the octopus murder ballad

Tags

animals, bees, octopus, poems, poetry, writing

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and perhaps that statement is never more true than in the animal kingdom. In June, I posted a story that involved a woman and a wasp attack. A couple nights ago, my sister called and told me an equally harrowing tale about how she had recently been attacked by a swarm of bees that came out of the ground! I knew some bees lived in the ground, but not massive hives of them.

In the same story, the narrator explained some of the more gruesome aspects of octopus reproduction—aspects I was unaware of when I first started writing octo stories back in 2015 or so. It turns out that in many cases, while the octos are getting their groove on, the female decides to strangle the male to death and eat him. That’s also her last meal, because she stops eating once she lays her eggs, and she dies around the time they hatch.

Nature is brutal!

Anyway, that should explain this poem whose title and lines are all eight syllables.

The Octopus Murder Ballad

Understand that with my three hearts,
I will love you three times as much:
passion signed in triplicate,
so you will always be with me.

You have all I long desired:
perception, beauty, daring, strength.
You outshine others like a star,
a blazing sun to stay with me.

You give me life and then you won’t
stop struggling. I thought you loved me.
I thought you wanted me. Husband.
Lover. You promised to help me.

Become this. Become us. We will
fill the ocean with our children.
You will die and I will eat you,
and we will never be apart.

it’s a dry heat

Tags

flood, memoir, poems, poetry, rain, writing

After twenty years in Phoenix, I thought I had seen it all. The monsoon season that peaks around August in Phoenix had done some terrible things to me. Once, I got caught on my bike in pitch-black night in a combination dust storm and rainstorm that was like a sheet of mud pouring right out of the sky.

Another time, I was trapped on my scooter in the middle of flooded streets, and cars and busses were trying to get past me in the dark, splashing massive waves against me, and I was pretty sure I was going to die before I got back to my lightless, powerless apartment to see if my cat was okay.

I guess at some point you just accept death as an option and keep going.

Tucson’s monsoons this year started earlier than I recall those in Phoenix rolling in, but they are no less violent. Last week, I got caught walking home from the store by a dust storm that turned the entire sky brown. Two days later, I got caught walking in one of the most insane rainstorms I have seen in twenty years. The big drops of sprinkles started in, and it wasn’t even minutes until I thought I was going to be knocked off my feet by the wind and drowned in the deluge at the side of the road. Cars and busses were pulling over because drivers couldn’t even see. By the time I made it home, I was drenched from head to foot.

So, Tucson monsoons surrounded by mountains and lightning, here is a poem for you. Now please stop trying to kill me.

The Flood

Grey mountains perforated the
underbelly of a great cloud
that admitted no horizon,
until nothing held back the rain.

City streets drowned, and vehicles
lost their way, taking with them
drivers, children, and families,
until no one held back the rain.

The entire valley filled with
rolling, churning torrents darkened
by earth and history of earth,
until no rim held back the rain.

No mortal knows what lies beyond,
where only floodwaters venture.
The deluge keeps her secrets well,
and she never forgets the rain.

seven short poems

Tags

poems, poetry, singing spell, writing

These seven seven-line poems go with a new short story called The Singing Spell, which should be ready to share soon. The subjects relate to the story, and the first letters of each line spell out the poem’s title. It’s not a form I usually work in, but I thought it would be fun to try something different.

PATCHES

Pressed close to the ground,
a solitary huntress hungers
to taste what scurries and forages unaware.

Calico colors—brown, black, and white—
hide her in the sun-dappled forest floor.

Everything comes down to
survival.

BILLION

Before history,
I knew you
like a light or a
lyric or the
iridescence of a hummingbird.

Only now,
nothing separates us.

NEBULAE

Nurseries of infant stars,
expectant giants and
black holes hungering for birth,
ushered into a theater of
light and violent gravity where
all who ever lived await
eternity’s epilogue.

MINERAL

Maybe next time,
I come back a stone.
Nowhere to go or
escape, just
rock.

Alabaster.
Limestone.

SERPENT

Sometimes you need to shed
everything to find the
right skin.

Pent-up explosions
emerge as something new.

No one ever mourned
the cell she escaped.

FORTUNE

Fate remains silent,
only speaking in unsolved mysteries.

Road signs vanish, and
travelers lose their way
until that unexpected
night, when
everything at last makes sense.

HIGHWAY

How we got here
is less important than why.

Go as far as your
heart can take you, and
when you reach the
arid edge of time,
you will find me.

illustrations from ‘art of birds’

Tags

animals, art, art of birds, birds, drawings, jack schmitt, jack unruh, pablo neruda

I recently shared a couple poems from the 1985 illustrated edition of Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Art of Birds. I guess I got lucky last year, scoring an old library copy for less than $20, because prices on any edition of this book are now pretty steep. Here are four of Jack Unruh‘s bird drawings that accompany Jack Schmitt’s translations of the poems.

black-necked swan

andean condor

many-colored rush-tyrant

chimango caracara

 

 

pablo neruda: mebird

Tags

art of birds, birds, pablo neruda, poems, poetry

It looks like several people enjoyed the previous post featuring a poem about a bird from Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds. I mentioned that all but the first and last poems in the collection are about one specific species of bird, but the second-to-last poem takes a liberty with that idea. In it, having painted dozens of magically expressive verbal portraits of birds, Neruda considers himself as a bird.

MeBird (Pablo insulidae nigra)

I am the Pablo Bird,
bird of a single feather,
a flier in the clear shadow
and obscure clarity,
my wings are unseen,
my ears resound
when I walk among the trees
or beneath the tombstones
like an unlucky umbrella
or a naked sword,
stretched like a bow
or round like a grape,
I fly on and on not knowing,
wounded in the dark night,
who is waiting for me,
who does not want my song,
who desires my death,
who will not know I’m arriving,
who will not come to subdue me,
to bleed me, to twist me,
or to kiss my clothes,
torn by the shrieking wind.

That’s why I come and go,
fly and don’t fly but sing:
I am the furious bird
of the calm storm.

pablo neruda: austral blackbird

Tags

art of birds, austral blackbird, birds, pablo neruda, poems, poetry

Last year, I got an illustrated hardcover edition of Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds, translated by Jack Schmitt with drawings by Jack Unruh. It was a bit of an accident, since I thought I was ordering a bilingual edition, and I wish this volume included the original Spanish. But even without the originals, this is a very cool addition to my Neruda collection. Every poem (with the exception of the first and last) is about one specific species of bird, and many of them are right up there with Neruda’s best and more well-known poems.

The following poem is about the austral blackbird, which I had never heard of before, so here is a link to read a little more about this bird, see a picture, and listen to 30 seconds of its unique song.

Austral Blackbird (curaeus curaeus)

Whoever looks at me face-to-face
I shall kill with two knives,
with two furious lightning bolts:
with two icy black eyes.

I was not born for captivity.

I have a wild army,
a militant militia,
a battalion of black bullets:
no seeded field can withstand.

I fly, devour, screech, and move on,
rise and fall with a thousand wings:
nothing can stop my determination,
the black order of my feathers.

My soul is a burned log,
my plumage pure coal:
my soul and suit are black:
that’s why I dance in the white sky.

I am the Black Floridor.

seedlings

Tags

poems, poetry, seedlings, seeds

Revised March 2019 based on workshop feedback.

seedlings

ideas and emotions are seeds
longing to sprout
unfurling green to capture the sun

they might live for centuries
or be wrapped in fire
presented as gifts to the blackening sky

they might become medicine or poison
they might drink their fill or die of thirst
they might flourish in obscurity
or wither under the attention of millions

they might fill a forest like soldiers
marching in chaotic ranks to the coast
or stand isolated on the cliff edge
where no one sleeps in their branches

seeds neither know nor care for any of this
gravity tugs their roots
the sun summons leaves
the stalk joins earth to heaven

the seedling wants to grow
yet desires nothing
seeking light
without ever looking

its substance and soul
are one and the same

eclipse

Tags

drawing, eclipse, pastel, planets, poems, poetry

eclipse

when the sun disappears
we dance in its umbra

embracing lightless silence
where mockingbirds dare not fly

darkness belongs to bodies
we plant kisses like seeds

and if one star
carves its absence like a scar

then you and i are healing
in the wound

Pastel Planets 1

pollen

Tags

bees, poems, poetry, pollen, wild roses

pollen

words we create together
for each other
lavender-scented and improvised
bloom like wild roses in a field
untidy and free
scattered in summer sunlight
delicate as lace

our blossoms want to stay
unplucked from our stems
we cover this field
in a scent we share
embracing bees
who drink from us

we hold them close within our petals
for moments we never recapture
but always remember
giving grains of pollen like gifts

paper-thin wings
carry our presents
to distant lovers we never meet
flowers who want to taste and touch us
to grow as we have grown
and fill this place
with creations of their own

simple

Tags

poems, poetry, writing

Revised March 2019 based on workshop feedback.

simple

you make life sound so simple

as if we could feast on angels’ corpses
dragging tomorrow over us
like a blanket

as if we could inhale
the first breath of stars
and claim their color as our own

to you this all makes sense

the way a song splashes on stones
bathed in light
rocks never see

how water holds a person aloft
when she dreams of drowning
and forgetting

you come here all the time

to this windowless shelter full of holes
this expanse that ceases
at your fingertips

you call it home
and it answers you
in silence and thunder

blackout poems from the archives

Tags

Blackout, poems, poetry, redaction, writing, writing prompts

While organizing my writing files today, I found my collection of blackout poems from a few years ago. Some were eventually combined or otherwise transformed into poems I published in Anything Sounds Like a Symphony. If you’re looking for off-beat inspiration for your own poetry adventures, give this method a shot. I didn’t invent it. It came to me through a friend of Austin Kleon, who made a name for himself doing this to pages of newspapers and launched a successful series of books including Newspaper Blackout and the New York Times Bestseller Steal Like an Artist.

I didn’t use newspapers, but a stack of National Geographic and old Playboy magazines, and odds and ends like an issue of Seattle’s Stranger.

You can do it with anything! In a writing course I took last January from Joanne Fedler, we did a similar exercise with our own material. We started with free-writing based on our recent dreams, just filling the pages with anything that came to mind, and then we highlighted only the most captivating words or short phrases. We used those as prompts for additional writing, like new starting points, but my highlighted pages resembled a blackout poem. Anyway, here’s the lot of them, from the archives.

 

 

history

Tags

history, poems, poetry, writing

history

some objects crave stories
like the restaurant receipt you find
in a used book of poems

or the face carved in palm tree bark
on your walk home
from the bus stop

the lavender tops of a mountain ridge
silhouetted against the soft peach of sunset
demand a history

the truth of their geology moving in slow centuries
collides every night with astronomy
to tell a different tale

embrace the miniscule
the details
in their honest inconsequence

they are undiscovered fragments of giants
waiting for you to weld them with words
unique narrations tying threads together

symbols find meaning
only when married
to other symbols

all mine
lead back
to you

dawn

Tags

dawn, poems, poetry, writing

dawn

at dawn the trees awake
with your name on their lips
unfurling your syllables on every leaf

tributaries of sap
running clearly to the edges
like resonant waves from a bell

a microcellular song
carried to thirsting branches
to reach above the horizon
and reunite this earth with heaven

like the trees you create the air i breathe
and shelter for the birds
flying from my heart
in every direction
seeking home

nestled in your boughs
where last night
stars danced and descended
to converse with shadows
and show them
what gave birth
to light

deconstruction

Tags

deconstruction, poems, poetry, wall, writing

deconstruction

bricks
gathered and mortared
under lightning
immune to the sky-cracking blast
but not the pickaxe
not the jackhammer

water you endured
always more water
deluge of the desert
borderless within its hour

forgotten in the desiccated day
receding into memory
until people forget to pray
for what will quench them

thirst they slake with other means
dehydrating like meat in the sun
cooking like heroin in a spoon
all to be extinguished

 

men work to destroy
what men have built
then rebuild it

unlike ants who always construct
always repair
forever expanding

 

you take days to crumble
resisting the hands of strangers

glorious rebel of stone
uncouth fortification
senseless monument

silent ferocity
honest façade
they will cart you away for burial

then dig you up again
to deduce your purpose

 

what did any of it mean
sullen edifice guarding nothing
beneath a conspiracy of pillars
and a swarm of false fires

factories where noise is born
where chaotic life is forged
into merciless order of steel
and unforgiving plastics

what did it mean to you
solid barrier protecting specters
intangible ideas of property
profit and pavement

 

how they burned to break you
without considering how you destroyed them
as they deconstructed you
how you eroded those who carved you

sending them to be sequestered
unearthed later like artifacts
discovered and debated
but never
truly
known

union

Tags

poems, poetry, union, writing

union

accidents of birth have separated us
but they did not last for long

i loved you before we met
and always after you leave

how could we be apart
when the sunrise bears your signature
birds carve your name below the clouds
and no one can count your colors

you are this morning and the following onslaught
the shade and the respite
the chill
the darkness and the forgetting

you are the memory
the thread that sews me to tomorrow
the fullness and the emptiness
and all that comes between

how could i not love your light
reflecting for the first time
from buildings i never noticed
until this morning

you are the quiet space between passing cars
the silent animation in the palm trees
the slowly vanishing shadows
of the city’s slumber

what would i care for this minute
this millennium
if it did not carry your name
in every crevice and every peak
and all the undiscovered spaces

i am but a speck
a mote of dust
a whisper daring to dream it is alive
and achieving nothing

but in your arms
i am everything

writers

Tags

poems, poetry, writers, writing

writers

you drank away
everything i ever owned

it burned a hole inside you
until nothing was left
but unpaid bills

stains on the furniture
pages full of imaginary heroes
you son of a bitch

i threw them out
you writers are all the same
in love with any life but this one

even when you slept beside me
you thought of someone else

 

cassette

Tags

alice in chains, blast tyrant, cassette, clutch, memoir, music, passive restraints, poems, poetry, rock, we die young

cassette

neither of us was emotionally stable
when she made me a mix tape
in the mid nineties

we listened to it on the highway
without a reason to be there
except for driving at unreasonable volume

two songs on that cassette stayed with me
we die young by alice in chains
and passive restraints by clutch

as just another grunge member of generation x
i should have heard alice in chains before 1997
but i ignored commercial radio all my adult life

we die young retains their hair metal sensibility
while foreshadowing the heavy suicidal brilliance
of subsequent albums

but the clutch tune eclipsed it
combining a description of cars
with sexual power and surrender

expressing things i felt for her
but she felt for someone else
and i should have known that

early clutch riffs are not difficult
beginners can play them
but their ferocity and massive sound remain unmatched

when we saw clutch in pontiac they were just okay
though other times ive seen them
are among my favorite concerts

in hindsight it says a lot about my twenties
not really formed yet as a person
i was in the process of becoming someone else

it didn’t surprise me when layne staley died
he sang about heroin addiction and death
so it felt more predictable than the weather

what really surprised me
was how clutch recorded album after album
blowing away even that first impetus ep

and if i had to pick one perfect rock album
to listen to for the rest of my life
it would be blast tyrant

maybe everyone has an album like that
one that never grows old
no matter how many years go by

ive become more cynical and set in my ways
but every time i hear those songs
i miss her

 

 

 

resident

Tags

poems, poetry, resident

resident

before silence erased everything
you could go to bed
with jet engines ringing in your ears

the roaring railway serenade
cacophony of car crash lullabies
then emptiness

now you lie awake in solitude
unable to imagine what came before

not a drop remains
no sine wave nor vibration
only sickening tranquility

no one arrives to set you on fire
and toss the gas can
on your smoldering corpse

no one even remembers
where you live

shelter

Tags

Cat, ellie, poems, poetry, shelter, writing

shelter

that night we hid from rain
under cover of a metal carport
lightning crackled overhead
and the warning drizzle became an onslaught

i only felt safe with you
it didn’t matter how long we hid
so long as we stayed together
your sense of adventure inspired me

your intractable desire to hunt
encouraged me
your constant presence at my side
comforted me

to hell with the storm
for thinking it trapped us
together
we were never cornered

that parking lot belonged to us
we hunted across its asphalt expanse
exterminating the small things
locusts moths and lengths of string

property lines and contracts we did not recognize
agreements of strangers we did not recognize
we owned our hunting ground
for as long as we survived

hours passed beneath our metal canopy
before the clouds relented
we acknowledged their awesome power
no different from ours

forces of nature
embodiments of will
we gloried in the surrounding chaos
knowing we were its equals

i have never forgotten your eyes
your nearness at night
how you touched your face to mine
saying everything without language

but i have often wished
to live as you lived
to demand this earth obey me
and answer to my whim

to remain indomitable
when hope evaporated
to rule everything
when nothing
belonged
to me

—for Ellie Kitty, who loved to take me on walks at 3 a.m., whatever the weather.

weightless

Tags

dreams, gravity, poems, poetry, weightless

weightless

let us remain weightless
high above earth’s orbit
intangible spirits
untroubled by time
and its disasters

do you see how they scurry below us
frightened by storms that find them
terrified by a future they cannot predict
but arrives in solid armor
crushing everything in its path

is that what you wish for us

to be physical and real
to empty every drinking glass eventually
to wither away and become nothing
untraceable specks in a landscape
no one remembers
not even our children

consider
my counteroffer

let us remain weightless
and only touch them in their dreams
where we do and say what we please

let our only gravity be emotions
they remember for moments in the morning
then disregard

let us live more lives than one
an endless stream of biographies
we shape and redefine
only temporarily imprisoned
in a parade of faces
and memories
that never happened

let us meet them
in gardens untended
in buildings unconstructed
never becoming as real
as those we encounter

let us remain weightless
only touching life at its edges
like tourists who long to see a country
without immersing
in its wars or politics

when you and i become dreams
we will swim vast oceans
with no more commitment
than dipping our toes in the surf
without ever leaving
this place beyond it all

where we are forever unknowable
always seen
and never
ever
touched