American Pandora

 

Pandora admires her stack of new moving boxes from U-Haul.

After the debacle last time,

any problems should be small

like the railroad apartment she's leaving.

Pandora was a gifted kid, winning science projects and writing ribbons

tacked up on a bulletin board,

but like many to whom much is given,

she never expected the burn-out and the drifting.

Buck up, girl! she tells herself, and starts sorting gewgaws and hair bows.

I was set up to fail, she thinks,

loaded up with junk and mottoes

from all those uncles appearing from workbenches with scavenged parts.

She'll pack these boxes and mail them to herself out in Santa Fe

where the Land of Enchantment

waits with its southwestern way

of letting hope grow like junipers around the foothills and her heart.

____________

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is good through Saturday. Come, on, peek inside!

Lebanese Dove Lost in A Mexican Market

 

I awake on a sidewalk as a bird

and in a moment of comic idiocy

I fly into a store

                         where a woman swings a broom at me,

shouting, "Un pájaro!"

She misses me by inches

as I have missed so many things

by inches or miles

                             and if she breaks my wings

her dustpan will be my grave.

Once, I knew--or dreamed

your skin by Tiffany lamp.

In those days,

                      the mornings were quiet and damp

like a woods at first light

where we could go walking

and not worry where we'd been.

I careen into packages of pasta

which fall like pilgrims to the floor.

The woman spits, 

                              "Ay! Diablo!" and has no more

pity for me than a loaded gun.

How did I become a bird

in this ridiculous situation?

I remember the day when you left

with your bags like a brood of chicks

gathered at your feet

                                   in their nest of sticks

like burning incense.

Now, I am a mourning dove without a sky

with a new woman now, who shouts, "Diablo! Ay!"

_______________

For Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

Music: Gary BB Coleman The Sky Is Crying

Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

 Hello my hungry hearts, and welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt! If you're a reader, then you know that every once in a while, you'll come across a book that tells your story, or tells your possibilities, or simply speaks to your heart in a way that is unique and profound. 

For me, one of those books is a novel by the late Ann Wadsworth, entitled Light, Coming Back. Her debut novel (and there isn't much else by her that I could find), it was short-listed for the Ferro-Grumley Prize, The Lambda Literary Award For Lesbian Fiction, and the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. Moreover, it was a Book of the Month Club selection back when BOMC was more serious than its reanimated version is today. That's where I found it. I read it in 2007 and it has kept its special place in my heart ever since. (And yes, I do have one!)

Elizabeth Stark, author of Shy Girl, had this to say about it: "Light, Coming Back is an exquisitely honest love story that reveals the delicate and steely threads that bind us to those few we connect with deeply. Unafraid of complexity and full of vitality, this is a tale that should have been told before now; Mrs. Dalloway finds her passionate young Sally not in her long ago past but in today's flower shop. This smart and beautifully written novel will stay with you a long time; indeed, it will teach you how to live." 

The love story of Mercedes and Lennie is one I am eager to read again now. It will make you believe that, yes, light can come back. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others, and let the light in. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. 

And now, your List:

bon mots

cello

comic

distracted

drama

fooled

gallows

inches

lamps

light

miracles

missed

packages

pleasure

roosters

saga

severe

shed

soften

together

Song of a Tarnished Eidolon

 

I asked the locust leaves if they were lonely.

They replied,

We are restless.

An owl on a branch of the locust tree

wept silently.

I have looked in all directions.

At home, I found my future in a spoon's face,

and my melancholy in the strings of an oud.

I haunt myself.

Indigo is the night sky.

Indigo is the sleepless sea.

Nun-white bird,

I will meet you beneath the locust tree

wearing a veil of Point d'Esprit

and holding a torn carnation.

_____________

The Death of November

 

November has died, of a fever, in bed

under gray blankets made of wind and dusk.

I had called out to it before, full of a strange joy,

saying, 

                   see how the maples and pear trees

                   send their red-haired daughters down

                   like roses from the pale hands of virgins

to lie at the feet of autumn's wounded matador.

November has died, and must be sewn into

 a snow-shroud to be carried by somber hearse

past the last of the violets by the garden wall,

still living

                        like children up past their bedtimes,

                        wearing brocade vests, leather shoes

                       and shirts with sleeves of brilliant green

waiting for the west to swallow their parents, and their pasts.

November has died, and the shade has been drawn.

A new lodger arrives, talking too loudly, eyes as bright

as polished coins, holding a glazed sweet in one hand

raised up

                         as if it were a goblet full of honey, taking no

                         notice of the widows with their black mantillas

                         wrapping the last cornbread cake in a cloth,

for the sad mongrel who lies down on November's chilly grave.

______________-

Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

 Hello my little adding machines, and welcome to this week's Word Garden Word List poetry prompt! 

This time, our source is Amy Wallace's fascinating biography of William James Sidis, entitled The Prodigy. I read it way back in 1988 (I have kept a book log since late1987)and have never forgotten it. 

Amy Wallace

Never heard of Willam James Sidis? Well, back in 1910, his name was synonymous with the phrase "child prodigy." His IQ was estimated to be 50-100 points higher than Einstein's. His father was a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology; he and his wife believed that they could create a genius in the cradle. They hung ABC blocks above his crib and within six months little Billy was speaking. At three, he was typing and had taught himself Latin! At five, he wrote a treatise on anatomy, and at six he spoke at least seven languages fluently. 

The youngster enrolled at Harvard at age eleven, stunned the nation with a lecture on four-dimensional bodies, and articles about him ran on the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. Graduating at sixteen, he was desperate for privacy.

William had had enough, and staged a dramatic rebellion against his parents, academia, and the world's expectations. It began with jail and a scandalous trial. He then drifted from one menial job to another, concealing his genius but writing a number of books on various subjects using pseudonyms. One of these dealt with his favorite hobby--the collecting of streetcar transfers. 

Today, his name means one thing to a handful of educators--a burned out failure who died, ironically, of a cerebral hemorrhage.  But now, in an era of parents frantically trying to push their children into achievement at ever-earlier ages, William James Sidis's story is more relevant than ever. In his own way, Sidis's life was a success of living on his own terms, rather than everyone else's.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of one's own. Then simply link up, visit others, and do the math, dahling. This prompt remains active through Saturday.

And now, your List:

books

cotton

cram

dishes

enormous

famous

fat

girls

hellish

instantly

legend

love letters

midnight

numbered

problems

rained

riot

sewing

Sunday

trance 

Ode to a Chrome Cradle

 

The Ford Rotunda burning down, 1962.

It was decided

by women who had lost their sons

that there should be no more Sundays

in Detroit.

It was decided

by girls with broken dishes for bones

that all sewing should be done with dope needles

and veinous thread.

It was traditional

for the underground tunnel to Canada

to be filled with shredded tires and bent hubcaps

from fatalities.

In Detroit, the mediums

predict things that have already happened,

going into trance states instantly upon hearing

old Motown. 

It was decided

that love letters be made mandatory

for bums and debutantes whose heads rot softly

like pumpkins.

It was considered good form

for fat golfers to dole out mulligan freeways

through Black Bottom but never the fresh greensward

of Oakland county.

It was decided

in the end, that all elms be destroyed by fungi

and burned every Christmas at Ford Rotunda, disappearing

in tandem, brightly.

_________

The Detroit riots 1967

For Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

Music: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack

Process notes: I grew up in well-off Oakland county, just a bop down Woodward Avenue from Detroit. I still remember being taken to the Ford Rotunda at Christmas when I was a small child. There were live reindeer, and my brother always got a toy version of a concept car. It burned down in 1962. I was seven years old.

In 1967, the city exploded in a riot after the police raided an after-hours "blind pig" nightclub. After decades of being hassled by Detroit police, the people there had finally had enough and fought back. I stood on the corner of Woodward Avenue up in my safe white suburb and watched the smoke rise over Detroit. I'll never forget it, and things would never be the same again.