I want to be the bent pine

I want to be the bent pine

above the water sewage

trail hidden past electric wire

towers at university’s edge,

at the tips of many tender

fingers too clean to touch

the leaning trunk with leafless age, naked

branches under metal clouds.

It bows deeply to those

who climb over iron gates to leave

their tracks in muddy hollows,

who bridge small rivers between

them and the divine wild,

who find the tree unlike the rest

beautiful. I’d be thankful to be

in the presence of such gods,

I’d be humbled to be noticed.

-------------------------------------------------------

I wrote this poem on Thanksgiving day after taking a walk down an oft unused nature reserve off of Elon University with my brother, brother-in-law, and his two kids. I saw a bent tree and thought - now there's a tree that sticks out from the rest. It wasn't really special, except for its position and the way it leaned over the path. But I got a chance to see it because of going off the beaten path. And then I wanted to write a poem about it, so I took out a pen and wrote on my arm "I want to be the bent pine..." 

Response, California Bound

Response, California Bound

- To Korey

When you wrote the letter it came across

the continent crossing the salted ravines

mountains kicked up by collisions and dirt

pushed beneath the skin it came as a thin leaf

in my tin box the first sign of autumn the greenness

I saw in your words had been drawn

back into your buried roots you described time

as passing so fast you could see the plane

in the sky a comet blinking before it left

visibility and yourself riding that dream

home your spirit arrived here with you bereft

of hands sanded by clenched ocean

breeze and legs cramped beneath the weight

of your body walking so far it became

a companion sleeping and sick without you

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In this poem I wanted to create the effect of someone far away wishing so much that they were home that it’s as if their spirit has left already and the body is left behind as something incomplete, almost a separate entity that barely functions. I also feel the poem is about maturing and homesickness, or a resistance to that change.

I got the idea for this type of poem after reading a lot of W.S. Merwin, whose poetry is simple in language and yet syntactically interesting because he never adds the punctuation at all. The readers have to make it up on their own.

There are a couple places where I think I could perhaps add more if necessary: between “roots you” and “home your”. I might be making large jumps in both of those places and perhaps more information would be helpful for clarity’s sake. And if so, I’d be willing to provide.

To those of you interested, this poem is loosely based on a friend I have out in California on a mission for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He’s actually doing fine; he just mentioned how fast time was passing by. After that, I just thought of other people I’ve known who’ve been homesick.

Hope you enjoy!

My Mother's Knitting

I came up with this poem yesterday while walking back from school. I really like it; hope you do too!

My Mother’s Knitting

While my mother speaks, she knits with her needles

the blanket she began beside her mother, white yarn diving

beneath the pattern, then leaping at every breath.

Like water trails behind a boat, or clouds behind a speeding

jet, her nimble fingers leave traces of a memorized design hiding

within the synaptic wrinkles of her mind. I believe her past

is a black fly wrapped in spider’s silk, full of sweet

juices she’s laid aside to feed me. Between her bed

and the couch where she curls (where I kneel, listening

to her stories) there is a loose line connecting the moments,

as if drawing a dangled string: Ariadne’s trick to remember

the twists in the Labyrinth and the safe path back.

I’ve seen the same style line after scuttling leaves and people,

up and down daily sidewalks, past the zigzag of grocers,

coffee-shops, and  inviting neighbors. They entrust their shadow

to the earth. They weave in the sunlight. They brush a pathway

by their impressionist strokes. Photographers capture

this lace effect through long exposures of night’s highways:

the vehicles are vanished. Only remain the red lines of taillights pursuing

the tug of headlights. The unseen spinning wheels churn on,

beyond the picture limits, across the roads of nations.

Cartographers could mark on maps the fibers of every trip

(the walkers, cars, sails, and airplanes) to make the world look

like the sinew of a heart, organic, alive, and flexing

when my mother breathes. There is no way to finish

the woven blanket. She is planning to pass it on. Everything

connects, she says through the cord of her cotton voice.

While my mother speaks, my ears are pricked with the point

of her conversation. The thread is led through my canals, down

to the anvil’s slate, where the hammer forges imagination.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe it's just my craziness, but sometimes I can imagine the interconnectedness of everything - as if every moving thing left a shadow of itself behind. I'm hoping in this poem that most people have see a long exposure of a photograph of a busy road at night, because that imagine explains best the concept I am trying to explain in this poem. And, of course, other than the imagery of this poem and the imagination, I am also just talking about the metaphorical interconnectedness of things - of people, of generation, of ideas. So yeah, I really really like this poem because I understand it. The question is, do you like it? Did it make any sense before you read my explanation? Hope you enjoyed it in the end!

Recording

First the poem, then my commentary:

Recording

For the first time, lips to the lattice of a microphone, I am speaking

about the summer rainstorm I saw in negative – black tracing

the edges of a white maple, towering and holy like Yggdrasil.

It glowed for an instant, burned like a crackling pillar of fire,

then split apart under the weight of heaven. A witness,

I fell, as if my legs had vanished beneath me, while in reverence

my hair stood at every corner. Thor, it appeared, had stomped through

my backyard, on his way to the field of Vigrid – on to death

and the end of old gods, the incineration of nature, and on to rebirth.

The developed photo of memory left behind is a splintered stump

and the footprint of a giant, though my father reminds me

that the tree-trunk lay there, before he dragged it away.

I stop speaking and play it back to make sure it’s right. I fine-tune

my words. I re-record the story; I change the vocal effects, but I know

it’s no good. I can’t get the voice to quiver like my childhood.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In my poetry class, we often listen to a recording of the poet reading his/her poem and so today I thought to myself - I'd like to try doing that with one of my poems. So I used Garageband to record an older poem of mine "The King of Fury", but I noticed, as usual, that I don't sound like myself when recorded (although I'm sure everyone hears me like that (I just don't hear me like that, so it's weird)). And then I began to try to write a poem about it, but I didn't want to repeat the poem I was recording so I twisted the actual experience and made it into something I've never actually experienced - seeing a tree struck by lightning was what I was trying to capture, though some of the details may be incorrect.

So in a sense, I meant to write one poem and may have ended up writing two - one poem about recording and a whole 'nother poem about a non-existent, but still interesting (to me, at least) experience that includes Norse mythology. Should I cut out the stuff about recording and separate the poems or does it work well together? What do you think? Is the poem any good anyway? I just wrote it, but I like some of the stuff in it. Hope you enjoy it too.

Skidaway Island (Where I Lived)

I recorded this poem while down in Savannah about a month ago. It was the first visit I'd given it in a year and a half and, while many things hadn't changes, some things had. And so, because I didn't have a pen and pencil, I recorded myself saying stuff that was sort of like poetry and then later on wrote it out and revised it a lot. This is the product; hope you enjoy it.

Skidaway Island

Where I lived they are building

a bridge over the old drawbridge,

above the migrant bird wires connecting

my island: that place removed

from the flat land by a thin strip

of water, scaffolded by fake beaches.

They are building black traffic

lights, stop signs, curved

roads to avoid the roads they made

useless. There are stone gates around

the rusted gates with spike tips

and orange plastic preventing entrance.

A man on the bridge is standing

on the tallest beam, commanding all

below, each rafter, each sweaty workers.

His hardhat shining a cautious yellow,

he directs the flow of cars like the tide

from where he reigns and I must follow.

But I do not live here anymore and I am not

building. Let him build my home,

which now stands occupied by white

walls, a carpet, fresh and dead,

without the grape stains I pressed once

while stomping up and down stairs.

He could cut out the backyard and make it

into chairs, a new family table, without

dents, or initials carved into the legs.

I wish he would build a new home: the sinew

from the raised foundation, the heart chambers

from the ruins unable to outlive me. 

Late-Night Headache (Sestina #1)

I was going to put as a status on facebook "And so the night begins..." or something like that because I have a big project to finish, but instead of typing that and working on my project, I wrote a sestina, somehow, for the first time in my life. The poem was also influenced by the song "Headphones" by Jars of Clay. I think its pretty cool, but then again, I'm really tired and this is only the first draft.

For those of you who don't know what a sestina is, don't worry, I had forgotten the name of it too. It's basically a poem with six six-line stanzas and a tercet (39 lines total). At the end of each line in each stanza are the same six words that rotate in a specific way throughout the poem. All six words are also in the closing tercet. I'm excited that I was able to pull one off in a way that, I think, is actually half decent, especially considering that I wrote the first six lines and then decided to turn it into a sestina only based off of that. If you still don't understand, just read the poem and enjoy it. Meanwhile, I'm actually going to work on my project for the rest of the night.

Late-Night Headache

The night begins with my fat eyes wide,

watching news and listening to nothing.

The heavy worlds pivot in their black sockets,

blinking at the fluster of light in a dark room.

There, images flicker like dying

fire – I don’t try follow the wind of events.

A gray-haired man I know has lived events

terrible enough he keeps his mind wide

and awake. It keeps him from dying.

He told me at lunch, in slurped speech, “Nothing

compares to my day in a chilled room,

eyelids taped shut around the sockets.

If they had plugged a thin cord into the sockets

on the wall, what a shocking turn of events

it would have been to die in that room;

I still don’t know if it was filled wide

with inviting furniture, torture devices, or nothing.

That’s all you know in a world where you’re dying.”

I asked him, fearless, if he feared dying

and his eyes retreated deep into their sockets.

My plate was still full; I had eaten nothing.

His eyelids twitched closed, flipping through events

like the channels on my TV, the screen wide,

yet never fully creeping into my room.

Finally my friend motioned across the lunch room

beyond the picture window, out to a beggar dying

opposite the sidewalk, his starving mouth open wide

and his hands cupped like empty sockets.

“I fear living on handouts and chance events.

Yet I worry that some day, I’ll watch and feel nothing.”

We finished our cold meals and parted, saying nothing

more of it. In my gut there was no room

to hear the sickly cough of his life events.

The man, my focus, the day were dying,

blushed red with embarrassment or the anger in our sockets.

The sky, my mouth, hung forgetfully wide.

Tonight I cradle events, born out of white nothing:

news flashes wide with light in a wintry room

while my eyes groan, dying in their sleepy sockets.