October 10, 2009

Poetry – The Night We Danced Sequence

I. The Night We Danced at the Promenade

In the blue-walled ballroom of the Hotel Don Leon
the boot-black sky served in slices at the open doors
and citrus blossoms hanging thick as seed pearls
on the specimen trees espaliered on the courtyard walls
like men before a firing squad,
we were not yet lovers.

Forehead to cheek, we kept the distance demanded of our charges.
Fevered teenage eyes watching us, suspicious of our dancing grace,
their own gyrations rumbling the parquet loose from its glue,
shaking the chandelier in the ballroom below, raining
small bits of plaster onto wedding plates.

This is the only acceptable public embrace
we’ve jotted into our conduct codes
as our longing unfurls among the crepe-paper roses
and silver-sprayed ivy.

The dance ends and our bodies part, hands lingering.
Out on the balcony the pierced-tin sky tilts and spins like a shuttlecock.
The dry air browns the orchids in my corsage
as the petals drape their arms around the curled ribbon.

Notes: This is the first in a series of poems done as a cycle. I’ll put them up over the next few days. The cycle has six poems in it – each playing with a poetric tradition of praise and longing, whether in form or in device used. The arc of the cycle is from the inception of an affair through to the distant future. The device in use is sound – lots of “o” and “a” and other sounds that make for a sigh. Prom is something most everyone remembers – fondly or not – but it’s not just the teenagers who get taken with Prom. Most teachers are required to chaperone at least one dance per year and in my time as a teacher I learned that the faculty is every bit as much under the sway of hormones as the students are. High school is a stew of longing. I’ve been working on this cycle for years and haven’t really ever done much with it. Why tonight? Because it’s been a horrible day – probably the worst in a series of bad days, and what the hell – why not.

September 24, 2009

Mind the Swale

September 21, 2009

Poetry Monday – Abujerar

September 3, 2009

Re-Blondification

September 1, 2009

Poetry Monday – August in Wildwood Canyon

August 26, 2009

Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee . . .

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start posting naked pictures of myself on here. That. Would. Be. Bad. This will be an entry about exercise. It’s a leap, I know.

I’m trying to love and accept myself as I am, really. I’m struggling with the idea of that, though, because I don’t much like my body right now. I think liking your body too much when every chart on earth says you are a fatso is not such a healthy self-esteem thing. Personally, I think it’s better to acknowledge that the old bod is not so great anymore than it is to be in denial. Denial is not your friend. I’m on the outs with denial, remember. Denial and I are no longer chatting on the phone every morning and deciding to wear matching outfits.

I was flipping through my stack of diet books (a post for another day) and came across this really interesting quote in a Jorge Cruise book.

Exercise is a form of body praise.

Hmmm. I like that much better than my old form of body praise, which went something like this:

I don’t care if you have rolls and you require lycra and a good bra to get into clothing – damn it, I still love you.

I don’t hate my body, exactly, I’m just in a little tiff with it. I’d like to get back to praising my body, but I need to find another method besides my Frenemy, Denial.

You know what you get when you search for Praise for your Body? You get Donne – To His Mistress Going To Bed – a poem in which Donne is smoothly talking the pants right off some chick who’d rather be having sex in the dark with her linen nightie pulled up a chaste amount. That’s some pretty nice praise in that poem, but it’s sort of meant to result in him getting lucky. I’m sure it worked – what girl doesn’t want to be the subject of a poem? In case you missed this one in English Lit, you can read it here:

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/elegy20.htm

So, I also came across the Gâyatrî Mantra in my search. In case you missed your Islamic Mysticism class one day, here it is:

We meditate on the glory of the Creator;
Who has created the Universe;
Who is worthy of Worship;
Who is the embodiment of Knowledge and Light;
Who is the remover of all Sin and Ignorance;
May He enlighten our Intellect.

But that one is about the brain, not the body. So we have the extremes here: Wooo Hooo Go Naked and then Remove Sin and Enlighten Intellect. Sigh. I do love the search engine Google, but sometimes you get the gamut.

So, I think I need a new mantra to praise my body and I just realized how simple it is, really.

To My Legs Before Going To The Gym

Get thee up, thou full-fleshed and lazy limbs;
Work out hard – for that’s what the Creator intends.
Treadmill, stair-stepper or just a long walk,
Off your lazy ass; waste less time on talk.

August 24, 2009

Poetry Monday – Autumn Migration

Autumn Migration

Throw up your dinner at the break.
Beside all the gawking starlings
in the bathroom, you’re a macaw,
fuchsia stripes and ruby slashes,
but under the stadium lights
you look healthy. Rub Vaseline
on your teeth so your painted lips
slip into smiles. On the field
the minutes march away until
the band cranks up Louie Louie
as the players depart to pray.
and you count into position
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . .
When you feel the base’s hands grip
your hips, you stop hearing music,
the crowd rumbles away. You bend,
his fingers pinch your waist until
he raises you up in the air
like a falconer. Your feet rest
in his hands for a four count, then
you stick it, right foot in your palm
and left foot gripped hard in his hands.
You squeeze your cheeks until your thigh
becomes a rod of hardened steel
pinch a penny, pinch a penny, pinch a penny
Even from this distance you look
in the eyes of parents, stoners
and old graduates in the bleachers
and see them bound to the earth,
their bulk absolute and leaden.
Out of the corner of your eye
you see the other flyer tossed
like a released homing pigeon.
She comes out of her tuck, touches
her pointed toes, then swan dives down.
Later, she will tell you about
seeing, over the crowd and past
the bleachers, the long line of cars
on University. Eight counts
left, but his hands begin to shake.
One count early you feel him bend
his knees, propelling you airborne.
You twist into a perfect V
and ride down into the cradle.
Pop out of his arms, wave in time
with the waning beats of the song.
Only some have bones light enough to fly.

Notes on Autumn Migration
One of my favorite aspects of being a modern poet is the ability to play with that almighty ruler of poetry – Form. Just as poets in the 18th and 19th century took to and used hymn meter because that was the rhythm they heard in their daily life, modern poets can take whatever beat they want. We’re not as constrained by the notion that there is one right way to apply form.

This poem is about cheerleading, of course, but not any cheerleading – the basis is the gravity-defying aspects of doing stunts. Throwing another body into the air – or being the body thrown in the air – requires a certain mental toughness and a deep belief in your partner. It’s hubris in a short skirt. The manner in which I tweaked form for this poem is in the line count – each line is 8 beats – which is the count in cheerleading. Every motion is dictated by that magic 8 – so I wanted this poem to fall within that hard and fast rule. When you can get the form and the subject matter to marry so closely – well, that’s pretty satisfying. The last line is not 8 counts because the stunt has ended.

Oh, and a little inside tidbit. The cheeks in the poem are butt cheeks. Every flyer is taught the mantra that they repeat in their head – and sometimes outloud – Pinch a penny. They have to squeeze their butt cheeks as if there’s a penny in there and their life depends on keeping it in place. In order to defy gravity the flyer has to keep their body within a single plane – if they move any body part out of that plane then the base can’t hold them and they fall. Watch ESPN cheer competitions some time and you can catch a few of the flyers mumbling up there in the air.
Pinchapenny pinchapenny pinchapenny.

August 17, 2009

Poetry Monday

Pacing at 2 am with Telia

The neighbor’s house is nothing but black geometry
as I walk the floors with my infant daughter —
lost in half sleep, in the desire to dream.
She reaches, grasping at my hair,
and anchors herself as a moonflower vine
grows small spikes to find purchase on a wall.

Of all the strange fancies
my grandmother keeps in boxes
what she wants the most is her mother’s hair,
arm-length, chestnut and tightly braided.
A marvel to hold when I was a child.
The trophy none of my friends could top.
I find it on a high shelf in her bedroom,
muslin wrapped, looped with silk lily-of-the-valley,
plastic case clouded, label smeared.
Seventy-five years it has lived with her.
Fierce desire for this one thing
has been triggered by a recurring dream –
she’s sixteen and come home from school
to find her mother on the edge of death
her knee length hair gone by order of the doctor.
That long braid, turned gray by age, sickness,
was buried with her body,
but the switch, culled from a hairbrush
and used to make elaborate coiffures before the sickness,
haunts my grandmother,
makes her reach out to hold
the brittle strands in her trembling fingers.

I’m posting this as my first poem because it’s about my grandma. I stopped blogging last year so abruptly because my grandmother fell and hurt herself. She was 94 and the fall she took ended her life after three painful and hard weeks. I just sort of, well, entered a mourning period. So, I thought it fitting to “publish” this one about her as my first foray into getting my writing out in the world.
Because I’m a teacher I have to give some explanatory notes for each poem. Were I giving a reading I would do the same thing for the audience to introduce the poem. Here’s the deal with poetry – it’s mostly meant to be an interaction between the audience and the poet. It’s okay to say what a poem is ABOUT. To me, poems where you have to delve deeply to figure out WTF is going on are just an excuse to not pay for therapy for the poet. Some of what I write is autobiographical and some is fiction – the switch in the poem is real and a pretty cool object when you think about how long ago my great-grandmother died.
The style of this one is a pretty modern construct my favorite professor, David Bottoms, is the master of. The first stanza is an in-the-moment riff, then there is a break, and then the second stanza reveals the meaning and the theme. The two sometimes look like there’s a big leap in logic or a breaking of the space-time continuum, but if the poet has done their job the two halves form a circle that reveals something powerful without coming out and saying it or hitting you over the head with it. It’s sort of tied to the stream-of-consciousness movement in fiction, but there’s a more formal aspect to this technique in poetry.

August 13, 2009

Who Is This Will and Why Does He Have All the Power?

My family had bacon for dinner last night. Crispy bacon. And scrambled eggs – cooked in bacon grease. My family is skinny, through some miracle, so they can eat things like that once in a while and be totally not as fat as I am. I’m not even going to ask what’s up with that because it’s pointless. Oddly enough – I ate my salad and my Nutrisystem Mac n Cheese and was perfectly and totally happy. I did not even snitch a little corner of crispy bacon. And I was the one frying it!

It occurred to me today while I was huffing it on the stair climber at the gym that the Greeks may have had it right after all with the whole Muse thing. And yogurt – you have to give them that. Muses and yogurt. Brilliant people those Greeks. However, I think the Muses need a refreshening. Kind of like in Europe where the buildings are all 1 million years old and very beautiful and patinaed (see, I was a designer since you have to have a license to use a word like “patina”), but when you go inside everything is very au courant and clean-lined with this Bauhaus sensibility and all these bright colors. So, the Muses need the same kind of treatment.

Although, really, I think the Muse of Erotic Poetry is doing just fine modernizing herself. Anyhoo, I think we need to add a Muse to the list for our modern sensibilities and needs.

I hereby nominate the new Muse – Will.

He’s the only male Muse and he is in charge of inspiring us to not be obese forty-year olds with bad capris and saggy boobs. I’m having a hard time figuring out what Will-the-Muse looks like, however. Is he like Frosty the Snowman with two cherry tomato eyes, a carrot nose, and a jaunty leaf of Bibb lettuce for a hat? Is he a really buff dude who speaks with a slight German accent and says “drop and give me fifty!” every time you call upon him? He might even look like Johnny Depp. If anyone should be a Greek it’s Johnny Depp with his yacht and his island.

All I know is that I have Will-the-Muse to thank for the fact that I happily ate Salad and did not partake of Bacon.

August 12, 2009

A Picture is Worth 1200 Calories a Day