past novembers

damp
leaf
prints
faded stains
on the
sidewalk of my memory

Old poems

Was cleaning off my desk and found the poor old poetry journal I kept from from around 1978 to 1989. It's in really bad shape. So I'm going to try to harvest as much as I can.

To Rachel (1989)

Just you and me.
You are unhappy.
We rock.
I fend of your cries
with an endless refrain:
"Hushabye, don't you cry
Go to sleep my little baby"
desperate to comfort you.
Finally you succumb to sleep,
dreaming your baby dreams
of eating.
Now I cry,
aching for this consolation
that no one gave to me,
and hating you
because I love you.

Untitle 1989

My little son killed a hamster
today;
Held it so tight
its tiny heart stopped.
And I cried
not for the hamster so much
as for myself
trapped
waiting for circumstances
to squeeze the life out of me.

Okay, that's enough. Too depressing.

I recently posted this in Extreme Honesty, a tribe on Tribe.net, and basically was told that no one understood it. So I'm posting it here. If anyone runs across this and can understand it, let me know.


Untitled
(taking suggestions)

On, off
On, off
On, off. . .
In the ripening wheat
The fireflies flash
Their coded, courtship calls.

On, off
On, off
On, off. . .
In the corn stubble
Genetic memory downloads
Phosporescent binary commands;
Triggering reproductive subroutines,
Spawning child processes.

On, off
On, off
On, off. . .
Maybe love DOES compute.

Ah, back to the old grind. ::grin:: Cassie reminded me this morning that I owed her an assignment. She's right. Too many irons in the fire, that's me. But never fear, I decided to give it a shot this morning.

So I went out on the patio with my coffee and some homemade potato salad to peruse the list of position assignments and opted to do "write in a strict form". Which is kind of a cop-out as I love to write in haiku. My sitting outside inspired this poem, where I replace potato salad with toast.

coffee and toast
birdsongs, cool morning garden
ah, contentment

It actually took a tiny bit of work, because potato salad was actually a good fit in the original version. But Cassie and I were talking about using shared symbolism in poetry, in order to communicate better, and I just felt that not everyone thinks potato salad or cold pizza are at the root of contentment.

This next one is about my love affair with the ravens. There are four of them that come by every morning. I listen to them and have been trying to lure them into the yard. This morning I decided to put out some scraps from dinner last night, the fat and tendons from meat cut up for stirfry, to entice them into the yard.

strips of raw meat
arranged so delicately
lure flies, not ravens

So there you have, two for the price of one. What do you think? Assignment complete?

Okay, final revision.

Carrot Cake^^{btw, this is my assignment for today}

nothing rhymes with orange
but things do rhyme with carrot
not that it matters
as carat is just about a small enough
measure to quantify the significance
of my words

I ran that last poem past my husband and he failed to catch the subtle nuances. ::sigh:: Which leaves me fearing that no one will. He suggested the following improvement.

^^{btw, this is my assignment for today}
nothing rhymes with orange
but things do rhyme with carrot
not that it matters
as carat is just about a small enough
measure to quantify the significance
of my words

Okay, for my first assignment, given to me by the fabulous Cassie, I offer this poem.

Assignment: Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non- connotative word, like "so" etc. (From Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments)

nothing rhymes with orange
but things do rhyme with carrot
not that it matters
as carat is just about a small enough
measure to quantify the significance
of my words
by the way, this is my assignment for today
^

Really truly, it's time to start writing again. Too long have I allowed other concerns, other pasttimes, take precedence. So I will start here with the first poem I have written lately. Yesterday, I believe.

The desert
barren, bleak with furtive stirrings of imaginings
The rain
gentle, nourishing makes seeds long dormant swell
I bloom