Dear Readers, it's the 10 year anniversary of Word Garden.
I have been writing and posting on this blog since 2008, and for two years before that elsewhere. Even prior to that, in my younger incarnation as a writer, my work appeared in a few dozen journals.I thought it might be time to make up this list of the sixteen of my own poems that I am most proud of and pleased with. I'll list them in ascending order, with some thoughts about each one and a link to the full poem. (Clicking will open the poem in a new window.) I hope you enjoy them.
16. Beeville (2/21/09) Always, I have liked to write prose poems that tell stories. In this poem, I have combined my love of small Midwestern towns, girls' and women's sports, and storytelling.
15. Lady Franklin Bay (2/7/11) I have written several poems about Arctic explorers and on far northern themes. Most of them are longer story poems, but this one is short, and uses the Greely expedition into the Canadian Arctic in 1881-1884 as a metaphor.
14. An American Girl In The IRA (1/25/16) I made a trip abroad in 2009 and had a horrible experience which left me with a jaundiced eye for all things English. I combined that with my penchant for creating outsider characters, and the result was this.
13. Decompensation (12/3/10) Sometimes I know right away that something I've written is good, and then other times--like with this poem--I don't. Over time, though, I liked this one more and more. Decompensation is a medical term denoting the breakdown of a system that had been working but which breaks down due to stress. Thus, my homeless lady trying to hang on to something good in spite of everything.
12. Vantului (11/24/11) Pestera Vantului is a wind cave in Romania. Those of you who read my stuff know that have an unexplained fondness for things eastern European. This poem uses the wind caves to talk about a feeling of approaching mortality.
11. The Witch In Springtime (5/4/10) I was going through a dry spell with my writing and had experienced some relationship disappointments, so I wrote this poem about a Witch who's lost her powers.She is feisty, though, and the fact that the poem title denotes "springtime" probably says that her struggles with ice and winter detritus is temporary.
10. No Matter (4/12/16) I posted this under the title "Singer & Song", which I later changed to "No Matter" when I included it in my book Catechism For A Girl On Fire. It's just a love poem that says, no matter what, I will be there.
9. The Hill is Closer To Heaven (2007?) Although I posted this poem to my blog in May of 2008, it is older than that. I wrote it in 2006 or 2007. It's a very simple love poem, but it remains a special favorite of mine. The person I wrote it for seemed naturally good to me, "closer to Heaven." I still think she is.
8. While Pouring Coffee (5/3/15) I would be remiss if I didn't include a flash 55 poem. It's more than that, though. When I was younger, I went out into the world. Now that I am older, I find that it more often comes to me. Oddly, I don't think that's what I was after when I wrote it, and it has been edited a bit from its original version--improved, I think.
7. Fire (7/15/10) This was a reminiscence, about something that happened when I was young. We didn't actually crash into a tree; we miraculously stopped about an inch short of it. We did have to call a tow truck.
6. Rose (12/12/15) I think that this is the best rhyming poem that I have ever written. I was thinking about the death of a very young child.
5. Heaven (6/30/14) I find that the love poems (of my own) that I like the best over time are the easy breezy ones more than the overwrought ones. Though we like to say we're going to feel a certain way, or do a certain thing in the future, really who knows? All we can do is love today and head in a direction that feels right.
4. The Cherub Of Pierzanie Prison (6/21/14) "Pierzanie" is a Romanian word for "perdition." I stole the idea of the cherub from a remaindered novel called "The Building" by Thomas Glynn. He opens the novel by describing a cherub statue in a trash-strewn apartment building courtyard with an upside-down shopping cart draped over its head. I took that and ran with it. While the novel is blackly humorous, my poem is about needing love despite all the shit that rains down sometimes, and despite our own flaws.
3. Love Poem For K. (2/13/12) I'm very proud of this poem. Writing something complex, simply, is a hard thing to do, and this one time I think I got it absolutely right. Sometimes a thing or a person doesn't seem to fit in our lives and yet they keep on appearing as if to say that they do, after all.
2. God & Eros (6/2/11) I have tried many times to write about my childhood, but this poem is far and away the best of them, except for the one that follows. "Playing church, I lied" is one of my favorite lines I have ever put down. When one is denied one place, one looks elsewhere, and I did.
1. The Far Garden (12/27/10) One of the things I recall most vividly about my childhood is the little patch of garden way in the back of the yard which had strawberry and mint planted there. I was always out of doors, wandering, and was always very curious about myself and about the world, as I still am today. However, answers weren't forthcoming when I asked questions, back then. Somehow, though, I kept that wandering, curious spirit alive. It is there in every poem I write.
Catblossom and her associate editor Crackblossom don't think anything I have ever written is anything but "tiresome claptrap and derivative drivel." I hope you disagree with them! ;-)
From a sugar bowl womb, came the World's Sweetest Girl-- Me.
I'm like a vision at lake side, talking rot to the swans-- and oh how I do go on and on.
I am formed of the frilly, the feminine, the fine-- thanks to old Daddy down the anthracite mine.
One step, two step, three step, five; I'm made out of honey from an old bee hive. Work bee, fly bee, sleep bee, then sink that stinger if he tries it again.
Church on Sunday, Monday do the wash. See if it sticks or scrubs right off. Do you think I'm pretty? Everybody does--
ask around, ask Alice, ask sweetly, ask the swans. ___________
For you, love, I have made my whole body a morning. Birds rise from me, a murder of crows gone soft as black lace and as light as the tender intentions of my fingertips.
For you, love, I know the wait has been long. I know that you are a tangled garden with a dark rose at its heart, so I have spun a cocoon and sleep next to you, blessing the stem, your body, which called me. For you, love, I have clothed each clock with filament and incense. Never mind them honey, nor the things that seem to keep us apart-- you think you are waiting, but you are already arrived In the shelter of my new wet display-- the one I bore and wear always and only for you, love. ___________ for magpie tales #89
How blah, the blah of the Immortals, When blahs spread ever blah-like O'er sylvan blah and hellish blah alike!
Blahs, doth blah emblah us To take up Blahian blahments, Even as Blah himself did In that oft-blahed time,
E'er blah set the human heart Against its very blahhood? Blah again, Blahnanians! Blahlujiah! Excelsior!
Note: Believed lost for more than three decades, a nearly illegible copy of "When Limpid Light Upon Mine Eyes Shines Weary" wasdiscovered at the bottom of Lady Philpott-Tewksbury's handbag whenshe expired from split ends in 1933. Her nephew, Aldous Tewksbury Smythe, painstakingly restored P.H. Bookfield's legendary poem. Unfortunately, he died fifteen minutes after completing the restoration in 1976. The beautifully restored manuscript now hangs in the British Museum of Interesting Debris, where it can be viewed and admired by all.
When I met you, you already had almost everything.
You spoke, and from a halved lime, a golden-eyed tiger stepped. From the tiger's mouth, came vermillion birds, and in the birds' beaks, silver rings to please you.
If I had told you I loved you then, I could not have borne the weather of your face-- a clear sky of indifference, or your smile, constant as any equator.
I knew, that to win you, I would have to get beneath your heart-- I would have to fold my yellow wings, with their India ink edges; become vermiform and as light as a ghost's fingers on a cotton ball.
There I slept.
After six Novembers and a single Spring, I opened my eyes-- a solitary traveler when I arrived, I had become four. You felt the North, South, East and West of me within yourself, nesting your heart, as if you were a Russian hat, and I, Medusa's vanity: her hair.
Now, we are together forever, like bone and limb or the closed and golden gates of your almond eyes.
I am more than content to be your courtesan, your slave, your palm leaf, arched over you like Desire's own angel-- but if you dismiss me, all the matryoshkas of our union will break.
You will see me, at last, as I really am, a constellation of spilled confectioner's sugar anointing these shattered nesting dolls with their linseed smiles, drug store red lipstick on every jagged edge. _______
Matryoshka dolls, also known as Russian nesting dolls, or babushka dolls, consist of a series of similarly painted dolls, each one revealing a smaller doll inside it, down to the last and smallest doll, which is typically a baby.
The sky is always in motion As are the swaying heads of wheat or lavender, Whose very roots are carried with the turning earth Moving, like the blood within our veins, And our passions born there.
My darling, you are always near me; Even when we seem to exist apart, please believe That soon enough, you will hear me Coming back again, through wheat and lavender, To hold your name as close as skin to breeze. _____
