april's fool

Why should I bother being nervous about this when I never know what I'm doing anyway?
-----------------------------


do you remember when the sky
was made of wallpaper?

when its wood waxed and waned,
it developed the lines of one
who laughs north and cries south.
tears made rusted tracks down
from the leak we never saw,
and settled somewhere
in the dresses you never wore.

you said the sky had seams in it,
because back then,
wallpaper came in strips.
I thought they were like cracks
between concretes, these seams.

you corrected me slowly,
picking the words out of your teeth with reluctance:
these ones need to be stepped on.

someday we'll go to the edge of the interim,
where the ellipses elapse and
commas and caesuras grow from conchshells
for the birds to pick at, to punctuate phrases
of their runonsentance cadenzas.

we'll step between paces,
where one raindrop erases
the traces of faces
from dollpaper places,
and we'll rhyme with our toes
in inkpuddles that grow
and collect on the stones
in ribbons of black between texture.

someday i'll take you and you'll come along,
to hunt nests of song -- faint, whispered song,
just arteries of consonants
in a fleshy breathy mesh of melody.
we'll go and we'll listen,
(and maybe sing too)
as we cradle the wind back into motion
and let words mold our mouths,
and take color photographs
of the black and white world.

Poem One:

This is so beautiful. Your imagery is wonderful and unusual and it flows perfectly. I especially enjoyed the last line.

Poem Two:
"where the ellipses elapse and
commas and caesuras grow from conchshell"
is delicious.

Again, I love the final line, but I'm unsure about the rhyme, especially in the second stanza. I think it's a little much.

Keep going, you're doing great!

lately, at night,
he thinks, and inks,
all the of the answers
onto the palm of his hand
so that when the questions come,
he'll know how to answer them
(no matter what they be)
in a way that will say:
take me with you.

I can hear from across the fire escape that you are home.
Your voice reaches me, but not your words
because they all get stuck on my balcony,
somewhere between the tiedye of flowers
in their sunburnt brown painted prison pots.
They settle into soil and hug writhing roots,
like the rays of dark that tell my lilies to close bloom.

I love the first line of the first poem

Last stanza of the second poem has great imagery and I think it's my favorite poem of NaPo so far. Perfect ending.

The third poem is absolutely gorgeous.

I think that if you expanded the fourth poem, it would be sososo wonderful. <3

one time I held my hand
over my mouth.
mute song condensing on my fingers,
a quivering pulse
like smothering a universe.

my feet would run
the world, in time,
if clocks had ankles
instead of wrists,
and if eyes looked

like the fingerpainter,
who lathers color onto her fingers –
a beast basking
in the kill.

Spoiler

oh pah

camerashy angels, maybe
taught you how to talk
(quiver, shake, shatter, mend,
like a mirror dropped in a pond)
because sometimes your words have halos,
and sometimes there aren't any words.

The lady bore a daughter in the winter
and when crinoline crustaceans hugged the trees,
scents condensed under window lace, pepper, mint or
coriander boiling the water brown. Snow peas
and blood oranges with cracks on the backs of their hands.

He used to sit with her in silences
and set his puppets on the fire grate
so their shadows cast the floor with sentences
of vigils in the open night. Sometimes a plate
or a spice or a shoe, or books of foreign words that mean don't leave me.

Whispers and whimpers and fireplace sounds
in the morning when wind was in the garden.
When the house by the sea was too big for its grounds
and sleighbells and churchbells sang hard in
the air. And the bells of the Ophelia settled harbor seas.

She often thought of all the fair maidens
playing their bells on deep ocean sands,
but none were the Ophelia, who he had made in
the shadows for her: rings of rigs on her hands
with painted skin and flowers braided in her sails.

It was night when the daughter was born,
the sea sent letters in tongues on slips of paper,
drumming the windows til glass was old, worn,
white paper, black night, gray wind. The nape, her
neck, she whispered her daughter's name: Ophelia.

Spoiler

This NaPo thing keeps coming up with new ways to show me that I am not a poet.

sometimes stars would fall
into our arms when the sky
was too big to hold them.
we buried them in holes
we'd made from between holes
in gray woolen socks,
and watched soil thaw on our feet
while waiting for spring.

or there were times,
when thirst would sew
the horizons together,
and we thought and all the stars
would cling to the arms of the moon
as the universe swallowed them whole.

sometimes we thought we were circles,
and the stars traced us
like we sometimes traced them,
watching frozen feet spin
through holes the woolen earth
as we'd drift, stall, flutter, fall,
like vagabond angels
or stars without wings.

there must have been a moment,
and embryo inside warm fluid hours
painted by a mother's breathing
and pulsating with so many tenses
(they were all future but only one would be past),
and I wonder if it dreamed of braided wheat
and colored candles with wax beards
like old men that have been burning too long
or if it didn't dream at all
as it waited for forever and a half
to be born.

today is when you realize
that you're translucent.
not transparent, not invisible – translucent.
you feel like a new glass plate
that's not scratched yet;
as crystalline as your clumsy otoliths
that you've stopped trying to reason with.
and you're sitting there
with your knees in your mouth,
wondering why nobody ever told you.

Spoiler

a third of the way there!

a quarter to five in the station.
there is a sun
rising somewhere above
but here there are only sleepwalkers,
dragged by dressshoe heels
that tick tock tick tock tick
until someone forgets to wind them.

over there on the floor
by the out of order escalator,
his fiddle is watching
the metronome sleepers
tick tock tick tock ticking
all out of time.

his face sifts
the smells brought out of the tunnel.
doors open wide, and heels
tick tock tick tock;
a roar in rhythm.

someone brushes by his fiddlecase,
and leaves it empty.
the bow keeps mouthing melodies
chewed by ticks, swallowed by tocks.
fool will never know.

doors close, the tunnel digests.
the platform is almost silent.

Spoiler

I have been out of town, but shall try to make up for the missed poems.

the sky is smaller than you remember it,
eaten away at the edges like maple leaves
the year the gypsy moths were rampant
and the sugar maple tree looked so sickly
you thought you could hear it wheezing
when the wind blew.

there were fingerprints on your hands
from all the ballpoint pens
you had drained
into finely kerned notes
until you bled blue
and your fingers looked
like a giraffe that had bit its tongue.
and I seem to remember
that the tongue liked to lord
over the piles of mountains
in our driveway,
like northern wind
with dirt under its
fingernails.