Young Writers Society

I would say you wrote a "real poem" there, no biggie. Very, very nice, touching in detail, dramatic in its simplicity and even if a reader can't connect with everything, you write in a manner that allows the emotion to flow from the words naturally. Much to learn in reading your work, no matter past words shared. I'll make sure to follow this closer towards the end of NaPo.

april 12

in xanadu

lesser blade
of the american lion,
and the dark sermon rhetoric
of condor wings—
i have tamed whetstone bluebells
to hang with the silver meaning
of saints' medallions, creeping
housewise like a creek's
pebbled elocution in root-shade.

hills stripped to goat plates
by a snowmelt's early erosion,
circling the fire of valley russet
like dire wolves. i buy ether
at the pharmacy, soak a rag with it,
drop it in the empty feed barrel
with its isolated mouse.
i couldn't imagine its bones
sliding through mine
like a broken milk—
instead an alfalfa dark, bleary
as pearls and full of bells;

i offer a way out,
like the gift of an annexed land.
the dakota roses bead smoke,
i hatchet their necks for a pot-roast
table-set and iron candlestick holders
and lace cloth.

it is easter next sunday,
cattails built with fur and rising
from pond dark as frog-driven lazari.
we watch woods, the spruce
singing momently beside alph
which loops through protolith—
our own murders white
as the bolero of troops through a capitol.

dawdling piscines,
granite boys, stems of guided water
catching piazza light
like a flight of carrier pigeons
on photo plate.
______i sigh with wonder
and put my hand up
under my wife's loose
unfastened skirt
to cool it there.

I want to run away with this. Kubla Khan -- an all time classical favourite (a pity I can't stomach most classical poetry any more) -- I think I must surely have the first half at least memorised.

...feeling too happy about this to think straight about it. Coleridge has a great sense of rhythm, don't you think? I feel like doing handsprings just reading your title. Ah, the opium induced dreamscape... I'll come back to this when I stop grinning at it.

i offer a way out,
like the gift of an annexed land.

Almost made me cringe. Not because it's "bad" - no, quite far from that - but rather because this section had so much potential until you decided to tack on that there simile. I understand your usage of poetic devices and respect it, but this line could be made into a punch rather than a weak slap. "i offer a way out." Thunderous statement, as if coming down from the circles of heaven itself, but reassuring. It packs heat on its own without needed to artifically amplify it with strings and balloons. If you really do want the "annexed land" bit, then put it somewhere else - but don't let it steal the first line's glory.

Food for thought.

Good idea, Gal.
--

april 13

naval

___foetus of plankton, I remember nothing. —Derek Walcott, Origins

tweed gulls, stones settling in
like wheel oxen which can go no further,
myrrh grass, beach houses that
lope downhill like dog years—
I cannot get this rope-tar
out of my blood, or the stammer
of stream-fled salmon and their
elder pacific seamanship.

shell vendors, or bodiless whistles
tight as the thermal glass of
a sick couch blood. tight and high
as a breed, the beaches full of
black labradors who bend into
the darkness like coastal horns.
all young men at the cellar-head
of width, to see no hills congregating
like sundays, away from the ruled
library of rock, and rough
isle hair.

until all that is left
is the brainless guidance of stars,
the clay tilt of an astrolabe,
untraded borealis weaving
like an orient salt. I lie on the beach
listening to the dry whip
of burning driftwood, sand
fine as a longitude's brown-armed dance by oil lamp.
I ship nineteen years on an
ocean current, I find a mouth of turtle-eggs
soft and limpid as the inland
greyness of doves, all my paper is
stiff as fifty years of sun-up.

night peels into itself
like a bladed fruit; I lift my arms to it—
the boats slip from sand
like the sweet knot
of a final stable.

april whatever

lily

speckled godhead
like the threesome cedar warmth and talc
of gathered eggs. you suffer,
i coax you to eat, to move your eyes,
flare nostrils, touch your cheekbones
like pending lourdes stone.

blood samples, vialed
red swinging like an admiral's gait,
placid concaves and the dilated
binge of a microscope. i feed you
applesauce from a metal spoon,
to communicate to you
the wholesomeness of
collapsed fruit and the intimate
movement of spring-time nodes.

outside, our white apple blossoms
flick flies from their baled bulk like
a shivery cow. i massage your jaw,
rub worry ruts into your teeth, traveled
into like wormed wood. sometimes
i lean to your nose to listen to
the quail shape of your breath.

as for all oils,
go west.

appomattox, smelted valleys,
the capitol ringing like a maypole girl
and all the smoke-nutted rivers through passive
stands of poplar. i start praying again,
loose clay shingle prayers in a country
neolithed under the settled bishopric
of rosethorns, wafers. i dread
attendants of all sorts.

but your features begin to unfreeze,
like thimble-lengths of water trapped in
sea-board trees. the incense
is summery. dew distills between my eyes
like the soft commencement
of a pearl. it is just.

Kylan,


I am touched. You remembered everything.

A time too black -- it is still black -- but at least I can now, for the briefest moment, pretend there are colours.



Thank you


N

cow's girl

old, family wood bending like mule
and the grain calico of a
barn-owl presence—i stand at
the porch of a ford's rust, and
his hands split around me ungiving
as stump knots, goddam sad
as cheers to a lowered bull, he hasn't
taken off his gloves since the first furrow,
the first girl slat.
i am strait, the coral whim,
tea ships wrecked against
my mammalness like
mornings on brooms of staying dark.
i am the one flowing into fore-dawn,
through his dappled lanes, spring ruts,
into the sideways mesa. his voice
laredo twine, calf orbitals, the lasso
of boot-oil and lifted bicep straw.
he lets me have a basin of flowers,
i let him have skin unbroken
as a cottonwood blaze, catalogue
dresses rough as the brown pond of sisterhood.
torn denim of a meal-bell;
and he comes back like
a shadow cast by a sire clock—i am
ten gallons, holding litres,
he chaps like buttonhole posies, drowns
in the numbness of names, dies
every june when freckles return
like the smell of mown clover.
night shapes his torso, dust
churns up like starvation
between wolves—he lays against
my belly to listen for
future stampede, rainless whiteness
i snarl through him
like a parallel lineage.
i am the spur
on the floorboard, the turn
of the blood, and the wire.

agri-fetish

knots creak
like beach carcasses in heat,
the red wood giving itself,
rough and through bellies of grass
like a cowpath. i am enamored
by your seventh-decade nails, goat-crooked
and stubbed with rust,
repeated metals, rambling through
pine like horse-wire. birth-place
of ten calves, sunlight carried
in on mote-wobbly slatted (roman) invitation
like a kept mother on
a burro to the House of Bread.
pulleys gobbed up with ropes
of night like radar bats, and
the hay exhaling awful seeds,
insects clattering in the utensil tones
of a reel mower through suckle.
i huff the smell of dung,
the warmest aged month
that mires me in bell-less mornings,
and the oil-slick sheen
of roosters, talons carving
a longing into boyhood.
noon drapes, i lean with you
through led hills, and it is in rain
when your chipped red
matches my own
idle proxy pulse.

You are just plain old wonderful. (far too lazy for nitpicks)

liked 'knots creak.' and 'radar-bats.' That last poem in particular has a really strong ending. Love the string of organic details. Really vivid.

best,

on drugs

a fourth thousand years
in the old ram of a skull, a spine
that tongues up to a white drought
like canvas months sliding
into bubonic autumn. you pod open,
watch heartbeats evaporate plate-wise
like a mud heat—the silt and scepter
of a blood season on a raw delta, or cities in fog,
and their great bridges constructed in the fog
like oldrose, sanskrit love stories. the light
is perilous. you walk on the brain's
ledges to fetch a slapstick cat,
returning to the same klaxon
geometry whose red polygons shudder
like dog-teased birds; the same oneness
unreeling an ankle-length,
barn-risen dance out of silk, nodding dens.

the Denver poets are prophets,
speaking out of the smoke
like a gettysburg address; i hate them.
their pills derelict and soft
as fishing whistles. it is midsummer,
and no one wants to smell the prim rust
of stationed tractors, or listen to the adder swell
of eve's beefsteak tomatoes. there is no
psychosex in the grief
of wire through home-grass.

you are devout, orchids
open to you like the changing sex
of a frog. the reap, dub smell
of the bay's apartments, flypaper bass,
summers rotting aside
like remnant season deer.
you swallow like bazaar eaters,
your unkept violets niagra over fences,
and you step into the lawn night not to be it
but to feel it, poor bastard.

i cannot follow you;
there are dozens of snails
out there.

what is found after rain

in it
fragments of blue shell
like a tortoise's age—
the fallen nest woven
out of alfalfa, ribbon, twine
thorned together with the same
mud fingers as for a hoisted nazarene,
but there is warmth all the same in the teetering
depth of spirals, repeated
baron descents—

this unwinding nightjar nautilus
these codes in the grass,
sucked stone of a bird's
flight.

spliced homes, periphery rugged
as a father's approval, i carry
the nest inside, feeling charitable
towards this somewhat shaken,
barefoot home
after its terrible four-alarm
family fire.

there are imprints
of breast-red here,
like where the heaviness of dog laid in the sun,
where a shore of eggs once
borrowed heat, to which
birds revisited, kept yeast starts, listened,
or hid throats under porches
of dusk or in the plush
hullabaloo of the closing
robes of flowers.

i keep it on my shelf,
as if it is justified alongside
my antique teaset,
offering, wide-brimmed.

death toll

The first man to die
in Kentucky in a long time
in tulips placed purposefully
as maneuvered troops. roofs peeled
back like pool-side skin;
in the wind, hammocks entangled to
a hill-porch pedigree, with the julep dialect
of simple crew knots.
he was found a quarter mile
from his home; his cows
gathering flies, their rot billowing
over matted pastures
like coronation robes,
upsweeping, over stones.

i think about his time
spent in the gorge of the twister,
his dorothy state—
hatchet pressure
and lithifying winds absolute
solitude in the iris of the same nature
which sidled into the avenues of Pompeii
like a gun-for-hire in a one-horse town,
or spins columns of air out of tropics every
August down the shipping lanes
of a poor, silt gulf.
to have been suspended in god
on a cumulonimbus Sinai, he too
famished with lightning, a part
of marvelous splinter orbitals that
ripped railing, wire, bales, homesteads,
various poles and fences.

a little worse for the wear,
tulips hang their taffeta heads
like rural murderers. he is
face-up, could have been
taking a nap under more
woolly, pastoral circumstances,
mouth partially open as if viewing
deep vistas on divine invitation.

he rots normally—
certain systems remain.

asl

you get to examining the mouth,
how lips pull to make vowels
muscles dragging the weight
of the face into the deep coral of a consonant
like the ribbony wake following
a maiden voyage. to watch a tongue
slowed down, as it breaches and arcs
like a whale's timber parabola,
words of great depth and gram
that abide certain celebrations
of buoyancy, displacements
of prior bodies of wisdom.

or the fluidity of screaming,
building out of covered bones
like a brother's kingdom,
lungs split open to geodes of templed strain
pricked with the quartz royalty
of establishing one's regardless displeasure
through ruptured rings of air.
is there sound in the herd-panic
of a blood-spatter? the climaxed gethsemene
of thunderous poppies?

people write about post-coital
huskiness, as if the voice could be shucked
like summer corn. that's something.
it's the small sounds;
the near-silence of snow-tilled woods,
a shovel through the strep of clay,
old soles on library stone.
i can move in this silence
without the sound of apples
and their bony burlap noise.

you sign to me, signal
as dark coasts. you knuckle candy
into your cheek, pull the hatbrim
of boyhood over your eyes.
the gesture for home is
sturdy as the telling of low roadsigns
beside stone scarborough walls—
what is the sound made
in the fistful collision for shoes?

our hands strangle
into nights of sound
like built, binaural fires.