new year's note to self: short and long versions

New Year's Note to Self, short version:  

Put first things first and take a writing/blogging sabbatical for a couple of months.

New Year's Note to Self, long version:
Yes, Heidi, you are a poet & teacher who practices her arts blah blah blah, but you are also a parent--the parent of a kid who has distinct executive function challenges that keep getting more pronounced as life gets more complex.  But just like you told said kid, when you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, you don't sit back and say, "Oh, these things are hard for me so don't expect me to do them well."

Instead, top to bottom ed/psych testing is an opportunity for everyone to practice using their strengths to develop their weaknesses.  Right?  So you the parent need to model this.

Weakness:  responding flexibly when things don't go smoothly, efficiently and according to schedule.
Strengths: "goal-directed persistence,"  organizational and time-management skills.

You the parent need to temporarily clear the decks and free up some time and attention to focus on this child who needs extra frontal lobe in order to cope with the demands of 4th grade.  If you keep doing everything you're doing all at once, there's no frontal lobe to spare for him. 

The poetry will still be there in 60 days. (Heck, it holed up and hibernated circa 1985 and then popped out full of spring sap 15 years later.  Not to worry.).  But two months is a long time in the life of a 10-year-old who needs more patient reminders and less frantic screeching about missing homework and undone chores.

So, give it two months and see where the family gets.  Check back in around March 1.  "Everything will be all right in the end.  If it's not all right, it's not the end."

Love,
Heidi

the mystery of zingerline

Recently on NPR's Science Friday there was a piece on how our many online social media opportunities raise a question about the multiple identities we all inhabit and how we present ourselves to the world. I think I'm what you might call a "casual user" of this technology, but even I am splintered across this blog and my static website, two accounts on facebook, LinkedIn and twitter (as yet unused), three email addresses (personal,"writer" and teacher), about a dozen listservs (three different usernames) and a charter school identity. And who knows how many sites (Evite, Groupon, amazon.com to name a few) think they know who I am and what kind of cookies I like?

But long ago--ten whole years and then some--before any of this, when most of us were pretty cutting-edge in having any email address at all, I considered redefining my poet self by writing under a pen name instead of under the same old scary-looking, mispronounceable Mordhorst (which, by the way, is spelled just the way it sounds and pronounced just the way it's spelled, so please don't say MordhUrst). I came back to poetry almost the minute my daughter was born (talk about identity crisis: "You are now Mommy"), and while taking workshops at the wonderful Writers' Center here in Bethesda, I started signing my drafts "Heidi Zingerline."

The new surname choice was totally legit and even served a historical purpose, I thought. My mother's maiden name is Zingerline and with only one set of cousins on her side of the family, both girls, the name is in danger of disappearing from use. Plus, how perfect is that for a poet--zinger-line? Get it?

Then I realized that there was no way to communicate all that information in a byline, and that anyone who didn't know that Zingerline was a real name, mine to use by rights, might see it as a cheesy joke. I briefly considered "Heidi Zingerline Mordhorst," but it's not like "Heidi Mordhorst" needs any further distinguishing feature--maybe, if I had been Lisa Smith my whole life, Lisa Zingerline Smith might have made some sense.

But what really changed my mind was a poem written by a fellow workshopper and instant friend from the Writers' Center. He arrived at a critique group meeting one week in 2000 with this to share, and now the only vestige of my flirtation with Zingerline is in my writer email address, zingerline@gmail.com. Thank you, Lawrence, for your faith in Mordhorst.

Nom de plume
For "Heidi Zingerline," newly named

Mordhorst.
A commanding sound -- so majestic!
It could be a painting
by Vermeer: View of
Mordhorst.

Or a short
story, no? One of Edgar Allan Poe's
more fearsome inventions --
"The Fall of the House of
Mordhorst."

Or a series
for Masterpiece Theatre -- imagine
Alastair Cooke: "Welcome
to tonight's episode of
Mordhorst

Revisited."
I'm sorry I misspelled your name. Please
don't take another just because
my fingers can't type
"Mordhorst."

Ignorant
digits. They pay no attention, and
sometimes the eyes don't either.
But the ears delight in
"Mordhorst."

~Lawrence Biemiller
October, 2000 ~ all rights reserved

The round-up today is with my new acquaintance Carol Rasco, the CEO of RIF. Does my awe at the fact that the CEO of anything big would hang out at Poetry Friday reveal a streak of cynicism, or have I just suffered bad timing?

found out

Last week I mentioned Frank O'Hara and linked to a really interesting piece on him by yet another poet I didn't know, Elaine Equi. She's quite famous, and pretty soon agents of the Academy of American Poets are going to show up on my so-called poet's doorstep and relieve me of my laminated Poets Club ID card based on my dire ignorance of modern American poetry.

I'll plead with them, explaining that after all it was I who, as a work-study student at Wesleyan University Press in 1982, discovered Yusuf Komunyakaa's Copacetic in the slush pile and sent it breathlessly off to the Editorial Board, but they'll say, "That's no excuse for admitting in public that you had never heard of Elaine Equi until 2011. Just look at the kind of works she's been producing since 1978, long before you found yourself typing first-reader's reports in Middletown, CT on a manual typewriter using carbon sets."

They'll thrust a page into my hands. "Just look at this poem from The Cloud of Knowable Things! And you call yourself a poet!" Then they'll turn on their heels as I cry from my kidscribbled, catscratched teacher's doorway, "Please--I just need more time!"

[echo of "more time! more time! more time!" receding into the distance]

excerpt from

The Objects in Fairy Tales

are always
the most important
characters.
Then as now,
the power to transform
is theirs —
the story
a way of talking through
(and to) us.
Shoes of Fortune,
Magic Beans,
are unlike objects
in magazines
for they awaken
us against our will
from the spell of abject
longing for more.
Only then do we live
happily ever after.


2.

They speak
but not
to everyone,

just those
ready to hear
and endure

what they have to say —

impossible tasks,

shine wrapped around
the seedvoice.

Golden apples
in the grasp of time.

"I'll climb up."

~ Elaine Equi

I wonder: what kind of well-read do you have to be, to write well?

Explore this question and others at A Teaching Life with Tara Smith, host of Poetry Friday this week.

I promise a return to the Kidlitosphere next week...

thankful for big ideas

I have a new favorite book. I'm late to the party as usual, but through the 2009 Poetry Notables session at NCTE last weekend I heard about a slew of books new to me, and ordered several titles on the spot using my handy-dandy wireless device. It was an eminent body of work that arrived on my doorstep, but the most thrilling was The Tree That Time Built. I had not heard of it at all, nor read a single review, so I was taken by glorious surprise.

This weighty collection of about 125 poems is much more than a themed anthology. I find myself wishing that I were a 5th-grade science teacher so that I could use it as the basis for a whole year's study of what might ordinarily be called evolutionary biology. The cover says the poems were "selected by" Mary Ann Hoberman, 2008-2010 Children's Poet Laureate, and Linda Winston, a cultural anthropologist and teacher. However, the work they did in compiling this rich array of poems by everyone from William Blake to Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes through to Douglas Florian, Alice Schertle and quite a handful by Hoberman herself goes way beyond "selection." (You might call it "supernatural selection.")

The title doesn't give it away, so I opened The Tree That Time Built expecting a "celebration of nature, science, and imagination." But this collection is really a tribute to the towering ideas of Charles Darwin, two anniversaries of whose were celebrated in 2009, and is an examination of the ways that the work of scientists (and particularly naturalists) and the work of poets resemble each other. "Science and art have often been cast as opposites," says the Introduction, " but the division is an artificial one. Scientists, like poets, depend on imagination for many of their core insights. And poets, like scientists, observe and explore connections within the natural world." Through their thoughtful selection and arrangement of the poems, Hoberman and Winston layer pockets of tiny detail, swathes of rock-solid description, and seeping realizations on a grand scale. Then, through their commentary on both the science and the poetry at work in each poem, they cut a cross-section through those layers to expose a whole new view of our natural history and the way we humans have expressed our understanding of it.

I've always been a fan of the idea of evolution and its grandeur, and the notion that it all happened without any hint of human agency save for naming it tickles my mind. Impossible to choose just one from this book, but here's a simple, elegant piece by Mark Van Doren.

 

If They Spoke

The animals will never know;

Could not find out; would scarcely care

That all their names are in our books,

And all their images drawn bare.

What names? They have not heard the sound,

Nor in their silence thought the thing.

They are not notified they live;

Nor ask who set them wandering.

Simply they are. And so with us;

And they would say it if they spoke;

And we might listen; and the world

Be uncreated at one stroke.

~ Mark Van Doren

The Tree That Time Built, 2009

Enjoy a Friday full of poetry with Ms. Mac at Check It Out today!

 

SPARKs fly

As I noted some weeks ago, I'm participating in SPARK 10, an online collaboration project between artists and writers. This painting is by Delores Ekberg of Piedmont, SD. Here's how she describes the work: "This is watercolor on rice paper...fun to do. You crumple rice paper, attach it to illustration board with acrylic matt medium, then brush color on the creases, or "rub" color on the creases...I used colored pencils...then use watercolor to make a picture of whatever you see coming out of the textures."

Here's my poem (probably not my final draft) inspired by the art. Ooh, I hope she likes it!

Willowriver


blossoms in autumn from
crumpled trunks
rootrippled river
from wrinkled tips of twigs

hangs lowswinging
among elderly leaves
dripping dry mineral hues

falls to ground
lies in brittle layers
sinking to siltsoil taking down
swallowed sunlight

sends up heat

is wisdom


Enjoy all the poetic richness of Poetry Friday this week with Toby at The Writers' Armchair.

P.S. Two notes to all my PF friends:
1) I apologize for receiving all your kind comments and regularly failing to return the favor. I shall try to do better now that my teaching life is settling down.
2) Will you be at NCTE? Let me know!

in case anyone has never

What is it about pumpkins? We went to choose pumpkins at a local "patch"--no time for a trip to an actual farm this week, and my kids know very well how pumpkins grow--but even just being in a large sunny yard strewn with pumpkins gave us all a rotund feel of earthy well-being.

At school today, following the kindergarteners' visit to a pumpkin farm yesterday, we'll celebrate our first Poetry Friday together by carving a pumpkin while simultaneously reading the following tour de force by the great Valerie Worth. To me this poem (with many of hers!) serves as a definition of "poetry" for kids: a piece of writing that distills experience into a handful of words that work musically together. (Want to watch me try to explain that to 5-year-olds?) In any case I think it will make a fine complement to our work with "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate" next week.

Pumpkin

After its lid
Is cut, the slick
Seeds and stuck
Wet strings
Scooped out,
Walls scraped
Dry and white,
Face carved, candle
Fixed and lit,

Light creeps
Into the thick
Rind: giving
That dead orange
Vegetable skull
Warm skin, making
A live head
To hold its
Sharp gold grin.

~ Valerie Worth (1933-1994)

You can dig in to more at a wrung sponge with Andi this week.

the badnesses of this world

My preference is usually for "uplifting" poetry, that which (along with everything it does for cognition and imagination by sounding good to your ears and feeling good in your mouth) leaves me with a reverberating sense of wonder at the goodnesses of this world, kind of like the ones I posted back in January that suggested some animal spirituality.

I'm having trouble therefore understanding why the poem below keeps me coming back to it. I received it courtesy of The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day service. The pain barely contained in it is enormous and frightening and wonderful.

Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72
by Charles Harper Webb

May there be an afterlife.

May you meet him there, the same age as you.
May the meeting take place in a small, locked room.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves tipped with razor-
blades and acid.
May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands.
May the glass in his car window, which you smashed as he sat stopped
at a red light, spike the rifle butt, and the concrete on which you'll
fall.

May the needles the doctors used to close his eye, stab your pupils
every time you hit the wall and then the floor, which will be often.
May my father let you cower for a while, whimpering, "Please don't
shoot me. Please."
May he laugh, unload your gun, toss it away;
Then may he take you with bare hands.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail
and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw....

Take a deep breath and read the complete poem here. Poetry Friday is hosted today by Breanne at Language, Literacy, Love.

blasted poets!

At the ALA in Washington Monday, on the way from Gianormo Convention Center Building #1 to Gianormo Convention Center Building #2, I asked directions to Room 144A, scene of this year's Poetry Blast, and then heard two stylish and colorful women behind me doing the same. As we crossed the street together, one commented on my own pink-with-orange ensemble. I did not realize, until we all reached the front row of chairs where the Blasting poets were gathering, that I had been complimented on my chromatocombo by Lois Ehlert herself!

I have participated in three what you might call "national" poetry readings now, and every time it is such a thrill to meet and hear in person writers who have existed for me only as names on a book jacket. And I was so relieved to hear famous* children's poets greeting other famous* children's poets saying, "I've heard your name but I'm not familiar with your work," since I often feel terribly ignorant of all the excellent work out there. I guess we all have a blanket of acquaintance with the work in our chosen field, and then, as someone put it, we have "deep shafts of knowledge" here and there.

I shall be digging some deep new shafts next week (once the blasted public charter school appeal is done) to know more about Debbie Levy (what range!), George Ella Lyon (what delightful diction!), Tony Medina (what humor!) and Carole Weatherford (what living history!).

Thanks to all at the Blast for another great show, especially Barbara Genco and Marilyn "Six Stars" Singer!

My lame but heartfelt reverso about the Poetry Blast...

You
had to be
there
to catch every nuance
but
it was worth the effort,
traveling!

Traveling:
it was worth the effort
but
to catch every nuance
there
had to be
You!

working for it can be fun

Today (behind the times as always) Kay Ryan is my hero. The poem below is what made me go looking for more; it's one of those included in Poetry Speaks to Children. When I included it in a collection for my first-graders--whom I thought would appreciate the bear-forest-wolf-stick fairy-tale flavor--they were generally baffled, and a couple even said they found it creepy. And it's true that when I went looking for another of Ryan's poems that might speak to younger children, I couldn't find what I was looking for.


Bear Song

If I were a bear
with a bear sort of belly

that made it hard
to get up after sitting

and if I had paws
with pads on the ends

and a kind of a tab
where a tail might begin

and a button eye
on each side of my nose

I’d button the flap
of the forest closed.

And when you came
with your wolf and your stick

to the place that once was
the place to get in

you’d simply be
at the edge of the town

and your wolf wouldn’t know
a bear was around.


But there's something about her style that we who write for children can learn from. Her poems are compact; they look tame and accessible on the page, written in complete sentences and in a conversational register. Read "The Fabric of Life," though, and see how dense and challenging it is, and how she encourages engagement with the big ideas by skillfully passing them through a prism of humor, and how that bent light opens our eyes.

The Fabric of Life

It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps—

hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects.

From the biographical note at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/: "Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” " They may not start with imagery or sound, but listen to this irregular gorgeous turtle music:

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

I'm all inspired, not least to think that this Poet Laureate taught "remedial English" for 30 years. Can't you tell that she's a brilliant teacher? "I know great," Ryan said. "I do not know where great comes from." We could all use some of this remediation.

the first grade update

Poetry immersion continued this week with more children's choices: "Nightmare," a spider poem from Hey There, Stink Bug! by Leslie Bulion, chosen by Christopher; Sophia's selection "I Know Someone" by Michael Rosen collected in My Song Is Beautiful; and Kate's choice of "Violets, Daffodils" by Elizabeth Coatsworth from a lovely large-format collection that I'll get back to you on. Rafael chose "Schools Get Hungry Too" from Kalli Dakos's The Bug in Teacher's Coffee which I'll be going back to when we talk about voice, and yesterday Ella picked "Monday's child is fair of face" collected in The Barefoot Book of Rhymes Around the Year, which I've owned since my years teaching in London. We all enjoyed coming back to this one which popped up in our read-aloud Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, a classic English series by Catherine Storr which is not well-known here but very worth tracking down.

Meanwhile, there's some poetry action going on in my son's own first-grade classroom and as a result I enjoyed a peak moment this week: close to an hour snuggled in bed on a rainy evening with my two children as we all simultaneously wrote color poems following a form that Little D had used in class--he in a brand-new writing notebook, I in my umpteenth writing notebook, and Bigger D on her laptop (when did she learn to type so fast?). This is the one he brought home from school, specially copied out for Mommy the poet.

Black and Me

Black is the deep black night and Great Ape's
pound

Black is a great wolf's howl

black is a spider creeping

black looks like a slick fur coat

black sounds like an echo in a neverending
hole

black smells like smoky black coal

black feels like the threatening black spikes on a
steel gate

black tastes like the smoky taste of smoked
salmon

black makes me feel brave and swift

black is an old ghost in a tavern

~Duncan, age 7

Much later I realized I had missed Glee....like that mattered.

a bank street girl at heart

"Explain how the curriculum is aligned with Maryland Content Standards and the voluntary state curriculum."

Hermanadad / Brotherhood

Soy hombre: duro poco
y es enorme la noche.
Pero miro hacia arriba:
las estrellas escriben.
Sin entender comprendo:
tambien soy escritura
y en este mismo instante
alguien me deletrea.

~Octavio Paz

I am a man; little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

~Octavio Paz / translated by Eliot Weinberger

"Most of what we learn--about ourselves, about the physical world and about our place in it--we learn through our relationships with or in the company of other people. At GGPCS social studies holds a special place in the curriculum, because its focus on people and their relationships with each other and the environment mirrors children's learning through their interaction with people in the environment...."

Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is at The Drift Record with Julie Larios.

live from philadelphia

First, thanks to everyone who played along with the idea of "definito"s last week. I'm coming back to them soon and wish I could find a way to display all the comments permanently...

Despite my best intentions this week, I neither visited Miss Rumphius to pick up a Poetry Stretch on Monday, nor managed yesterday morning to post live from the NCTE Conference live from Philadelphia, where I had just the best time at the Poetry Party organized in honor of the NCTE Poetry Award (finally) Winner Lee Bennett Hopkins.

Many who contributed poems to a beautifully produced tribute volume joined the panel in saying a few words and reading their poems, but I believe I was the only one having the pleasure of meeting Lee for the first time. I have never felt so physically middle-aged than I do this fall (and let's face it, 45 is very probably halfway along my lifeline), but something about being in a room with him, with Bobbi Katz and Jane Yolen and the gentle spirits of Myra Cohn Livingston and Eve Merriam, makes me feel like my 4th grade self again, the one who wanted nothing more desperately than to have a poem published in the brand-new Cricket Magazine. When John Ciardi visited my school (thank you, Mrs. Jane Toler, school librarian), I was starstruck and have saved the autograph he gave me in my musical jewelry-box forever: it stood for poems, and what is a poem but a musical jewel? (I'll tell the story about the three cigarettes that once spent a few guilty days in that same jewelry-box another time.)

In the years since, I've been living and working on the outskirts of Poetry Town--knowing just enough news and just enough people to feel like a part of the community, but rarely setting foot in the Town Hall. So getting up and reading "Stanza Means Room" among that crowd of luminaries was was was--DIZZYING, knowing that my poems are built out of their poems, that the internal recording of my experiences as a kid was in a language they taught. I'm not the same now as when I went in, a guest in their poetry house.

octover

October may be the 10th month nowadays

but I counted it octopodally:

I was an eight-armed creature walking on water, juggling

many odd balls, some of them flaming

with excitement, even as

I battled an eight-armed creature equipped

with powerful suckers that threatened to drag me

too deep in an ocean of constant motion

clouded with turquoise ink, bad weather and

many more than one grain of sand.

In October my long arms finally reached

the rubbery endtips of my ability to Do Things.

Surfacing, now I can breathe the word

Octover.

party poopers

No bright uploaded image here; it's wet and chilly in Montgomery County, MD and I'm in a glowersome mood.

I was looking forward on Tuesday evening to participating in the PTA-sponsored "Read-Along Pajama Party" event at my school--the perfect opportunity to introduce myself (new this year) and Pumpkin Butterfly to the community. I asked about selling copies and donating some of the proceeds to the school, and my supportive and savvy principal called to inquire what the rules might be about such a proposal.

The answer from The Office was something like, "Not only can your teacher not sell copies of her book, she shouldn't be reading it on school property. That constitutes a conflict of interest." So I went to the pajama party and read work by Calef Brown and Valerie Worth, by Marilyn Singer and Constance Levy, by Ralph Fletcher and Brian Patten--a lot of fun! And yet...

The part about selling books makes sense to me; fair enough. But the part about not reading, not teaching my own published poems to my class (or any other in the system, perhaps including those of my own children as a parent volunteer), doesn't make sense. Our curriculum emphasizes the writing process and the development of the author identity in our students, and writers and poets are invited in all the time to bring that process to life--isn't having a live, in-house model a good thing?

I think it means something that after sharing one single poem from Squeeze (which is approved for inclusion in the county's school and public libraries), half of my first-graders are working on poetry collections for our Publishing Party at the end of the month. That's the interest we want to protect and promote, surely?

pumpkins on my mind

Oh dear. I can't decide if I'm delighted or dejected to finally find my way to the wealth of promoformation at the bubblestampede blog of Laura Salas and Fiona Bayrock. So many provocative ideas, so many approaches, so obvious that I should have started long before beginning of June! Despite my 'tenacity,' I have been rebuffed by the farm where the pumpkin butterfly poem, "Ghosts," happened; they can't fit my fabulous book launch event into their packed pumpkin-harvest October schedule...so now I'm trawling for another pumpkin farm that has more respect for poetry and racking my brain for another clever launch venue...

finally, a solution?

Somewhere towards the beginning of 2nd grade, the silent reading speed of my sharp little D1 (F, now heading for 5th grade) surpassed my own read-aloud speed. As a result, I have despaired of ever being able to read aloud to her again. At bedtime-story time, rather than attending to a skillful but tediously dramatic performance by her mother, she prefers to lie companionably beside me while racing through novel after novel and the occasional nonfiction selection while I get on with my own bedtime reading.

But poetry is my bedtime reading (brevity is beautiful: I can usually get in at least one whole poem before my eyes close and the book lands on my belly), and I have discovered that D1 WILL allow me to read her a poem or two. After all, in poetry there's often a little something extra that my read-aloud can reveal. Last night it was Billy Collins. I was looking for "The Lanyard," to go with the several that D1 started at the Chautauqua Boys' and Girls' Club last week, but I didn't find it, so we went for "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" and then "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles." In both cases, she enjoyed the journey but wasn't quite equal, first time around, to the destination.

We'll save "The Lanyard" for another moment in the future, in which her green, white and black lanyard is less special, and realizing that I may have found a way to preserve the cozy bedtime reading habit, I'll work on being as intentional in my choice of poems as I am in offering picture- and chapter-book choices to her brother.

a piranha religion

I may be the last poet to discover the Favorite Poem Project, but just in case not, here's a sample of the glory of this idea of Robert Pinsky's that the medium of a poem is not the words, but the breath, voice and body of each person as he or she reads that poem, especially a favorite one, out loud.

Nick and the Candlestick

by Sylvia Plath

chosen and read by Seph Rodney, photographer

I am a miner. The light burns blue.

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish--

Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,

A piranha

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,

Your crossed position.

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses.

With soft rugs--

The last of Victoriana.

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.

The Hug, by Thom Gunn

Heart-snagging.

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

...and now it's sprung

is hosted today by Maya Ganesan at allegro.

I spent two mornings this week playing poetry with kindergarteners in a Title I school in Arlington, VA. Here's what one class had to say, with a little orchestration from me, about the view out of their window right now:

dogwood

grow green, soft sprout
(drop splash puddle)
four white-pink petals
on juicy-sour stems reaching out
exquisite puddle of petals

Can you guess which word was the teacher's contribution?

as civilization unravels

it's soothing to chant something like the following, in which everything set backwards and upside down leads to a sense of floating rather than sinking....

I Am the Song

I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.


~Charles Causley
from The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry, ed. Brian Patten