NaPoWriMo Day…Oh, who am I kidding?

So instead of writing poems the last few days, I’ve been working on a lyric essay project. I started it back in January, with the goal of building up a book-length body of poemy prose on the topic of adoption. As part of that project, I wrote some material about horses. Now, I’m shaping and adding to that material in order to fulfill a related goal, of having an excerpt ready to send out to journals by May 1. Here’s a little excerpt of that excerpt:

***

The places Stormy and Poco carried me to—the places on the edge of Reno where a person could ride a horse—were mostly broken places. Broken trail, or trails leading to places broken from having trails leading to them. The trails were power line roads, maintenance roads along irrigation ditches, dirt access tracks leading to small reservoirs or cattle-trampled springs that fed the irrigation ditches. Burned-out rangeland and fire breaks. They were rutted and rocky off-road roads, roads leading to the shot-up shooting ranges out in the sage. Always lots of rocks, always shattered glass. Sometimes, snakes.

NaPoWriMo Day 7.4 (Day 18 for Everyone Else)

Northern Harrier. Photo credit: National Wildlife Federation

Today, the fourth of my poems is published in the online journal Cascadia Review. All four poems (titled “Went Hiking,” “Strange Bird,” “One Way,” and ”Day After Thanksgiving”) are now presented on the home page, along with my “Statement of Place” in the Cascadia bioregion.

These four poems are also included in my chapbook, Impossible Lessons, which will be ready to meet the world in about four more weeks.

(Coming some time soon: NaPoWriMo, Day 8! I think!)

NaPoWriMo, Day 7 (Day 16 for Everybody Else)

Ever since encountering this piece of statue over two years ago, its story has disturbed and fascinated me. It’s a fragment of the intricate statuary ornamenting the exterior of Chartres Cathedral–yes, the big famous one, in France–that somehow ended up in the tiny but spectacular Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona. This life-size, haunting visage is displayed in the chapel foyer, exactly at eye level. Most tourists visiting the chapel want to know about the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture or whether they can book a wedding there. What I want to know is how this chunk of Medieval Gothic found its way to the desert Southwest! None of the clergy or docents I approached knew the history of this piece; one nun I contacted later was able to tell me that it had been knocked from the cathedral’s exterior by shelling during World War I or II, and that the chapel’s founding donor had aquired it through an art dealer in L.A. (I can only imagine the other details of this story that will never be divulged.)

“Head of Christ in granite from Cathedral in Chartres, France” (now in Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, USA). Photo by Mark Kummer.

I’ve been trying to write a poem about this statue for the past two years. We visited it again this February, and Mark photographed it for me. Its physical disembodiedness, and its historical and geological dislocation, continue to haunt me. Today, still distressed by yesterday’s explosions and amputations, I attemped the poem again using the persona of the statue. I dedicate it to all who experienced a loss, physical or otherwise, of some piece of themselves yesterday.

***

PRAYER OF THE HEAD OF CHRIST IN GRANITE FROM CATHEDRAL IN CHARTRES, FRANCE AT CHAPEL OF THE HOLY CROSS IN SEDONA, ARIZONA

My Father, whose art is on display
all through this Verde Valley as red-rock buttes
of Coconino Sandstone, into which this chapel

is chiseled, how did I come to this place?
I sense Your Spirit spinning in every crumb
of Sedona dust and in every limestone layer

dyed blood-red by volcanic iron oxides–
but I remember little of the World-War violence
that severed my granite head from my granite body

and, via L.A. art dealer, delivered it, suffering, here.
I hear the nuns and docents point tourists
toward the rain-carved Madonna and Child

You shaped from the viscera of the mountain
above this chapel. They exclaim the likeness
is unmistakable. But I cannot look upward

to see those Permian other selves, my neck
unhinged and my Precambrian countenance
downcast as it is, in my decapitated extremis.

Does Your will erode here though it be done
in Heaven? This day, unblast me; lead me back
to the Cathédrale and give me whatever is left

of my body. From there I will journey to my original
kingdom in the quarry at Berchères-l’Evêque,
to deliver myself to the womb of the earth.

NaPoWriMo, Day … oh, dear.

Moving right along.

Today’s poem is prompted by Danielle Mitchell at Litnivorous (motto: “You Are What You Read”). In addition to offering brief prompts this month, she also has a full menu of very detailed writing exercises (see the menu bar at the top of the Home page) that fascinate me. My poem below responds to Prompt #7, Exercise #1. Thank you, Danielle, for this enjoyable workout of my “brain’s weirdness muscles.” And also, for the word “vodka.”

***

TO ONE WHO ESCAPED

This was the last time you would tell them
the water of their core aquarium did not meet
your requirement for prismatic frequencies.
Though they wooed you in Catalán, in Cantonese,
and Klingon, you inflected them back to themselves
in images of fizz and fenestration.

For a while, you tried your weirdest
to parlay their assertions into factual acres.
Your curiosity percolated like verdure.
Fluffed, it met with temporary merit.
But—peekaboo!—you found it impossible
to combobulate the spacious into something capable.

They wanted you to believe belief was everything
(the u-turns in the hairpins, the whirl of repentance).
At length, tremblingly, they offered you
a majestic ceramic and its liquid aphrodisiac.
But they weren’t prepared for the convergence
of your fineries. Or for the way you shouldered
that stoneware—so demure, so periodic.

When their methods uncornered the dribble
of their trial, you triumphed by splintering
the vodka of their maroon. Shhh… They want
you to believe your professed beliefs
are really true. Just because you’re pronoid
doesn’t mean they’re not favoring you.

NaPoWriMo, Day 5 (Whoa! Day 12 for everyone else)

A week late, but still in the game.

***

STILL LIFE WITH KUMQUAT

The French call it
nature morte, tartly
not living. Sordid, maybe,
but worthy of the eye’s
marveling at the last
glimmer of loveliness,
captured. The ovoid
kumquat, a curve
of driftwood, fished
from the tide, a billow
of yellow dillweed flowers:
a flight stilled, still live
enough.

NaPoWriMo Day 4 (Day 9 for Everyone Else)

Inspired by Maureen Thorson’s Day 9 prompt: “Noir” (but with a sort of non-urban twist) and by Doug’s flashback to clip-on earrings.

**

WINTER NOIR

The next one waits, polishing its incisors.
What willing thing would venture near, barefoot?
Some days, it doesn’t know itself
whether it preys or punishes. Or both.

Meanwhile, another clips earrings to her lobes.
She uses the pain to remind herself
of her worthiness. Please watch,
her ministrations seem to say.

Lifted to the level of her smile, each pearl ignites.
She draws the fur onto her shoulders
and against her neck. Outside, the moon
shows paw prints circling in the snow.

NaPoWriMo, Day 3 (Day 8 in other time zones)

Just to keep things confusing, I’m using Maureen Thorson’s Day 4 prompt–spaceship names from Iain M. Banks–as inspiration for this poem.

**

THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE DOMESTIC IMPULSES ENGAGE
IN A FRANK EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

Ordinarily, I suffer from an onslaught of abundance.

We need milk. We need postage stamps.

We need sandwich bread, bananas, and jam.

I refuse to fall victim to ambient distraction.

We need more frozen burritos,
the ones with not too much rice and just
the right amount of cheese.

Principally, each interruption is an apocalypse
of meaning.

Will you put your laundry in the basket?

Will you pick up those Legos from the floor, please?

Fortunately, some conflicts of interest
are grist for good thought.

We need sliced turkey and more applesauce.

Tissues. Peanut butter.

Did Tiresias have a family?
Would his wife have been a prophet, too,
or is one oracle per generation enough?

We need yogurt and a little more culture.

We could use beer and a little less fizz.

NaPoWriMo, Day 2 (Day 7 for Everyone Else)

Well. Where were we?

Oh, yes: barn swallows.

***

WAITING FOR APRIL

An old farmer I know
won’t celebrate his birthday

until the swallows fly back
from wherever they go

for the winter. He watches for their
swift, fork-tail dartings

from his kitchen window
looking across to the rise in the hayfield.

When mosquitoes swarm up
from the puddles in his tractor lot,
the birds bring their acrobatics closer.

When he sees them begin
to carry twigs and tufts of cow hair

up to the rafters of his barn,
he sends out invitations for a potluck.

When you’re past seventy-five, he tells me,
you get to feather your years some.

When you’re past seventy-five, you let
the party come to you.

NaPoWriMo, Day 1 (Day 2 for Everyone Else)

Happy National Poetry Month! This April, I’m getting a bit of a late start with NaPoWriMo (though not as late a start as I did last year). I hope to write and post a new poem here every few days. In between, I plan to enjoy and comment on the poems posted by writer-friends who are also participating in this poem-a-day challenge.

My first poem is inspired by yesterday’s prompt from NaPoWriMo founder Maureen Thorson, to “write a poem that has the same first line as another poem,” and by David J. Bauman’s (a.k.a. The Dad Poet’s) lovely reading of Frank O’Hara’s poem “For Grace, After a Party.”  (Instead of following the instructions, however, I borrowed O’Hara’s title, not his first line.) Here we go:

POEM BORROWING A TITLE FROM FRANK O’HARA

For Grace, after a party is the best time
for getting back into dancing.

For Grace, after a party is never as sweet
as that span of time just as the second drink
is kicking in and everyone is beginning
to feel hopeful.

For Grace, after a party means she can stop
apologizing about her hair.

For Grace, after a party is a time to uncorral her feelings
and watch them buck and snort across the pasture.

For Grace, after a party is an interlude
for considering which loved one to forgive.

For Grace, after a party is the perfect time
to practice scrambling eggs and holding
the weather, warm and calm, in her spoon.

Bad Blogger

Hello, Dear Readers–

I’ve been away too long! The past few weeks have been filled with poetry-related excitement. Here’s where I’ve been:

• Participating in a Mother’s Day reading at an outdoor sculpture garden. Along with six other Bellingham poets, I read poems celebrating mothers while the sun shone, the rhododendrons bloomed, and the visual art luminesced. Since most of my own poems about motherhood involve vomit and being an unwitting casualty of the Mommy Wars, I had to go looking for poems more appropriate to the occasion. I found wonderful pieces to share by May Sarton, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Martha Silano.
• Studying Martha Silano’s collections Blue Positive and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. The latter, especially, in addition to being a delightful and thought-provoking read, fascinated me for the way Silano manages to arrange the poems into a sequence that somehow–brilliantly–interweaves pieces about motherhood, faith, aliens, sex, cosmology, and consumer culture. I went to school on the structure of this book, since at the same time, I was also…
• Reworking my book-length manuscript to include some of the poems I wrote during NaPoWriMo. Realizing that the sequence of poems I’d come up with for my manuscript last fall was actually a tangled mess, I struggled mightily to find a new arrangement that makes any kind of sense out of my poems about theodicy, origin myths, the food chain, and cognition. Adding to the urgency were two May deadlines for first-book competitions–one of which I’d already submitted the Messy Manuscript to a few months back, but withdrew to substitute the New and Improved.
• Receiving acceptances by two literary journals! Getting my first acceptance by a paying market is a thrill–I’m a professional writer now! The complicated part was completing the mountain of paperwork attendant upon becoming an independent contractor with the State of Texas (via the public university where this literary journal is housed). In addition to signing up to receive the honorarium check, I also may have agreed to donate organs and possibly acquired licensure to drive a hazardous-materials rig. I’m not sure–the accountant I had to hire is still figuring out what I committed to. (In any case, my apologies in advance to Reno King, whose tax dollars are probably at work here. If it’s any consolation, the accountant is very deserving.) More details as press time approaches!
• Attending the Skagit River Poetry Festival. This is the west-coast sister of the Dodge Festival, held every two years in charming La Conner, Washington. During the three days, I took in readings and panel discussions by Jeremy Voigt, Christopher Howell, Chris Dombrowski, Linda Bierds, Rachel Rose, Mark Schafer, Marie Howe, Bob Hicok, Ellen Bass, Lorna Crozier, Jericho Brown, Caroline Forché, Tony Hoagland, and Nikki Giovanni. It was a feast of beautiful and nourishing words. And on the final day, I attended a terrific writing workshop with Tony Hoagland, whose book What Narcissism Means to Me (in addition to having the world’s funniest title) gave me permission, when I first read it four years ago, to engage in serious play with poetic voice.
• Learning how to levitate. Actually, this was completely effortless; the gift of walking on air was given to me at the Skagit River Poetry Festival, by a small-press editor I deeply respect, who asked, out of the blue, to see my book manuscript. So I’ve spent the past week re-re-reworking the thing to submit there. In the immortal words of Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes, not the Reformation), “Further bulletins as events warrant”!

It’s good to be back here with you, blogger friends!

Cheers to you,
Jennifer