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)