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And thus, we start the backlogging with my collection of poems, since we can get that out of the way in one post. These pretty much span from high school to recently, though the ones I am proud of are mostly from high school, strangely enough. I don't have much of a knack for poetry these days.
(The prompt was to write something political using mythological symbols... I rather liked the result.)
Narcissus
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection
on the shores of San Francisco, even when
fully aware of the difficulties involved
in pulling him out of the water
and coaxing him into a church.
He can't promise his reflection sickness and health
when health is a scarce commodity,
he's stuck with clandestine candlelit dinners
because people are starting to talk,
slipping him the phone numbers of normal girls
rather than watery illusions,
but he doesn’t have the willpower to
walk past mirrors and shop windows
and keep his eyes tightly shut.
They can't be bound together
through life and death and paperwork,
not when gods and goddesses only
regard one as real, and the other
as some unattainable fantasy
who watches from the water,
worrying that some day
Narcissus will evaporate.
(Assignment was to write a simple allusion poem, but I was feeling remarkably bitter at the time.)
Hansel and Gretel
Sometimes I can't help but wonder
if you remember, even a little,
the things I did for you.
While you were locked in
candy cane cages, I worked for you,
starved for you, killed for you
while you idly sucked on lollipops
and watched vacantly, uncomprehending.
You pretended with Father that everything was
perfectly forgiven, that we could be three again
until the next time loneliness makes him weak;
until then, my brother, a trail of breadcrumbs
still winds through the dark forest. Close your
eyes with me and pretend for a second that
we're there again, looking for signs of light
under the closed canopy of trees.
(My first epic narrative poem. D.Gray-Man fans will know where the inspiration came from.)
Siren
I heard once
that across the Red River,
thirty miles south of where
the thornbushes grow wild into a
solid wall, there is a ghost town
in the valley surrounded by mountains.
A ghost town in ruins, each house
missing a roof or a wall, sometimes
just stripped down to its foundation,
and an impermeable layer of black
smog hanging around its streets. Some
people say it was ravaged in the war
a few years back, and some say that
everyone just left one day, and the
still-lit empty houses tore themselves
apart in their loneliness.
One stayed behind.
A small girl in a blue dress that has
grown grayish and dirty with
too much wear, and long,
ash-colored hair that covers her face.
They say if you're very quiet,
and very still, she'll approach you,
tilting her head back to let her
hair slide back off her face. Her eyes
are wide, deep and completely white
and so large they threaten to swallow
her face whole, and she smiles simply
and says in a small voice: "Listen,
traveler, can I sing you a song?"
And if you refuse, she will follow
you all the way to the mountains,
empty eyes pleading, asking
over and over and over,
her voice echoing in your ears
long after you leave.
But I've been told that one day,
a man came to that town
with no baggage and no destination,
and he leaned up against a ruined wall,
waiting for her. And when he was asked,
he smiled back, a bright smile
that lit his gaunt, sunken face. "Please."
Her voice is the center of the sun,
the hot core pouring from her lips
and covering the entire valley
in melted light, and it paralyzes
his every nerve. At first, it is just
tiny fingers drumming up his
spine as each blood vessel vibrates
to her song, the sharps and flats
of a tune vaguely familiar, but
lost somewhere in his memory,
and then it is a numbness sweeping
through his limbs, heart, and mind
until he is detached from his body.
They say she'll be young, they'll both be
young, as long as she keeps singing,
so her song keeps going, repeating,
a little different each time she reaches
the refrain, until her voice breaks
in her throat. She opens her mouth
wide to begin again, only to swallow
cold, empty air.
(This... is probably one of the more personal things I've written. So showing it to people makes me nervous as hell.)
Next Door Neighbor
They all thought I was joking
when I ran into class on April first
and told them I knew the dead boy,
just like the wind was joking
when it drifted in from the South
and tapped him on the shoulder,
nudging him towards
the cold beach, telling him today
was a perfect day to go sailing.
In reality, I remember nothing else
about him than what I'm told I
should be remembering:
he lived in that big blue house
on the other side of our woods,
he liked to ride his bike down
the steep hills of Faith Road,
he always ended up wandering
into our backyard somehow, and
clutching his buzzing walkie-talkie,
he always apologized to my mother.
Yesterday, I found an unmarked tape
on top of the family room cabinet,
and pushed it into the VCR
and I see myself playing catch with a boy,
some gangly red-haired stranger
with glasses, and a smile that shows
all his crooked teeth to the camera.
David, I can't cry for you, not
when you only exist on TV screens.
(No, I'm not just being macabre here, this is based on an actual person! I wrote this one at Sewanee... I worked on it a lot with my instructor, Jason. The first draft looks nothing like it at all.)
Symphony for the Hunter
I don’t know the man who lives there
in the blue Dutch Colonial
covered with creepers and overgrown bushes.
I’ve never seen him out
dragging the barrel-shaped ribcages up his ladder
and pinning them to the high clothesline,
so I know he must be out late at night,
or in the early hours of morning.
It’s easy to tell the most recent bones,
the ones with grooves in the hard, brown surface
where a knife carved out stubborn muscle.
But as the day goes on,
they become blanched by the sun,
and smoothed by the weather,
until they are polished white as piano keys.
The clothesline strains under the increasing weight,
and gusts rock the bones until they meet,
tapping together like the hesitant knuckles
of strangers at the door.
Below the clothesline,
behind the window covered in creepers,
he polishes the barrel of his gun,
and raises his glass to his afternoon music.
(I wrote this a few weeks before I graduated high school.)
Locking Up
Those endless freight trains
that sometimes take fifteen
minutes to pass the crossing
always come through this side of
town late at night.
I used to think
that they were filled with the spoils
of some coal-mining town
from the North,
until I saw the chain of cars
in broad daylight, saw the
sunlight glittering against bent
steel girders and glass.
Blocks away,
it barely has the strength
of a child whistling away
the time on the midday swings,
but even through my classroom
door, slamming through desk
drawers, I can hear its
lazy tune.
The scratched silver surface
of the stressed keyring
tries to bury itself in
teacher's papers
and letters
and gradebooks,
waving me off as if
saying I'm not in as much
of a hurry as I pretend to be.
I press its finger through
the lock, so that the
tip of its nail touches
T.S Elliot's love song,
embedded deep in the wood,
admonishing all that pass it
that love will take them
to the deepest parts of the ocean
and distract them enough
to make them ignore the water
filling their lungs like balloons.
We debated the poem's message,
circling around it like vultures, the same day
my teacher told us,
in a knowing, half-serious tone,
that we do everything
just to feel the diffusion
of warmth from our body to another's,
to feel the friction of hip bones
and get out of bed the next morning
to dress in our parents' clothes,
but the act itself
represents some deep
psychological need to dominate,
to submit, to resolve our feelings
for our mothers and sisters,
and the girl next door
who always had higher standards
than that.
Twisting the key,
the train carries its
one-note tune as
white-hot pinpricks burn
weak holes through
the thick carpet of midnight.
No sky will melt as easily
as the thin New England
sheet of ice that hangs
above the college towns
and mountains of coniferous forests.
The train wanders towards
the river to whistle
to the coal-black water,
to skip stones and watch
the freshwater fireflies
light the ripples.
Winding around the locked hallways,
I slip away from the
cacophonous laughter of
the front parking lot,
following the street lamps to my car
like a military plane
tracing the luminous wake
of its aimless carrier.
(Another rather personal one, written about my grandfather's funeral.)
Valentine's Day
A seven-year old girl sits cross-legged
on the burgundy carpet of the funeral
parlor, pondering the difficulties of
trading plastic bracelets and Happy Meal toys
for a human life.
She reaches into the painted milk carton
and draws out one red envelope after another,
unwrapping the Valentines and laying them out
in uneven rows. She's never gotten
so many Valentines before.
Her eyes barely linger over the
cheerful messages and the careful apologies
as she counts them again, each ascending number
bringing her further and further from the altar
of dripping wax candles and carnations,
and the sweet, dull scent digging into
her black velvet dress that does not
exist outside, that blows away with
the lightest movement of the wind.
Everyone's stopped crying.
She wasn't crying either, not until
she thought she heard
that familiar gravelly voice
murmuring her name
among the whispered hymns.
(Written for college poetry class about my graduation trip to Japan.)
Itadakimasu
Lately, my chopsticks always seem
to splinter when I break them apart.
My friend looks up from her meal to
my maimed utensils and says, “That’s
bad luck, you know,” but I can’t be
concerned because these days
I haven’t been dreading anything.
In Kyoto, the waiter handed me a
fork with my meal, smiling as if
he’d been waiting all his life for
a gaijin to walk in and use it, and
he didn’t listen or didn’t understand
when I told him in my broken accent
that chopsticks were fine.
In Kyoto, I had nothing but bad luck,
the festivals vanished when our train
pulled in and left their masks on the ground
in their hurry, and it took us hours to find
Gion because my friends were too stubborn
to pay for the bus, and Gion was not filled
with geishas and dango but
soundless temples that were locked up tightly
but somehow the front entrance was lined
with perfectly positioned shoes,
and everyone was cranky and sniping
at each other so I wandered to the gift shop
at the top of the hill while they
tossed yen into the vented box and tried
to burn incense without matches,
and all I could find were trivial things
like the faces of Tokugawa’s guards
on origami paper until some monk
showed me the charms hanging
by the register, and he knew each one
in English: safety, love, health,
until he reached the green one and
struggled for a minute until he sheepishly
told me, “Shiawase.”
Happiness.
I would have asked him if it had
the power to ward off a utensil’s curse,
but I didn’t know how to make him
understand me.
(Well, more like prosetry, really, but I still like the idea.)
Four Seconds
It’s been two years, thirty-two days, five hours
and fifty-nine seconds since time stopped.
It was 7:00 in the evening, December 18th,
the sun froze half-dipped below the horizon
and the snow continued to fall, never slowing
or building up on the ground, and the thousands
of clocks throughout the city were stuck mid-chime
and had to be broken. There was no sense of when
to sleep, when to work, and the novelty of snow
angels that melted back into place quickly
wore thin, so the mayor placed the names of
every child who lived there in his hat and
pulled out twelve slips of paper, leading them
up the highest hill and shepherding them into
a ring, their backs turned to each other, and as
he shredded their names into scraps, he assigned
each of them a number, he told
them that they’d be the wardens of time, and
in return, they could choose where to start.
Two was practical, suggesting starting where they stopped.
Six was stubborn, insisting on starting at midnight.
But Eight, staring at her pink snowboots, said
that she could guess the time by the pitch of the
clockwork evening train whistles.
So schools opened again, businesses rumbled to life
like willful machines, and no one thought to
use that hill anymore. But the children found
their own way to speak, though their voices
were useless for anything but counting and chiming,
they scribbled notes and passed them along the circle.
And Twelve, constantly looking for ways to amuse
himself, slipped a note to Eleven one day, nodding
at her to pass it down, and it read, “listen, last night
four seconds before Four I saw time start again,
and we were off the hill – we’d been off for a long time –
riding the evening train to the beach to spend the day
because spring was almost over and the air was humid,
and on the way back we stopped at the marketplace,
nothing special, just buying groceries, but that’s
not the point,” and they knew he was lying
like he always did. But that night, everyone
down in the city sat up in their beds, swearing
they heard the clocks starting up again, chiming
and clanging for only a few seconds though
they’d never been fixed, and
complaints rolled into the mayor’s office the
following morning, and lectures were given
to each child, scolding them, telling them
to stop playing tricks and take their job
seriously, but they were too busy
exchanging wide eyes and hesitant smiles,
nodding as if to confirm that
they’d seen the summer come, too.
(I actually like this one. I like it a whole lot. ♥ Inspired by James Merrill's amazing poem "Lost in Translation.")
Life Underwater
Somewhere
between the time of her two dislocations,
she lost count of the days when she
did not speak to outsiders,
only remembered that
in third grade, she was told she only
had a limited number of words
in her lifetime, and was warned not to waste them.
It was that summer when she lived in an apartment
because the new house was growing mold
and making everyone sick.
The new house was made of dark greens and blues
(the owners had a hangover and couldn’t stomach pastels),
but the apartment was pure cirrus white
as the day it was painted.
She slept on a bed with a quilt
that stole its pattern from the Hilton,
and blinds that refused to keep the light out,
so she moved into the hallway after sunrise,
that windowless hallway that could be closed off
from the living room, and lay next
to the washing machine in the comfortable chill
of the air conditioner, (I’m always told
that my room is too cold.)
She makes long distance calls with her saved words
and complains that the South is encased
in a cumulonimbus, always crackling with lightning
in the late afternoons and into the night,
that there’s always a tornado living in the sky,
always a hurricane lurking in the Caribbean,
(the morning after Frances, she walked out
in her bare feet and pajamas to see how much
the canal had flooded, surveying the downed
trees as the wind whipped at her,
but that was already two years later.)
The complex had a pool, toxic blue
that drenched the air with chlorine,
and she needed a way to pass the time between speaking,
so they made an understood contract,
if just for the summer.
So she made the commitment,
she walked across the complex in the bubbling afternoon heat
and heavy evening humidity,
past the little cat who had an owner
but followed her anyway,
and she drifted from shallow to deep,
never venturing underwater until she bought
goggles from the nearby sports store, because
it would only be frustrating if she couldn’t see.
She laid across the bottom as long as her
limited lungs allow her and watched
the perpetual rainfall ripple across the
shivering surface, courting electrocution
as the sky grew darker and the thunder
crackled outside, but she pretended to be
as deaf as the water. (While Frances
raged outside, her mother told her that
hurricane winds are so strong, thunder
and lightning do not exist inside them.)
August. The contractors still beating away
at the mold, she started high school
that’s wrapped in orange and yellow tape, (even
looking out my window, I see machines
digging meaningless ditches),
and she wondered if it would be a betrayal
to exist there, (she exists, but not as long
as she’d like). She doesn’t have enough
saved words left to make a long distance call
and complain about the empty green of a
Southern autumn. The downpour had tapered
off, but she did not notice until she absently
looked up one morning and was followed all day
by its dark purple spot.
(Today is the third day of rain, and I
don’t hear voices, or laughter, or
the sound of feet across the ground.
All I hear is that rhythmic splash
and patter against the windows,
the sound that swallows everything.)
(This one was me trying out a more spare style. Still don't know if it worked...)
Elegy for Summer
june.
Only the third inning
and I was already squinting,
the sun in my eyes, legs stuck to bleachers,
my fingers pulling the matted fur of a
spaniel belonging to my brother’s teammate’s mother.
The ball whipped through the air,
and I saw her not-yet rare smile bloom,
even in the heat.
july.
You had nothing to worry about.
You were always better
at skipping stones.
They were our every whims:
bare feet against searing pavement
and sharp gravel, fireworks over the lake,
a balancing act on our shared inner tube, and
your brilliant plans that never ran out.
Your lake house had a pulse,
a thud of well water within the walls that
never masks the sound of screaming college boys
and their naked bodies hitting the water every night.
My mattress creaked and tilted
as you crawled over me, head out the open window,
giggling behind your hand.
I closed my eyes and wished for thunder.
august.
I only swam once,
but I kicked the barnacles against the dock.
Alone in the water,
I sidestroked to the shore
covered in crabs and glass.
And I do believe we'll stop there!
(The prompt was to write something political using mythological symbols... I rather liked the result.)
Narcissus
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection
on the shores of San Francisco, even when
fully aware of the difficulties involved
in pulling him out of the water
and coaxing him into a church.
He can't promise his reflection sickness and health
when health is a scarce commodity,
he's stuck with clandestine candlelit dinners
because people are starting to talk,
slipping him the phone numbers of normal girls
rather than watery illusions,
but he doesn’t have the willpower to
walk past mirrors and shop windows
and keep his eyes tightly shut.
They can't be bound together
through life and death and paperwork,
not when gods and goddesses only
regard one as real, and the other
as some unattainable fantasy
who watches from the water,
worrying that some day
Narcissus will evaporate.
(Assignment was to write a simple allusion poem, but I was feeling remarkably bitter at the time.)
Hansel and Gretel
Sometimes I can't help but wonder
if you remember, even a little,
the things I did for you.
While you were locked in
candy cane cages, I worked for you,
starved for you, killed for you
while you idly sucked on lollipops
and watched vacantly, uncomprehending.
You pretended with Father that everything was
perfectly forgiven, that we could be three again
until the next time loneliness makes him weak;
until then, my brother, a trail of breadcrumbs
still winds through the dark forest. Close your
eyes with me and pretend for a second that
we're there again, looking for signs of light
under the closed canopy of trees.
(My first epic narrative poem. D.Gray-Man fans will know where the inspiration came from.)
Siren
I heard once
that across the Red River,
thirty miles south of where
the thornbushes grow wild into a
solid wall, there is a ghost town
in the valley surrounded by mountains.
A ghost town in ruins, each house
missing a roof or a wall, sometimes
just stripped down to its foundation,
and an impermeable layer of black
smog hanging around its streets. Some
people say it was ravaged in the war
a few years back, and some say that
everyone just left one day, and the
still-lit empty houses tore themselves
apart in their loneliness.
One stayed behind.
A small girl in a blue dress that has
grown grayish and dirty with
too much wear, and long,
ash-colored hair that covers her face.
They say if you're very quiet,
and very still, she'll approach you,
tilting her head back to let her
hair slide back off her face. Her eyes
are wide, deep and completely white
and so large they threaten to swallow
her face whole, and she smiles simply
and says in a small voice: "Listen,
traveler, can I sing you a song?"
And if you refuse, she will follow
you all the way to the mountains,
empty eyes pleading, asking
over and over and over,
her voice echoing in your ears
long after you leave.
But I've been told that one day,
a man came to that town
with no baggage and no destination,
and he leaned up against a ruined wall,
waiting for her. And when he was asked,
he smiled back, a bright smile
that lit his gaunt, sunken face. "Please."
Her voice is the center of the sun,
the hot core pouring from her lips
and covering the entire valley
in melted light, and it paralyzes
his every nerve. At first, it is just
tiny fingers drumming up his
spine as each blood vessel vibrates
to her song, the sharps and flats
of a tune vaguely familiar, but
lost somewhere in his memory,
and then it is a numbness sweeping
through his limbs, heart, and mind
until he is detached from his body.
They say she'll be young, they'll both be
young, as long as she keeps singing,
so her song keeps going, repeating,
a little different each time she reaches
the refrain, until her voice breaks
in her throat. She opens her mouth
wide to begin again, only to swallow
cold, empty air.
(This... is probably one of the more personal things I've written. So showing it to people makes me nervous as hell.)
Next Door Neighbor
They all thought I was joking
when I ran into class on April first
and told them I knew the dead boy,
just like the wind was joking
when it drifted in from the South
and tapped him on the shoulder,
nudging him towards
the cold beach, telling him today
was a perfect day to go sailing.
In reality, I remember nothing else
about him than what I'm told I
should be remembering:
he lived in that big blue house
on the other side of our woods,
he liked to ride his bike down
the steep hills of Faith Road,
he always ended up wandering
into our backyard somehow, and
clutching his buzzing walkie-talkie,
he always apologized to my mother.
Yesterday, I found an unmarked tape
on top of the family room cabinet,
and pushed it into the VCR
and I see myself playing catch with a boy,
some gangly red-haired stranger
with glasses, and a smile that shows
all his crooked teeth to the camera.
David, I can't cry for you, not
when you only exist on TV screens.
(No, I'm not just being macabre here, this is based on an actual person! I wrote this one at Sewanee... I worked on it a lot with my instructor, Jason. The first draft looks nothing like it at all.)
Symphony for the Hunter
I don’t know the man who lives there
in the blue Dutch Colonial
covered with creepers and overgrown bushes.
I’ve never seen him out
dragging the barrel-shaped ribcages up his ladder
and pinning them to the high clothesline,
so I know he must be out late at night,
or in the early hours of morning.
It’s easy to tell the most recent bones,
the ones with grooves in the hard, brown surface
where a knife carved out stubborn muscle.
But as the day goes on,
they become blanched by the sun,
and smoothed by the weather,
until they are polished white as piano keys.
The clothesline strains under the increasing weight,
and gusts rock the bones until they meet,
tapping together like the hesitant knuckles
of strangers at the door.
Below the clothesline,
behind the window covered in creepers,
he polishes the barrel of his gun,
and raises his glass to his afternoon music.
(I wrote this a few weeks before I graduated high school.)
Locking Up
Those endless freight trains
that sometimes take fifteen
minutes to pass the crossing
always come through this side of
town late at night.
I used to think
that they were filled with the spoils
of some coal-mining town
from the North,
until I saw the chain of cars
in broad daylight, saw the
sunlight glittering against bent
steel girders and glass.
Blocks away,
it barely has the strength
of a child whistling away
the time on the midday swings,
but even through my classroom
door, slamming through desk
drawers, I can hear its
lazy tune.
The scratched silver surface
of the stressed keyring
tries to bury itself in
teacher's papers
and letters
and gradebooks,
waving me off as if
saying I'm not in as much
of a hurry as I pretend to be.
I press its finger through
the lock, so that the
tip of its nail touches
T.S Elliot's love song,
embedded deep in the wood,
admonishing all that pass it
that love will take them
to the deepest parts of the ocean
and distract them enough
to make them ignore the water
filling their lungs like balloons.
We debated the poem's message,
circling around it like vultures, the same day
my teacher told us,
in a knowing, half-serious tone,
that we do everything
just to feel the diffusion
of warmth from our body to another's,
to feel the friction of hip bones
and get out of bed the next morning
to dress in our parents' clothes,
but the act itself
represents some deep
psychological need to dominate,
to submit, to resolve our feelings
for our mothers and sisters,
and the girl next door
who always had higher standards
than that.
Twisting the key,
the train carries its
one-note tune as
white-hot pinpricks burn
weak holes through
the thick carpet of midnight.
No sky will melt as easily
as the thin New England
sheet of ice that hangs
above the college towns
and mountains of coniferous forests.
The train wanders towards
the river to whistle
to the coal-black water,
to skip stones and watch
the freshwater fireflies
light the ripples.
Winding around the locked hallways,
I slip away from the
cacophonous laughter of
the front parking lot,
following the street lamps to my car
like a military plane
tracing the luminous wake
of its aimless carrier.
(Another rather personal one, written about my grandfather's funeral.)
Valentine's Day
A seven-year old girl sits cross-legged
on the burgundy carpet of the funeral
parlor, pondering the difficulties of
trading plastic bracelets and Happy Meal toys
for a human life.
She reaches into the painted milk carton
and draws out one red envelope after another,
unwrapping the Valentines and laying them out
in uneven rows. She's never gotten
so many Valentines before.
Her eyes barely linger over the
cheerful messages and the careful apologies
as she counts them again, each ascending number
bringing her further and further from the altar
of dripping wax candles and carnations,
and the sweet, dull scent digging into
her black velvet dress that does not
exist outside, that blows away with
the lightest movement of the wind.
Everyone's stopped crying.
She wasn't crying either, not until
she thought she heard
that familiar gravelly voice
murmuring her name
among the whispered hymns.
(Written for college poetry class about my graduation trip to Japan.)
Itadakimasu
Lately, my chopsticks always seem
to splinter when I break them apart.
My friend looks up from her meal to
my maimed utensils and says, “That’s
bad luck, you know,” but I can’t be
concerned because these days
I haven’t been dreading anything.
In Kyoto, the waiter handed me a
fork with my meal, smiling as if
he’d been waiting all his life for
a gaijin to walk in and use it, and
he didn’t listen or didn’t understand
when I told him in my broken accent
that chopsticks were fine.
In Kyoto, I had nothing but bad luck,
the festivals vanished when our train
pulled in and left their masks on the ground
in their hurry, and it took us hours to find
Gion because my friends were too stubborn
to pay for the bus, and Gion was not filled
with geishas and dango but
soundless temples that were locked up tightly
but somehow the front entrance was lined
with perfectly positioned shoes,
and everyone was cranky and sniping
at each other so I wandered to the gift shop
at the top of the hill while they
tossed yen into the vented box and tried
to burn incense without matches,
and all I could find were trivial things
like the faces of Tokugawa’s guards
on origami paper until some monk
showed me the charms hanging
by the register, and he knew each one
in English: safety, love, health,
until he reached the green one and
struggled for a minute until he sheepishly
told me, “Shiawase.”
Happiness.
I would have asked him if it had
the power to ward off a utensil’s curse,
but I didn’t know how to make him
understand me.
(Well, more like prosetry, really, but I still like the idea.)
Four Seconds
It’s been two years, thirty-two days, five hours
and fifty-nine seconds since time stopped.
It was 7:00 in the evening, December 18th,
the sun froze half-dipped below the horizon
and the snow continued to fall, never slowing
or building up on the ground, and the thousands
of clocks throughout the city were stuck mid-chime
and had to be broken. There was no sense of when
to sleep, when to work, and the novelty of snow
angels that melted back into place quickly
wore thin, so the mayor placed the names of
every child who lived there in his hat and
pulled out twelve slips of paper, leading them
up the highest hill and shepherding them into
a ring, their backs turned to each other, and as
he shredded their names into scraps, he assigned
each of them a number, he told
them that they’d be the wardens of time, and
in return, they could choose where to start.
Two was practical, suggesting starting where they stopped.
Six was stubborn, insisting on starting at midnight.
But Eight, staring at her pink snowboots, said
that she could guess the time by the pitch of the
clockwork evening train whistles.
So schools opened again, businesses rumbled to life
like willful machines, and no one thought to
use that hill anymore. But the children found
their own way to speak, though their voices
were useless for anything but counting and chiming,
they scribbled notes and passed them along the circle.
And Twelve, constantly looking for ways to amuse
himself, slipped a note to Eleven one day, nodding
at her to pass it down, and it read, “listen, last night
four seconds before Four I saw time start again,
and we were off the hill – we’d been off for a long time –
riding the evening train to the beach to spend the day
because spring was almost over and the air was humid,
and on the way back we stopped at the marketplace,
nothing special, just buying groceries, but that’s
not the point,” and they knew he was lying
like he always did. But that night, everyone
down in the city sat up in their beds, swearing
they heard the clocks starting up again, chiming
and clanging for only a few seconds though
they’d never been fixed, and
complaints rolled into the mayor’s office the
following morning, and lectures were given
to each child, scolding them, telling them
to stop playing tricks and take their job
seriously, but they were too busy
exchanging wide eyes and hesitant smiles,
nodding as if to confirm that
they’d seen the summer come, too.
(I actually like this one. I like it a whole lot. ♥ Inspired by James Merrill's amazing poem "Lost in Translation.")
Life Underwater
Somewhere
between the time of her two dislocations,
she lost count of the days when she
did not speak to outsiders,
only remembered that
in third grade, she was told she only
had a limited number of words
in her lifetime, and was warned not to waste them.
It was that summer when she lived in an apartment
because the new house was growing mold
and making everyone sick.
The new house was made of dark greens and blues
(the owners had a hangover and couldn’t stomach pastels),
but the apartment was pure cirrus white
as the day it was painted.
She slept on a bed with a quilt
that stole its pattern from the Hilton,
and blinds that refused to keep the light out,
so she moved into the hallway after sunrise,
that windowless hallway that could be closed off
from the living room, and lay next
to the washing machine in the comfortable chill
of the air conditioner, (I’m always told
that my room is too cold.)
She makes long distance calls with her saved words
and complains that the South is encased
in a cumulonimbus, always crackling with lightning
in the late afternoons and into the night,
that there’s always a tornado living in the sky,
always a hurricane lurking in the Caribbean,
(the morning after Frances, she walked out
in her bare feet and pajamas to see how much
the canal had flooded, surveying the downed
trees as the wind whipped at her,
but that was already two years later.)
The complex had a pool, toxic blue
that drenched the air with chlorine,
and she needed a way to pass the time between speaking,
so they made an understood contract,
if just for the summer.
So she made the commitment,
she walked across the complex in the bubbling afternoon heat
and heavy evening humidity,
past the little cat who had an owner
but followed her anyway,
and she drifted from shallow to deep,
never venturing underwater until she bought
goggles from the nearby sports store, because
it would only be frustrating if she couldn’t see.
She laid across the bottom as long as her
limited lungs allow her and watched
the perpetual rainfall ripple across the
shivering surface, courting electrocution
as the sky grew darker and the thunder
crackled outside, but she pretended to be
as deaf as the water. (While Frances
raged outside, her mother told her that
hurricane winds are so strong, thunder
and lightning do not exist inside them.)
August. The contractors still beating away
at the mold, she started high school
that’s wrapped in orange and yellow tape, (even
looking out my window, I see machines
digging meaningless ditches),
and she wondered if it would be a betrayal
to exist there, (she exists, but not as long
as she’d like). She doesn’t have enough
saved words left to make a long distance call
and complain about the empty green of a
Southern autumn. The downpour had tapered
off, but she did not notice until she absently
looked up one morning and was followed all day
by its dark purple spot.
(Today is the third day of rain, and I
don’t hear voices, or laughter, or
the sound of feet across the ground.
All I hear is that rhythmic splash
and patter against the windows,
the sound that swallows everything.)
(This one was me trying out a more spare style. Still don't know if it worked...)
Elegy for Summer
june.
Only the third inning
and I was already squinting,
the sun in my eyes, legs stuck to bleachers,
my fingers pulling the matted fur of a
spaniel belonging to my brother’s teammate’s mother.
The ball whipped through the air,
and I saw her not-yet rare smile bloom,
even in the heat.
july.
You had nothing to worry about.
You were always better
at skipping stones.
They were our every whims:
bare feet against searing pavement
and sharp gravel, fireworks over the lake,
a balancing act on our shared inner tube, and
your brilliant plans that never ran out.
Your lake house had a pulse,
a thud of well water within the walls that
never masks the sound of screaming college boys
and their naked bodies hitting the water every night.
My mattress creaked and tilted
as you crawled over me, head out the open window,
giggling behind your hand.
I closed my eyes and wished for thunder.
august.
I only swam once,
but I kicked the barnacles against the dock.
Alone in the water,
I sidestroked to the shore
covered in crabs and glass.
And I do believe we'll stop there!
