New Poem Thingies (doodles/wrks in progress?)
Jan. 27, 2025
Even Though You Are in Tay-ha
Even though you are in Texas — or Tay-ha
as it should rightly be known …
(such foreignness I have yet to meet:
those marching bands,
all that swinging all that swerving
chopping up the football field on your step-father’s t.v. set,
Aggies vrs Longhorns
Oh man, those uniforms! All that brass!
& Revvie, the collie mascot dragging this year’s handler
across the grass … and girl, is it really grass
— I mean does it rain enough in Tay-ha
for it to be so damned green?!!)
Daughter, my grown child, a PhD within your grasp,
sometimes I still check my shoulders
for posset stains, the heat of your sleeping head, sometimes
I still feel a sweet ache of those thousands
of midnight steps.
Jan. 20, 2025
1st Anniversary of Her Funeral
Could you in this merciless night
remember with me the gathering,
the water, salt rituals, sweet tea
served-sipped, fine china, the weeping?
In this merciless night, could you
remember with me how we lay her
to sleep one last time, one last fold
one last blanket soft imagined one life …
O grief, O grief through you in you
I swim, we swim, in you
this merciless night.
Jan. 18,2025
Buying a Teapot Online
Twenty stores at least I tread, hunting for a teapot, something nice:
homestyle stores, tea shops, antique stores, even HBC
(its departments anorexic, starved of what used to be).
Something beautiful, elegant, sound,
I’m forced to trawl websites now.
I had a teapot once, it was lovely, but my ex’s
now-wife, lovely Miss 2.0, took all my good dishes,
my good Henkel knives, my sideboard,
the Art Deco clock … and what the hell,
what kind of woman eats off another woman’s plates any how?
Oh … wait, she bloodied my sheets too, I suddenly recall.
Who sells china anymore?
Antique shops turn it away at the door,
full sets of china shunned like old wives, wives
abandoned, wives wished dead,
all those precious plates, tureens, bowls that passed
across five generations: fin-de-siecle, the Great War,
Depression, WWII, electricity, t.v. sets, astronauts, internet!
China dragged out at Xmas and Sunday dinners …
all that gravy, all those mashed potatoes, all those cups of tea,
all that soaking, washing, gossiping at the sink …
all those years cooking, cleaning,
keeping decades for some man, not ourselves
what a waste of good china, what a fool to love china,
no wonder it’s being thrown out.
Oct. 21, 2024
A few doodles written during AIR (St Andrews Wesley/Vanc) Brandon Wint’s first workshop on prayer and poetry. I haven’t sat in a workshop setting for years, maybe 17 years, the Banff Writers Studio, so this is gonna be interesting!
First prompt: What is prayer?
prayer
I walk with the dead
long for them, call them back
generation after generation
of ancestor faces fixed in black
and white photographs, little miracles.
At night, they slip through cracks
in my grandmother’s rolltop desk
where their images are kept,
their chatter, beautiful laughter
returning, seals my sleep at last.
Second prompt: a response to Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay as read by Brandon Wint. I’ve never read Gay’s poetry before & this was def. a challenging albeit exquisite piece. Given the context of
the workshop I received the poem as a confession. The hard part of confessionals is that while they might help the confessor feel better, without absolution they may pass the trauma forward. This, then, might be an absolution?
Confession Upon Hearing Ross Gay’s ‘Bringing the Shovel Down’
I am going to steal the salt of this poem,
then the white birch,
and probably the starlings in sticker bushes.
100%, for sure, I want blue robin eggs…
Darling, for love I will
copy his light breaking over the fields,
yet, too, for you,
I shall forget every last detail
of his testimony, witness,
of his brutal, bruising youth.