Open Studio Poem #17
disco
lickety-split
splendid
magenta
Fairies shelter behind the disco ball
hung in the portal to the kingdom of odd.
After sunset, they emerge lickety-split,
and all night they dance through the city,
their magenta wings flashing splendid
in the lights of streets, and traffic, and stars.
The other occupants of the Open Studio are out to get me, as you can see. But I know where that disco ball hangs, and I know the fairies, too.
I’m reduced to looking up old prompts and combining them. This is the result of two: “make up the world,” and “new proverb.”
PROVERBIAL
In this world, nine stitches
hold Time together.
You’ll need waxed thread,
a curved bookbinder’s needle.
When you have finished
sewing up Time’s spine,
all the eggs in your basket
will hatch at once. One swallow
will settle on your hand
to twitter up the summer
and two will call from a bush,
then lead you on.
Follow them to a meadow
where a red morning sky
is opening the roses.
All the horses you have wished for
will thunder from the mountains.
Choose one and look in its mouth,
but don’t believe a word.
According to some very early writers, it was on March 23 that God created Adam.
MARCH 23
On this day, or so they say,
God created Man,
gave him an Eden to tend.
Adam, God’s gardener—
Oh well. And then he fell,
and thus began the end.
LOCATIONS
“. . around the edges of oddness”
~A Bluebird Fairy by Emily Anderson
You won’t find it
in halls of ivy, or
in the chambers of kings.
It isn’t between the covers
of carefully curated
volumes available only
to members with reservations.
Never in anything
organized
by color or size.
Never in anything glossed
or listed or rewarded.
But look!
It’s teetering on a tooth
from a reconstructed
conodont. Spinning
on the rim of a sixpence
balanced on a pole
balanced on the rubber
nose of a clown
riding a unicycle on
a tightrope stretched
between a stormcloud
and the beak of a raven.
It’s lurking in the garden dirt
under the left thumbnail
of the weaver’s second
daughter. If you want it,
you might start there.
Garden Party
in honor of ol’ Walt Kelly
We are dancing on a dingbat
in the fury of a gale
while a wiley alligator
winds a kitestring on his tail,
and we do not have to worry
if the fury can’t abate,
for the foolish old bassoon man
has a catfish on his plate
and the streamlined fancy foremast
casts a shadow on our fate.
O, the moral of the story
is the wellspring of the fool,
and the quarrel of the sorry
is the spinning of the spool.
When the roses grow forgotten
in the gardens of the moon
and the chickens all fly skyward
on the string of the balloon,
when the demons do their darndest
to knock acorns from the tree
and the long-awaited pirate ship
comes sailing from the sea,
then we’ll know it’s time to cut the cake
and have a cup of tea.
O, the moral of the story
is the wellspring of the fool,
and the quarrel of the sorry
is the spinning of the spool.
I wrote this ages ago, in imitation of the great Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” poetry.
DOUBLE DACTYLS
Written over a period of several months. Try it sometime. . .
1.
Hopalong Cassidy
rode into London, his
horse was worn out from the
long ocean dip.
Hop said “The horse is so
antediluvian
next time I’ll make it an
aeroplane trip.”
2.
Thomas Sterns Eliot
wrote lots of poetry,
most of it excellent;
much of it sold.
Thomas, however, was
malasartorial–
pants were too long, so he
wore the things rolled.
3.
Theodore Roosevelt
went out a-trampling in-
to the deep forest in
search of big game.
There by a brook sat a
parasaurolophus–
long thought extinct, and
as huge as its name.
4.
Little Red Riding Hood
minded her mother and
went to her Grandma’s a-
long the right trail.
Wolf never met her, so
characteristically
old Jakob Grimm had to
make up the tale.
5.
Susan B. Anthony,
activist feminist,
thought if she worked hard she’d
get things to change.
Who could have guessed that such
antiestablishment
patterns of thinking would
still seem so strange?
6.
Frederick Wertheimer,
great Common Causer, be-
lieves the campaign style is
wicked and wrong.
Most politicians, so
unsocialistically’re
happy to sell out their
souls for a song.
7.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
dressed in his Sunday best
called on Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm.
He never liked her, so
unsympathetically
twisted her elbow which
caused her great harm.
8.
Jolly St. Nicholas,
frequently flying, one
eve in December a-
bandoned his flight:
“I’m sick of being so
omnidirectional.
Christmas be damned, and to
all a Good Night.”
9.
Princess Elizabeth
learned about protocol,
minded her manners and
kept her nails clean.
Good that she did, given
heritability:
when she was grown, they sang
God save the Queen.
10.
Jacqueline Kennedy,
so very stylish–de-
signers kept busy cre-
ating her shifts.
When she was widowed, she
un-Cassandra-ically
didn’t beware of a
Greek bearing gifts.
11.
President Kennedy
lived in the White House and
said “For your country ask
what you can do.”
I think up dactyls and
hypercompulsively
save them in notebooks. So–
how about you?
NOT POETIC
~after a discussion with fellow poets about the uses of euphemism
If shit’s not a poetic word,
then how about excrete?
How else can one describe what’s left
of things we creatures eat?
For water one must often “make”
urine ‘s not elegeeic;
and piss though not poetic,
is onomatopeeic.
I’m sorting through my old poems and posting a few that I still like. Including this naughty one, written maybe nine years ago.
THE CHAIR THAT WAS FIRST OWNED BY MY GREAT-GREAT UNCLE ASA
March Prompt #7
He wasn’t actually my uncle. He was my cousin’s uncle, on the other side of her family, you see, but we called him uncle because of that chair. It was passed on to my cousin’s Great Aunt Martha (not my great-aunt, just hers) who was his second daughter-in-law, and she passed it on to her son Freddy, who of course was my cousin’s actual uncle. He was the youngest in that family. Johnny, the middle one, married a Brady girl, and we have, at least my husband has, connections to the Bradys since his sister-in-law’s first husband was a Brady, and her oldest daughter. She didn’t marry his brother till he died. My husband’s. brother. Anyway, Freddy—my cousin’s real Uncle Freddy but we all called him that, used to come to Thanksgiving at my Aunt Bet’s. She was my cousin’s mother, Dad’s sister. So he was my uncle’s brother by marriage. He was the oldest. Never married. No one ever said why, but we have our suspicions. And one Thanksgiving, when he sat down at the table on that rickety old chair—you know how everybody has to haul out all the chairs at Thanksgiving if there’s a big crowd and there was always a big crowd at Aunt Bet’s since she and Dad were two of seven and Uncle John—not the John who married the Brady girl—that was Freddy’s brother—my uncle who was Aunt Bet’s husband had the same name— was one of four and by then they all had kids, except Uncle Freddy, and she always took in strays besides. People, I mean, but she did take in some cats, too, but mostly they stayed up in the barn except that orange one that everybody called Blink because it was missing an eye. But he sat on that old chair and even though he was pretty skinny it broke under him. Bumped his head on the edge of the table on his way down. We all laughed, and so did he, but he was never the same after. Neither was the chair, so Uncle John threw the chair in the fire and Uncle Freddy had to sit on a stack of apple crates they hauled in from the shed.
MARCH SNOW
This snowstorm’s not exactly late,
In fact, they happen all the time.
This sort of thing’s what we expect
For living in a Northern clime.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean
It’s something we appreciate–
Wouldn’t it be more comforting
If winter had a closing date?
FORGET MATILDA
Winter Prompt #19
No problem. I never, ever
remember her. Waking at 4 a.m.,
that old fear clutching—I am not
remembering Matilda. Walking
by the sea, filling my pocket
with white pebbles, admiring
the pair of osprey hovering
beyond the tide-line, I do not
think of Matilda. Stretching
my ice-cleats over my boots,
clipping the leash on the dogs’ collar,
following the ways of rabbits
through the snow—no Matilda.
Singing lonesome madrigals,
buying onions and soap,
drinking coffee with my husband,
feeding the cats,
reading to our grandson—
Matilda never enters my mind.
I have long list of sorrows,
but the one thing I do not regret —
I never remember Matilda.
