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NaPoWriMo Day 2

Here’s what I understand of Nirvana: People fight to attain it. Achieve it. Then fall out of it. The place is more of a purpose. The purpose is to always find your way back to it.  

I try to repeat that night. I try to find that night again and again. Sometimes, I slip back through small things—a red veined leaf pressed to flat to the bed of a shallow stream. Sometimes, I slip through unintentionally—a round table filled with friends at the Cheesecake factory. And sometimes, it happens just when it must—a walk philosophic on an evening when the moon peaks through a palm frond at me.

 But never it exactly. Never what I remember. And I understand how time moves forward and all the science behind that. But I still try to realchemize the pieces, which include you, together. Hoping to get back to that night so I can write with all the skill I now possess the poem I never did. 

Author Notes:

You’ll notice a theme in my NaPoWriMo submissions—about a memory of mine. It’s because I actually am trying to write about this memory so I’m using NaPoWriMo as an opportunity to brainstorm how to best express it.

NaPoWriMo: Day 1

Prompt: Write a poem that has the same first line as another poem.

Because it burned, I kept returning.

My ember: a memory of dark

juniper trees en pointe and a

beardless moon, its naked chin

provocative and

pierced with a grin. And I didn’t recall

the salad. I replaced that ashy

part with a coffee because steam

rises with more nostalgic

clarity than lettuce leaves in a

plastic container that I chewed

before juniper trees who

danced nimbly in a way that I

knew for that midnight exactly

who and how I was supposed to be.

Author Notes:

My first line comes from the poem “Eurydice’s Refrain” by Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut in her book “Magnetic Refrain.”

1.

Because it burned, I kept returning.

It was the same house, a desert white

with gaping windows and trees within.

Amd from inside, an alluring music that turned

sleepy, then strong. And when he

 strummed, his fingers seemed strangely familiar

though his notes were old and slightly strained,

as if he’d been away for too long.

And from inside my throat, the flames

began to uncoil and recoil

in bursts of song.

II

And even though it hurt to always follow,

to always echo, I loved being

a shadow that grew larger and radiant

as he skipped across stage, bringing

me with him out into the open.

And when he laughed, I cracked

a smile of relief. And when he ached

I made it storm with violent rain,

and when he wandered back

to save the city from burning down,

I didn’t hesitate to follow

and spread myself into a salty wave

crushing, soundlessly, in his wake.

Mornings at Blackwater by Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

When my friend surprises me with a poetry book

Hymn to the Neck by Amy Gerstler

Tamed by starched collars or looped by the noose,
all hail the stem that holds up the frail cranial buttercup.
The neck throbs with dread of the guillotine's kiss, while
the silly, bracelet-craving wrists chafe in their handcuffs.
Your one and only neck, home to glottis, tonsils,
and many other highly specialized pieces of meat, 
is covered with stubble. Three mornings ago, undeserving
sinner though she is, yours truly got to watch you shave
in the bath. Sap matted your chest hair. A clouded 
hand mirror reflected a piece of your cheek. Vapor
rose all around like spirit-infested mist in some fabled
rainforest. The throat is the road. Speech is its pilgrim. 
Something pulses visibly in your neck as the words
hand me a towel flower from your mouth.

(Source: poets.org)

The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet by Lynn Emanuel

   Jill's a good kid who's had some tough luck. But that's 
another story. It's a day when the smell of fish from Tib's hash 
house is so strong you could build a garage on it. We are sit-
ting in Izzy's where Carl has just built us a couple of solid 
highballs. He's okay, Carl is, if you don't count his Roamin' 
Hands and Rushin' Fingers. Then again, that should be the 
only trouble we have in this life. Anyway, Jill says, "Why 
don't you tell about it? Nobody ever gets the poet's point of 
view." I don't know, maybe she's right. Jill's just a kid, but 
she's been around; she knows what's what.
     So, I tell Jill, we are at Izzy's just like now when he 
comes in. And the first thing I notice is his hair, which has 
been Vitalis-ed into submission. But, honey, it won't work, 
and it gives him a kind of rumpled your-boudoir-or-mine look. 
I don't know why I noticed that before I noticed his face. 
Maybe it was just the highballs doing the looking. Anyway, 
then I see his face, and I'm telling you—I'm telling Jill—this is 
a masterpiece of a face.
     But—and this is the god's own truth—I'm tired of
beauty. Really. I know, given all that happened, this must 
sound kind of funny, but it made me tired just to look at him. 
That's how beautiful he was, and how much he spelled T-R-
O-U-B-L-E. So I threw him back. I mean, I didn't say it, I say 
to Jill, with my mouth. But I said it with my eyes and my 
shoulders. I said it with my heart. I said, Honey, I'm throwing 
you back. And looking back, that was the worst, I mean, the 
worst thing—bar none—that I could have done, because it
drew him like horseshit draws flies. I mean, he didn't walk
over and say, "Hello, girls; hey, you with the dark hair, your
indifference draws me like horseshit draws flies."
     But he said it with his eyes. And then he smiled. And
that smile was a gas station on a dark night. And as wearying
as all the rest of it. I am many things, but dumb isn't one of
them. And here is where I say to Jill, "I just can't go on." I
mean, how we get from the smile into the bedroom, how it all
happens, and what all happens, just bores me. I am a concep-
tual storyteller. In fact, I'm a conceptual liver. I prefer the
cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That's why I 
write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the 
reader and say, "Reader, you go on from here." And what I like
about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I 
mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They 
pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in 
a dark alley, I'd want it to be a poetry reader. They're not like
some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, "Put this
foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button
your coat, wipe your nose."
     So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I 
feel, deserve something better than they're used to getting. I 
do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, 
who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where some-
body spends pages and pages on some fat book where every-
thing including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, 
are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something.
And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the 
form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the 
average reader likes ideas.
     "A sentence, unlike a line, is not a station of the cross." I 
said this to the poet Mark Strand. I said, "I could not stand to
write prose; I could not stand to have to write things like 'the 
draperies were burnt orange and the carpet was brown.'" And 
he said, "You could do it if that's all you did, if that was the 
beginning and the end of your novel." So please, don't ask me 
for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the 
bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, al-
though you can ask me a lot about death. That's all I like, the 
very beginning and the very end. I haven't got the stomach for
the rest of it.
     I don't think many people do. But, like me, they're either 
too afraid or too polite to say so. That's why the movies are 
such a disaster. Now there's a form of popular culture that 
doesn't have a clue. Movies should be five minutes long. You 
should go in, see a couple of shots, maybe a room with orange 
draperies and a rug. A voice-over would say, "I'm having a 
hard time getting Raoul from the hotel room into the eleva-
tor." And, bang, that's the end. The lights come on, everybody 
walks out full of sympathy because this is a shared experi-
ence. Everybody in that theater knows how hard it is to get 
Raoul from the hotel room into the elevator. Everyone has had 
to do boring, dogged work. Everyone has lived a life that 
seems to inflict every vivid moment the smears, finger-
ings, and pawings of plot and feeling. Everyone has lived un-
der this oppression. In other words, everyone has had to eat 
shit—day after day, the endless meals they didn't want, those 
dark, half-gelatinous lakes of gravy that lay on the plate like 
an ugly rug and that wrinkled clump of reddish-orange roast 
beef that looks like it was dropped onto your plate from a 
great height. God what a horror: getting Raoul into the ele-
vator.
     And that's why I write poetry. In poetry, you don't do 
that kind of work.

(Source: http)