Word Garden Word List #16 (Donald Barthelme)

 

This week's word list is taken from the volume Forty Stories by post-modernist story writer Donald Barthelme. He was an odd duck, and so I naturally love him. When I was just a teenager and eager to get away from my relatives on a family trip to Denver, I went bowling and then to the book store, showing, I think, an admirable knack for prioritizing. 

In that book store, I found a paperback collection entitled Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts written by guess-who. The stories were all set in the present, with normal characters like husbands and wives, employees, and so on, but the situations they found themselves in, and/or their reactions to same were skewed, impossible, and often howlingly funny.  My eldest brother, whose taste runs to thrillers and Harry Potter, declared that I had wasted my money, further endearing Barthelme and his odd characters to me. (On a subsequent visit to Denver I bought my first Grateful Dead recording. That time, no one was there to pan my selection. Whee!)

The story I remember best from that first (for me) Barthelme collection was one about a man who felt he wasn't climbing the corporate ladder very expeditiously, and so to show his will and determination he became a Human Fly and began climbing a skyscraper using bathroom plungers to stick him to the glass sides of the building as friends and acquaintances shouted encouragement along the lines of "asshole!" Gosh knows why all that resonated for me.  As the years have gone by, I have continued to love both Barthelme and the Dead. A friend of the devil is a friend of mine, or something like that. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem--no haiku or haibun please--and then simply link, visit others, and enjoy. The prompt stays "live" through Friday.  

Spellcheck suggests I replace "haibun" with "halibut." Okay, no halibut either. 

And now, your word list:

actors

avoids

blackbirds

bodyguard

cops

fire

gaped

gowns

heroic

interview

Natasha

necessarily

peculiar

porcupines

saddened

shockingly

streamers

submarine

welter

wonderful

Poet

 

 

What I'm talking about is an ailment of spirit,

an ennui of the heart. 

It is not so much a seeking after angels

as a naming of devils.

Though these devils may sometimes be native,

most are introduced

like curare-tainted crosses slipped under our pillows

to teethe on at night.

We wobble into daylight, bright as fevers,

the lovely stricken

who learn to trick demons lazy for years or hours

or just the next blessed moment.

The well is poisoned, yes, but the hallucinations are rare,

butterflies of the injured mind.

We see loves bringing roses that are really lilies

for us discarded, already dead.

We are the gorgeous idiots, God's blind swans searching

for the blossoming branch,

mistaking the loaded barrel for Gilead's balm and leaving poems there

rolled, with ribbons, like answered prayers.

________

for Word Garden Word List #15 (Millay). 

top image: major arcana tarot "The Fool"

the amazing Toni Childs

Word Garden Word list #15 (Millay)

 

Our list this time is taken from the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I got off on the wrong foot with Edna. When I was in 8th grade and my beloved Tigers were in the World Series, our English teacher very pointedly collected radios at the door and made us hear, in rapturous tones, all about Edna St. Vincent Millay, in whom 13 year old me had zero interest. Moreover, the name made me think she probably wrote odes to tea cups or something. How wrong I was about that!

Years went by and I happened across something she had written and loved it. I finally gave her poetry a chance and she has become one of my favorite poets. Far from tea cups, she was a passionate, independent woman who wrote emotionally stunning, structurally fascinating poems. I hope that, unlike younger me, you'll look into her work!

Please use at least three of the twenty words listed in a new original poem--no haiku* please-- then link up and visit others. Link stays "live' through Friday.

*No haibun, senryu, or seppuku either. If you want to write haibun, go to Dverse. 

Your list:

ail

annotation

blossoms

bright

butterflies

cherish

dreadful

ebb

ferry

follies

forget

idiot

lily

lovely

margin

quarrel

rhododendron

stricken

swans

winter

Word Garden Word List #14 (Pablo Neruda)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greetings all. Hedgewitch (Joy Ann Jones) here, standing in for the redoubtable Shay Simmons, who is taking the week off. This week I have the privilege of featuring one of the great Spanish language poets, many say one of the greatest poets in any language, Pablo Neruda. 

Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Chile in 1904, was a renowned diplomat and prolific poet who produced a huge body of work, from the ardently political to the surreal, from lyric and beautiful love poems to odes to ordinary things like onions and soap, as well as a personal favorite, A Dog Has Died, in my opinion one of  the most memorable poems ever written about grief. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and died in September 1973, shortly after the Pinochet coup d'etat that overthrew Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende. There is some evidence his death may have been politically contrived. He remains "one of the most influential and widely read 20th century poets of the Americas." (Poetry Foundation)

 

 

 

I have sourced the words for this list from my own two collections of Neruda's work, The Essential Neruda;Selected Poems, various translators, edited by Mark Eisnar, and Residence on Earth, translator Donald D. Walsh. Both are bilingual, with poems in Spanish and English. I've tried to choose words which are clear and free of any confusion or nuance derived from translated concepts.

As Shay says,: "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.  

 

 

 So, without further ado, here is your list:

arrow

awning

beating

cortege

dog

earth

falling

geraniums

honey

iron

kiss

listen

malediction

naked

origin

petals

poppies

sour

water

white

Geraniums (A Love Poem)

 

It was that time of year

when potted geraniums on their iron hooks

had turned sad and leggy

(as you were)

when you posed for a Polaroid

in 1972

before I was born

or after my death--

always unclear.

It's like taking a beating underwater,

the way I still feel for you

or might have felt for you--

slow, 

the kind of pain that poppies soothe.

It's an origin story delivered via candle wax arrow

explaining everything

or nothing,

and told by someone's widow, lover, grandmother, daughter.

I make no sense

even to myself

a child scrambling on a broad expanse of lawn chair

or a biddy past caring at the head of my own cortege.

I loved you.

I would have loved you.

I press white lilies between album pages to preserve them

only to find that there is no album, and I have no hands.

You were lovely that day

or had not yet arrived

or had already left

but the geraniums were fresh and pink by way of recompense.

___________

for Word Garden Word List #14 (Pablo Neruda), hosted by the amazing poet Hedgewitch.

Hipster

 

Hipster is watching,

as you fumble along in life.

Every time you wear last year's ensemble.

Every time you post last year's viral meme.

Every time you use last year's catch phrase. 

Hipster is watching

as you turn bland and boneless as butter

tasteless as tap water

dreary as a rainy Monday in flyover country.

Hipster is watching

and is pained, 

but plays 

Ask Me Now 

flawlessly,

the keys reflected cool as cubes in a mai tai 

across his 

impassive

Sogreto

shades.

_______

for Sunday Muse #199.

top image: Thelonious Monk

His Ask Me Now is a notoriously difficult piece to play. 

The Boathouse In Winter

 Fishing poles lean against the wall like sailors

bewitched by sirens

or made lazy by plum wine and local taxis.

Oars, rejected by the frozen lake,

brood and search the grain of their wood

for bitter poems of chard and cranberry.

Outside, the willow is a mother whose children have gone.

In the ice, willow leaves wear the panic of stopped hearts.

In their minds

a path stretches into and between orange groves.

In their dreams

there is dancing, though with whom and to what music, they cannot say.

In their souls

the grief of the fallen, the motherless, the snow-blind.

Lake, why do you scorn sailors.

poets,

and fools in their clumsy boots on your shore?

Gone is the memory of holding the boat against your body

and the murmur of your voice

like a great heart about to fail

from the thorn

and the hook

and the plum wine sky of evening.

______________

for Word Garden Word List #13 (Gordon Lightfoot).