Word Garden Word List #13 (Gordon Lightfoot)

 

Hello everyone, it's me with your weekly word list poetry prompt. This time I'm happy to feature a lifelong favorite of mine, Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. 

I first heard him when a friend played "Sit Down Young Stranger" for me. Later favorites were "Sundown", "If You Could Read My Mind" and of course "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Being from Michigan and well familiar with the Great Lakes (and fascinated by shipwrecks and maritime mysteries) that song had a special immediacy for me. Moreover, I've been to the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral" mentioned in the song, though it is actually called the Old Sailors' Church and is not even close to being a cathedral. My father took me there.

I've seen Gordon Lightfoot perform in person just once, at the Fox Theater. Introducing "If You Could Read My Mind", he quipped, "You like it when I'm ethereal." 

Gordon is still performing today and his recent music is excellent too, though his voice has lost some of its power. He writes his music out on a score first and then adds the lyrics last. To my mind, he is one of the greats--he is certainly a favorite of mine.

What we do here is simple: use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in an original poem. Then just link up and visit others. This prompt stays "live" through Friday. 

And now, your list:

apples

axe

bitter

boathouse

colder

daydreams

dewy-eyed

lamp

lingered

mend

mistake

muskeg

outside

rainy

recall

records

saloon

Saturday

twilight

weavers

For Su Griffin

 There was a woman in love with fog

and the harbor knew her name.

Su of the basket heart,

Su of the darning needle nights.

Su out of breath, or holding it, just the same.

When you're a woman at odds with time,

every second slows the heartbeat.

Woman of the breakwater bones.

Woman in the crowd, alone.

Woman who folds her heart, folds the dough, folds the sheet.

There was a woman in love with fog

and the harbor knew her name.

_______

for The Sunday Muse #198. 

Part of the following song says (In Spanish):

Because after this life 

There is no other opportunity

How much love arrives like this, it arrives like this

Self-Portrait

 

Here I am, grime-faced at the bottom of a mine shaft. 

Here I am behind this ever-changing Halloween mask.

Here I am gorgeous, touched by God and given favor.

Here I am, so eat my dust, see you bitches later.

Here I am untouchable, unthinkable, unclean.

Ask dear mother, she'll explain exactly what that means.

Here I am quiet, just a watcher in the wings

made of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Here I am inside a book, inside an old cocoon.

Here I am reflecting light as if I were the moon.

Here I am in love with you, a fool to end all fools.

Here I am, a joker queen who can't tell shit from jewels.

Here I am to dazzle you with swooping magic madness.

Here I am one hour more, paralyzed with sadness.

Here I am, an urchin girl without a pot to piss in

to fetch your smoking pipe and tell you where you can put this in.

Here I am for Jesus, here I am for Puck.

To those who'd like to pin me down, I wish you all good luck.

_________

for Sunday Muse #198.

Line 8 taken from "The Walrus & the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll.

 

The Ash Tree In Winter

 

In winter, the ash is a liar like me

no different in the copse from its fellows

a beauty in death for its filigree.

Its costume of stillness and symmetry

in the fullness of summer turned yellow.

In winter the ash is a liar like me.

It looks to the wind to lend piquancy

by enlivening motionless sorrow

a beauty in death for its filigree.

The green of the ash has invisibly

diminished as the borer could tell you.

In winter, the ash is a liar like me.

Quick heart gone dry inside of the ash tree

A dancer swaying beneath the gallows

a beauty in death for its filigree.

A carve that kills leaves it fine and fancy

from just the proper angle, heaven knows.

In winter the ash is a liar like me,

a beauty in death for its filigree.

______

for Dverse Poetics: Pounding the Pantemeter, hosted by Ingrid. 

Word Garden Word List #12 (Richard Brautigan)

 

Hello everyone, it's me with your weekly word list poetry prompt. This time our source is Richard Brautigan, best known for his novel Trout Fishing In America (1967). 

However, this week's list is taken equally from two of his volumes of poetry; The Pill Vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968) and Rommel Drives Deep Into Egypt (1970). I have selected 10 words from each, with emphasis on words the author uses more than once. 

Richard Brautigan was the son of a waitress and he says he only met his father once. His childhood was hard, with periods of abandonment, hunger, and poverty. In 1955, he threw a rock through the window of a police station, hoping to be arrested and fed. All of this belies his whimsical, magical style of writing. His poems, in particular, are often very short, and have a conversational tone, albeit a conversation with a trippy bent. 

The Athens Messenger said about Brautigan "There's not a more exciting, more challenging writer working in America today."

Time magazine said, "His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty." 

Brautigan enjoyed only a very brief window of success and fame, from the late 60's into the early 70's. He is described by a friend as "a very odd guy." He was an alcoholic and suffered from depression, finally ending his own life at age 49 in 1984. 

Even so, his poetry is very often light and breezy, although he does delve in to societal and relationship issues in a sort of snapshot way. I don't include the work of any source poet in these posts because our goal here is to use their words as a springboard to our own poetry, not to copy theirs. What we do here is simple: write a new poem using at least 3 of the 20 words on the list provided below, then link up, and visit others. One additional thing: in honor of Brautigan's brief poetic style, if you'd like to write two or three very short poems (all in the same post, and please, no haiku) that's cool. It's up to you! Prompt stays "live' through Friday. 

And now, your list:

Baudelaire

candles

ceaselessly

circus

costume

dinosaurs

fish

Frankenstein

grace

groceries

hornets

lanterns

lions

million

poem

postage

pumpkins

spinning

trance

wind

How To Do The End Of The World Cha Cha

 

Convinced of the End Times, Neighbor Jim

MacGyvers up a companion from old soup cans,

paint brushes, stereo wire and car parts,

A sort of Bride of Frankenstein to ease Armageddon 

with chicken pot pies and a surprisingly

avid libido.

One day she comes across the common alley

for a woman-to-woman, making certain things clear about

Neighbor Jim, my skank ass, and Fist City.

Watching her walk away, dragging her dinosaur tail on the lawn,

I envy her those spinal plates, round-so-round

vulcanized boobs, and blowy porn-model Medusa hair.

I'm saying she's dishy, in a home appliance kind of way.

There is a tender grace to the way she lights the candles with her tongue

as she and Neighbor Jim while away the evenings

Watching This Old House on the generator-powered tv,

waiting on the six trumpets of Revelation as if they were the Tijuana Brass 

doing a hotel gig on the last day of a bang-up Cancun vaykay.

________

for Word Garden Word List #12 (Richard Brautigan)

Oriole

 

Lizzie Borden was alive in you,

in a dreary wooden way,

holding her breath for the next thing,

turning blue then gray.

You considered the wooden cradle

and me, of imperfect flesh

deciding you'd hate me not so much

were I made of ash.

Lay the axe at fireside,

move the cradle closer, too.

Your suicidal substitute

me in place of you.

The handle of the axe is made

from that which it destroys

in little bits and other shit

like broken burned-up toys.

But I, so like you in some ways

had asbestos in my soul

and rose away in sparks and smoke

like an orange oriole.

_______

for Sunday Muse #197.