

bob 

in our wake 

as we

age.

Now we can't 

get the damn toaster to work

let alone

move our bowels

or anyone's

world.

The finale

should be 

a snap.

After all,

we have been leaving

for a long

time.

____

for The Sunday Muse #234.

Blogger Is Off The Rails

 If you're on Blogger, you may want to go to "comments" on your dashboard and check for spam comments. (Hit the little arrow at the top for a drop-down menu and hit "spam") I've discovered that, lately, Blogger keeps shifting perfectly good comments from old posts into spam and I have to re-publish them. Like, half a dozen every day. This morning, there were 6 comments in spam, all from September of 2013! All of them were perfectly good comments from people I know. None of them were in spam yesterday. All of them had been on various posts for 9 years, and suddenly Blogger decides they're spam. So you may want to check.

Word Garden Word List--Susie Clevenger

 

Hello! Hooray! (As Alice Cooper once sang.) As you who have been following the Word List know, I have been delving into my early influences of late. But now it's time to switch things up! 

This week, our list is taken from two books by my friend Susie Clevenger: "Dirt Road Dreams" and "Insomnia's Ink." Susie is an amazing poet I have been being impressed by since way back in Real Toads days, and she only keeps on getting better. 

You can find her at Confessions Of A Laundry Goddess and at Black Ink Howl, two blogs chock full of poetry to get lost in. Her writing is always heartfelt, incisive, and original. I urge you to go see! 

Meanwhile, without further ado, here is your list! Just choose at least 3 of the 20 words I have selected from Susie's books and use them in an original poem of your own. Then link up, visit others, and bask in a quiet air of sublime accomplishment. :-)

alphabet

anthem

boxes

coffee

coin

crows

ghosts

hairspray

ink

masquerade

midwife

mockingbird

nurses

pharmacy

poised

shuffling

silk

skeletons

sorrow

tobacco

the nurses deferred

 

the nurses deferred

to masquerade doctors in balloon pants

who told them 

go to the underwater pharmacy

--a nickel a snorkel--

and dispense tobacco to the terminals

because

rules are restrictive

useless

barbaric

and they gave these instructions via telegram stop

from the big band ballroom stop

where the rhumba and the mambo

never stop

stop

and they used the bandmaster's baton

to perform minor surgery

on this poem.

In that town, at that time, the women never cut their hair

because of sorrow,

and the river's edge, and the need to weep

while covering their faces with their hair like bent willows.

In the heavy hour, in the day of the pueblo mission,

a mockingbird perched in the bell tower was singing,

"Come to the river's edge, to the place of no explanation.

Let down your hair as the boatmen do their sails in the silent evening."

the security guards delayed,

unfurling silk kimonos to wear in the confusion of night

and they had dragons

and chrysanthemums

draped over their arms and holsters

and their coffee was rich with a stupendous dizzying energy

which spoke to them

saying,

"you must leave this place and go

to help

and heal

where the real

suffering

is."

_____

for Word Garden Word List--Susie Clevenger. 

image at top: Socorro Mission, El Paso, Texas

I have used a technique I got from reading Grover Lewis, of alternating style and feeling between stanzas. 

music:  Jennifer Warnes "Song of Bernadette" 

Word Garden Word List--Christina Rossetti

 

Hi, and welcome to another Word Garden Word List, where we use at least three words from a themed list of twenty in an original poem of our own. This week, our inspiration comes from Victorian poet Christian Rossetti.

Lately I have been exploring and revisiting my earliest influences and this is no exception. While still in high school, I came across this poem of Rossetti's and became a lifelong admirer:

She often wrote of nature (though she was primarily a city dweller), the longing for love, mortality, and spirituality. She also wrote at least two Christmas carols and also children's verse. She was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and her father was also a poet. She came to fame with her collection "The Goblin Market & Other Poems" in 1862. Usually writing in a rhyming, rather uncomplicated style, Rosetti's poetry is some of the most moving I've had the pleasure to read. Here is one of my favorites, entitled "The Queen of Hearts":

Our aim here is to use the word list as a springboard to our own creativity, not to copy the style of the featured poet--though homages are always fine. So, without further ado, your list:

aloft

arc

chime

forget

goblin

grieved

grove

hare

hyacinth

iron

lily

lofty

maw

peacocks

riven

roost

shuffle

sleepy

spirit

thorny

The Goblin Girl (A Child's Fairy Story)

 

image by Gustaf Teggren

The Goblin Girl is cursed and wanders

over stubbled fields and passes under

the riven bridge that ice has split

and counts herself the cause of it.

Should the Goblin Girl admire the arc

of a lofty bird it misses its mark--

falters and falls like an iron omen

to fall at her feet in evening gloaming.

On thorny brambles she lays her head

with moon for pillow and stone for bed

to dream of peacocks and peahens crying

for the bride whose lily is cut and dying.

Who laid the wicked curse upon her?

Perhaps some coward behind a mask?

Or was it the smug and well-dressed hunter

who cradles his gun and ready flask?

Who burned her image and let the milk curdle

as done to them by an earlier other?

Why, the very one who rocked the cradle--

the Goblin Girl's Janus-faced mother.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Christina Rossetti. The poem is, in style, an homage.

For more about the two-faced god Janus, look HERE. 

Music: Sarah McLachlan "In The Arms Of An Angel"

Seventeen

 The summer I was seventeen,

I read The Bell Jar

Howl

A Coney Island of the Mind

and Lost Weekend.

The neighbor's garden had

decorative bells

hung above the river stones.

Every tongued bell

is keen to find language

for (w)ringing out its pain.

_____

for dverse quadrille for whom the bell tolls

music: judy collins the bells of rhymney

Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten

Hello friends, and welcome to another Word Garden Word List poetry prompt. Last week I featured an old favorite, Dave Kelly, but was dismayed at how difficult it was for people to find his work on line if they wished to. I've been mulling that. This week, our featured poet is "The Poet Laureate of Carmel" Ric Masten. When I returned stateside from overseas in 1977, I passed through Carmel and picked up a copy of "Who Wavin'? (a thin body of work)" which is indeed a thin body of work because the book is much taller than it is wide! However, the words inside are anything but thin.

The late Ric Masten, who passed in 2008, was not only a unique and prolific--23 books--poet, but was also a singer/songwriter, an artist, and a few other things as well. About his art, he had this to say: "I learned from Leger that I wasn't a cubist, He spoke to me in French and I answered in English. I didn't understand what he said, and I doubt he understood what I said. We got along fine." This is a typical remark. Of his habit of writing in all lower case without punctuation, Masten said it was "because I never knew how." 

I said earlier that I'd been mulling last week's prompt. Up until now, I have avoided including our featured poets' actual poems because the aim here is to use the words on the list to write something of our own, not to imitate the featured poet. However, like Dave Kelly, Ric Masten may be difficult to find, so I am including a link to three excellent poems of his HERE and am also going to include one in this post. Here it is:

the comedian

for william

he was a funny 

funny man

but

taking me

to the airport

he paused

in his routine

and the silence

was like a hole

in the ground

deep and dark

like his eyes

see those

gray wyoming hills

lying off

to the west there

well

my lilly

went off

into them

five years ago

and killed

herself

i tell you this

so you'll know

i understood

when you spoke

of your

loneliness

and then

he was joking

and

i

was

laughing

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words on the list below in a new poem of your own. Then link up, link back, and twist the night away. 

It has been a pleasure to share with you two poets who have been lifelong favorites of mine who I first discovered back in the '70's. In that vein, I offer Neil Young singing "Journey Through The Past." And now, your list:

breakdown

cafe

Chicago

costumes

dwarf

ferry

filigree

jars

kidding

nut

quietly

riddle

scaffolding

semaphore

shatterproof

stingers

trinity

trinkets

unimportant

veranda (Masten misspells it "varanda")

October

 

These early evenings, the sun sinks slowly,

like a 'do-ragged painter down spider-leg scaffolding.

We are all weary these days

as the world rolls beneath us and we logwalk,

our eventual fall following beside us like an unpredictable dog.

Then quietly, as crickets guard the evening filigree,

your ghost comes to me

where I smoke in the Adirondack

under the weak-sister yellow moon of the outside light,

to portend a storm that's already passed and gone.

In a canning jar, under the basement stairs, 

I have kept your hoodoo,

that sacrifice chant-dance made of woodsmoke and razor grass

that you wove to your bones

to make me love you as if you were food, as if you were solid earth.

Whether in Butte or Chicago, Pushmataha County

or Devil's Hand, it makes no difference.

Even the ocean is not shatterproof, so my bags drowse in the attic,

with old costumes and dressmaker's dummies

that you went to while I slept off the soft poison of your words.

I know why you're here.

I know why yellowjacks have stingers

and I can't write these poems forever just to stave you off.

You'll use the knife I gave you as a pick

and play some stupid banjo breakdown at my funeral

as if it were spring, as if you were sane, as if I didn't matter.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten.

I don't smoke. The poem lies!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot "Dreamland"

Lesson In Entomology

 

Red ladybugs, often made of wood or plastic, are the cheery ones. The dull brown ladybugs are the ones that bite. Born yesterday, uncelebrated and infused with the bright mindlessness of relentless summer, their hate is genuine; they wait on a pretty stalk for your bare arm. Your pain is their nectar. 

October is the time of show-off leaves. Red ladybugs burn their own houses down. Ask one. She is her own child in the blaze, and to her, death is quite romantic. She loves you, without the slightest notion what that really means. They are as vacuous as lawn ornaments. 

When waiting winter compels a choice, your heart will say, choose the brown ladybug, she knows your soul, even as she destroys it. Your sense says, choose the red, she'll make you happy. But no. You have decided and offer your arm.

______

Today at Dverse Prosery, Bjorn wants us to use a line from Bob Dylan's classic song "Desolation Row', a piece I have long admired, both for its lyrics and also for whoever that was playing the guitar counterpoint to each line. Bjorn instructs that we must use the line "To her, death is quite romantic" from this song. I will comply, (143 words)

Word Garden Word List--Dave Kelly

 

A long time ago--longer than I like to think it was--I bought a copy of "Poems In Season" by a poet named Dave Kelly. It was Volume Five of the Texas Portfolio Chapbook Series. Inside, I found a collection of blunt, truthful, unsparing, and unforgettable poems about every day life. I have moved many times since then, gone through myriad changes, but this book--along with others by undeservedly obscure poets like Michael Curley, Ric Masten, and others, as well as famous volumes like 'Howl"--have made the journey with me all the way to this very moment. They are part of who I am and who I've been, and it is from these poets that I learned to write fearlessly.

Dave Kelly is a difficult man to find, but in researching this list, I did finally manage to find out some biographical information which can be found HERE and HERE. I have taken the opportunity to order a couple of his other books, as well. This is the kind of thing that blows my skirt up, if I wore skirts anymore. To say that I am eager to read these new (to me) books is an understatement. 

And now, time for your weekly word list. What we do here is to take at least 3 of the 20 words provided--all taken from the poems in "Poems In Season"--and create a new poem of your own. Our aim is to use the list to spur new writing of our own, not ape the source poet, though a nod of homage is always a fine thing. So, compose, link up, visit others, and I hope that you will look into Dave Kelly's work as well. Enjoy!

Your list:

afraid

baseballs

betrayals

bus

camera

cat

coffee

foreigner

grooves

houses

insane

kill

newspaper

rain

rosary

shifting

skull

stinging

voices

workmen

Handsome

 Nobody thought he was handsome except for me,

the sharp-elbowed stick girl with the camera around her neck.

Always, he would show up on the street early,

a midnight cat sliding in on private grooves, to sit and wait

on the curb for the other workmen and the Jonah bus 

that swallowed them away.

If I could've, I'd have built him a church,

with Host of egg sandwich and coffee black or white.

I'd swear I saw him take out a rosary one diesel-rattle dawn

and it was strung with candy skulls and baseballs.

I imagined his prayers were colorful foreigners wandering 

in warehouse downriver drab Detroit, hated by strangers, loved by God.

After an absence, getting off gin and bad poetry,

I returned to find him gone, the bus stop shifted, the lone tree down.

The starlings had lost their home, me my jones,

and my camera stayed empty for a year after that, like an unfed stray.

I asked a girlfriend once, "Remember that guy, the different one

we used to see waiting?" Ugh, she said, that one. 

Like I said, only I thought he was handsome, like rain, 

like new work boots pawned.

_______

 for Word Garden Word List--Dave Kelly.

Shift

 

Mid-August, the weather patterns change,

but slowly,

like something forgotten in the fridge;

the holy

turning secular, then profane.

We had our own world, you and I,

a beautiful in-joke

but, behind your back as I looked at you,

a green-screen took

over and spoiled it with the whisper of a lie.

All summer, verdant leaves and cool shade

were hiding

the dying brown when the sugar stops flowing.

I'm finding

endings gorgeous, and terrible, like the love we almost made. 

_______

for Sunday Muse #230.

Music: Jennifer Warnes "Pretending To Care" (written by Todd Rundgren)