Appointments

The Poetry Bus this week, driven by Don't Feed the Pixies, challenges us to follow the signs (real or imagined) to wherever they take us. As I am reading Mary Oliver's, A Poetry Handbook, in which she talks about the importance of keeping appointments with your writing self, I've begun to think about following the signs to that place where I can do what I've set myself to do.

I will find it
Somewhere fair,
In rarified, clarified air,
The land and the house
And the room
Of my own.

It will be
A silky stop
Above the rocky crop;
A quiet refuge
That clamors
To be found.

It waits;
It watches the path
I tread,
The fallow past,
Its patience an ancient,
Beating, breathing thing.

I've appointments
There to keep,
Annointments hallowed, deep
In this meeting
And this resting place
For me.


Just a note: This wholly unsatisfactory piece is part of keeping appointments with myself. Good, bad, or indifferent, I will write.  While you're here, take a look at the two posts below this one. Practicing. Practicing.

Judgment

And then there’s this:
a tall tree trembling in the storm
like I will stand at judgment
uncertain that my roots will hold
before the breath of God.

In Green

Summer again. The ivy winds its way
Round the posts and up the walls
Like lover holds to lover.
This time, it’s embraced the shutters.
No matter how I wrap it in my hand,
I cannot pull the clinging things away.
The thought of such tenacious green embrace
Soothes my asphalt-addled mind.
I’m planted to my knees in green,
My feet sunk in this green ground,
My legs lost in miles of ivy.
If I stand here long enough,
Vines might climb my legs, bind me like a post.
If I stand here long enough,
Green leaves might hold me stalk-like, cover me in kisses.
If I stand here long enough, I might
Spread my sprouting arms and say, “Lover, come.”

In a Name and A Poet

The Poetry Bus is on the road with Jeanne Iris at the wheel! Jeanne's challenge, in part, is to ruminate on the origins of our names and see what comes to mind. Check Revolutionary Revelry to read the full challenge and see who else is aboard...and keep reading here to see my (very) weak takes on the prompt. We're among friends, right?


IN A NAME

Adam’s chin ran apple juice.

So what? Would Eden stand

If Eve had offered,

Say, unspellable potato?

Would grief be gone

Were Romeo called Capulet?

Would longing for a kinsman

Not put cankers on that rose?

A name is not a thing;

I am not etymology,

Though, By God, given half a chance,

I would be queen.

The name Karen is of Greek origin, a variant of the original name Catherine and means pure, clean. The name is often associated with queens, of whom Catherine of Alexandria, Katherine of Aragon, and Catherine the Great are most famous.


A POET

More than anything

I want to be,

Eye and heart and ear,

A poet.

I want to see

What others fail

To see;

I want to split

Myself open

And hear.

I want to be

A lake where

Shadows fleet.

I want to seine

Feelings through

My teeth;

I want to drain

Away the spillage

And the dross.

I want to drown

In the world’s

Loss.

I want to be,

More than anything,

A poet.

Prey

I saw a long, lean half wild rangy thing,

Climbing from the creek into the yard.

It slinked its way across the field

On silent feet and stopped, arrested

By the scent of a baby doll left by

The neighbor’s carefree, careless child.

I suppose God must love even cagey things,

Those attracted by the smell of innocence,

Themselves one moment abandoned on the ground,

The next locked in the jaws of something other,

The next, disappearing into dark beneath the trees.

The Bluest Bird

The Bluest Bird

The bluest bird I ever saw was in the middle of the road,

And I, going forty-five on a lane made for fifteen,

Couldn’t stop in time to take a good look, so a quick flit

Of true blue was all I saw lifting into the morning air.

Even I thought it strange that I managed to see the silver and blue

Of the can an oncoming driver lifted as he squeezed past

And the blue sky mirrored in another driver’s shades,

But the shade of the ruby breast on that bluest bird,

I missed, moving way too fast on a road not made for speed

On a silvery morning, missing, too, the tender notes

From a throat that could have lifted me high into a sky so blue

It might have hurt my eyes.