April 27, 2010

"A Flowering"




A sunny, chill day on the Sunset Cliffs, 2010.




National Poetry Month: Poem on the Range, mapping places through iconic poems. Go ahead. Check this out.

Himself: Illustrates Hole in the Wall Gang with photos of holes. Fill holes today.

Herself: Work on poem, get salad makings, pick up MB at 5, and to dinner with K and D. We are getting just so social I don’t know what to do about us.

Reading: A beautiful new book that’s too fragmented for me.

Gratitude: G, sunshine east of I 5.

There’s that you know. That poem, that thought, that word, that meaning are all stretched out into sentences. Sometimes they only make sense if you struggle with them. I’m one of those who have to struggle. Painting, drawing, and color work may have come easy to me, but the placement of words on pages do not.

Until I go shopping for salad makings, I have the whole day free to hack and slash at words, clarify their meanings in relationship to the next series of words, and finalize things till the lady poets shred me on Thursday. I’ll start over again considering the whole after that.

The biggest problem is that every time I open a string of words I think are done, I find something not quite right with them. In the poem, “Old Cops,” the whole first verse is gar-bage, out, fini, and I put the piece back in the “needing work” pile to work on later. This piece, “A Flowering”, doesn’t need a total overhaul, but it isn’t finished. There it sits in the finished pile, and it’s not at all done. When I did a painting, I could almost always find an end to it. With this new medium, I have trouble seeing the final line or the final word.





A Flowering


I pause before getting out of chairs,
considering,
unbending slowly
pushing upward
only with support
then hanging half bent
suspended
in a never, never land

At first I couldn’t laugh,
had no smile for this at all
now time has wiped the frown
away
and left me with a repartee
polite filler, jokes,
as my pauses blossom
into long halts.
I freeze
while others pass me by

smiling
talking while moving on
they leave me unfolding
into my own space
alone.


4 comments:

  1. To me this is perfect...I would be intrigued to hear what your poet buddies say.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know little about poetry, only that as a medium it fascinates and eludes me. This one feels good to me though. I, too, will be interesting to read what the poets say. And who defines them as the "experts" anyhow? Not being snippy, just curious.

    ReplyDelete
  3. They are experts because they are good. Not just because I say they are good, but a consensus of writers here plus ones emotions and feelings when their works are read say so. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. What would this poem look like as painting? If you can see the painting in your mind - you're done.

    ReplyDelete

postcards

Celebration of Life