Bottom Dweller

Bottom Dweller

 

You are a bottom dweller of the deepest kind,

hidden away behind dark glass, scales and eyes,

where the air hugs your skin in balmy gloom.

This is black Atlantis in a basement room:

flickering jeweled bodies under secret light and

your love swimming with them amid hollow castles

and breaths of air that rise to the surface as pearls.

 

And I am no fisherman, but you are the trophy-fish of lore,

the dream that ancient Ahab could not stop searching for,

ghostly beautiful but battle-scarred, slipping slow

between veins of algae and mud-slicked stones.

Living somewhere between deep silence and earth,

because those are the biggest parts of you.

What else is there?

 

Oh, if you would surface, I would show you the sun

so it would peel away your slimed olive skin,

and you would breathe the air again.

And somewhere there would be what is real,

the father I know you used to be,

who held a little girl’s hand because she was afraid

to follow you into that monstrous myth, the silent sea.

Sunday is a Day for Waiting

Sunday

 

The church bells ring under a gentle

Sunday sun.

The farmer’s family arrives late,

slipping not-so-silently into the pews

with the toddler restless

and the sister crying over her stained dress.

They sit in stuffy silence,

fans slowly slicing the air above their heads.

 

The priest in his black soutane

clutches a worn Bible behind the pulpit,

and all of these faces are turned towards

a broken man’s drooping head,

all blood and teeth and spit

masquerading as grace.

 

And he is thinking that a man with

blood on his palms cannot possibly

care enough about an empty bank account

or sick dairy cows and dying corn,

or a fourth baby on the way.

 

He holds out his own calloused palms,

lets grace sit in his mouth,

swallows.

Blessed are those who wait.

Poetry Exercise: Word-Substitution Poem

Exercise taken from Creating Poetry by John Drury.  Page 26, exercise 2:

Choose a poem that interests you.  Using a fresh sheet of paper, write down new words to replace each word of your model.  Substitute your own words for those of the other poem, making sure you keep the same arrangements of parts of speech.  That is, substitute nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, and so on.  You can write down opposites or antonyms if you like (“hot” for “cold”), but don’t feel restricted by that possibility.  The idea is to keep the other poet’s syntax (or arrangement of words) while providing your own building materials, your own vocabulary.

“A Dream of Jealousy” by Seamus Heaney

Walking with you and another lady

In a wooded parkland, the whispering grass

Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

And the trees opened into a shady

Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

We talking about desire and being jealous,

Our conversation a loose single gown

Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

And she consented.  Oh neither these verses

Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

Model

Skating with you and only you

under hushed snow, the fallen flakes

rested their bodies on our woolen caps

and the clouds turned into a misty

hollowed sky when we looked up.

I think the grayness of the day excited us.

We laughed over ice and being cold,

our voices a warm smoky apparition

or a lost baleful spirit held out

like a flag of white in the breeze.

‘Tell me,’ I said to your cheek, ‘what

I have often wondered, your heart’s true want.’

And you answered.  Oh, neither this frost

nor your pretense, love, can hide your empty gaze.

What I think:

This exercise helped me think about word placement and parts of speech–I couldn’t just choose anything and hope it made sense.  They had to match the ones in Heaney’s poem.  It’s a good exercise for writers who tend to just throw words together rather than stop and think “Why am I choosing this word?  Does it establish the meaning I’m trying to get across?”  It definitely took more patience than free-writing.

That being said, I adore Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and I don’t feel my exercise could even stand in the shadow of his work…but the point was to try and emulate a good writer’s work, which can only lead to better writing for me.  Eventually 🙂

Poetry Exercise: Rise of an Avocado Day.

Exercise taken from Creating Poetry by John Drury.  Page 19, exercise 14:

Write a poem that’s all sound, a babble of word music, letting vowels echo and consonants repeat, not worrying much about what it means.  Savor the sounds.  If this seems hard to begin, try listing as many delicious words as you can, words you can taste (and proper names too), like “crush” and “deliquescent” and “Susquehanna.”

Rise of an Avocado Day

Silver’s gossamer evanescence slips down a cherrywood banister,

whispers a phosphorescent dawn.

This is an avocado day, the sky jade over the sea, so

our lips hover over taste in hope.

This is morning that knocks on your cellar door like cymbals,

crashing, open, but listening, glistening, freshening the sun.

Dew like clear pearls between grass blades, our toes curling

under chestnut earth, the delicate doves gray against green.

Wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room, fog like

cigar smoke hovering above water.

Our breath is just an undercurrent of the breeze,

slender as invisibility

but grasping everything with the strength of a titan.

My love,

we go free with this daybreak,

we rise like robins,

rove like gypsies under mauve morning.

And we won’t return even when the moon steals the sky.

By:  Janessa Barrette

What I think:

I enjoyed this exercise because it allowed me to free-write with words that feel like honey on the tongue.  I found myself writing with a hunger for how the language sounded, not necessarily what it meant.  That’s for later revisions, not for the initial exercise.  I like “avocado day” and “wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room.”  I think the end became a bit cliche, but I’m not too bothered because I was just going with the poem’s feeling…I think there’s something to work with, here.

The Problem with Poetry

Note:  I am not a published poet, though hopefully I will be, someday.  These are just my thoughts on what good poetry is and what it should not be.

Okay.  I took a poetry writing class in college with Dr. David Craig–quite a brilliant man, by the way, and hilarious– and I learned something.  (Surprise!)

Poetry is work, damn it.  You cannot just throw words together and call them a poem, which is what many people do (and I used to do).  This:

My heart

is bleeding at your feet

and I cannot

breathe.

Life.

Death.

Hopelessness.

By:  Hopefully nobody.

Is not a poem.  It is a cliché image scattered over an open space.  I am guilty of doing this (though not to the degree of the above example).  So are many beginning poets, I think.  And there’s nothing wrong with starting somewhere.  An excellent poem may come from an exercise where you just write random words and images.  But that initial rambling should not be your final work.

While taking the poetry class, I had to revise each poem at least seven times for my final.  And let me tell you, they had changed a lot by the time those revisions were done.  There were times I would go to revise a poem and think:  “How can I possibly revise this masterpiece?  It’s perfection!  I’m frickin’ T.S. Eliot!”

Dr. Craig would then kindly stick a pin in my ego, and I would quite rapidly deflate and scuttle back to my keyboard.

So what is the problem with poetry?  People think it’s easy.  They think it’s just jotting down haphazard thoughts and cutting them to pieces to form shorter lines and stanzas.  But it’s so much more than that.  It’s dissecting those words and trying to figure out what you’re really trying to say, then completely changing everything.  Over and over again.  Sometimes you may not need many revisions, but most of the time the poem will unrecognizable from what it began as.

And that, my friend, is a good thing.