Shannon's May Poem

Thanks for reading. I'm curious to hear what you think of the title and the title's relationship to the poem. I wanted to try a title that wasn't merely descriptive (someone suggested "Mirrors" which seems too obvious!). Also, I commented on your April poems a little late, so be sure to check those out.

The Gift (New Version)

If you think mirrors

only reflect your own image

back to you, think again.

Rainbows overflowing

in a plastic bucket,

coffee grounds taking

on “S” and “L’s” shapes

in their own bitter language.

I’ve seen it all.

A blue feather atop

a silver scale just sitting

there registering time.

At first, these images

skimmed the surface

of glass, but then I felt

puppet strings between

my hands as if I were

pulling each image into view.

Or were they pulling me?

Pulling me into scenes

of tenderness and loss:

a man buttoning

up his grandson’s shoes,

A little girl kneeling on

the sidewalk to feed a dog.

An old widow whispering

into the knot of an oak tree.

So you’ll understand,

then, why that day in July

in Italy years ago when my sister

stepped off the train

—so thin, so unrecognizable—

I held up a hand mirror.

Not so she could see

what she had learned to hate.

But to offer up another

distant world: the one

within her. Teeming. Alive.

Glinting. Knife-like.

Dargie's May Poem

Hi y'all - here's May.  Still in Kansas! Comments of all kinds welcome.

FLAGS

The flags

are flying flat out

from their poles,

snapping continuously,

gasping

America!   

or    Kansas!    

or    Jayhawks!

(the flags over the car dealerships,

just plain blue or red fields,

have the same enthusiasm and get the same treatment,

but don’t have as much to say). 

Day after day they fly like that, as if starched,

or stuck in an illustration

of considerable windspeed

from an introductory meteorology textbook. 

The flags’ stamina is a little impressive

but mostly crushing,

like forced piety. 

Oh wind, please

give them a break. 

But it doesn’t, or can’t;

and after three or four days of an especially relentless blow,

some of the flags

get wrapped a couple of times around their poles

and are only able to muster

two-thirds of their lengths.

They are acolytes still abject in their devotion,

but thwarted in their expression of it:

the American flag atop a downtown tower,

eye level from my floor,

its field of stars half-visible and its stripes stubs,

the proportions all wrong,

and the blue field of the Kansas flag that

presides over the turnpike service center

is wrapped almost to the edge of the central crest,

its lower letters crying only NSAS 

and it’s a relief, in a way, that

at least couple members of this mad army

register the unbearable nature

of their task,

to be a flag

in Kansas;

and I give them a sympathetic look,

and then I turn to the wind and plead

shhh

please

quiet

Shannon's April Poem

Sorry for the late post! I had the flu and am just now feeling better.

On Handling Grief

In ancient Greece,
dolls perched,

bird-like, atop                  
gravestones.

Their dresses

were peppered

with notes
for the dead and purple

tulips. Cupped 
upwards, the dolls'

terracotta hands

seemed to 

be weaving 

the same patch of air

or maybe they

were waving. Their

fingers, too,

undone 

by the smallest
tremors.

Dargie's April Poem

Hi friends - I am just now caught up on comments, so take a look back at your Feb and March poems :)  Thanks for your help with the parking garage!  I submitted to the residency and will keep you posted. 

MT. ST. HELENS’S GHOST IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR

was not a mountain, but a massive,

unusually distinct cloud,

shaped like a pyramid with a flattish top,

building upward, just before dusk.

Its surface caught the apricot light of sunset,

alpenglow

of the plains.

It danced teasingly

from my rearview mirror to each side mirror and back again

as the highway wagged west,

presiding over the landscape with a desultory menace

and a beguiling beauty, and growing in apparent

potency as I drove—

but at a distance,

partially seen and

being left behind. 

In the morning, I read that the tornado

the cloud became killed a person and destroyed

three houses a hundred miles to the east.

In Kansas, look for your cataclysms

in water vapor.

Underestimate me.

That’ll be fun.

Kasey's April poem

Hello poet friends,

Thank you so much for your helpful generous comments on my March poem... on ALL my poems. I'm very grateful for this group - so glad to be with you and your work, your minds and hearts (I'm never sure if people go back to the comments from previous months - I sometimes remember to and sometimes not - so I wanted to make sure you all saw this! I'm still getting the hang of Blogger...).

Happy spring - very much looking forward to reading your April poems.

Kasey

At Cape Henlopen

All night wind insists in the trees, its unsteady hush

funneling us down into sleep under the tender

shelter the oaks, even leafless, make—all night

their trunks creak and sigh and speak. Speak

to me—I think the word protect until its edges

dissolve, inside the tent that wraps us

like another, thinner skin, rocked and chastened

by the wind that doesn’t cease: it ripped

the nylon from our hands as we tried

to pin the edges down, make the tent stakes hold

to dead leaves and damp and sand, the tangled

ground that presses back against our bones.

The ocean hidden but near: all night I mistake

wind for waves, waves for breath, imagine the blur

at the horizon where it practices dividing sea

from sky, one blue utterance from the next. I want

never to mistake you, though I do it all the time,

though we wake and drink the tea before

it turns cold. Later you crush juniper berries and hold

your fingers to my face: gin, that muscled scent

sun and forgetting keep falling through. Later we walk

the town churchyard and read: Sacred to

the Memory Of. Fell Asleep. We walk in light

so steep I can see each single stitch

of your gray sweater, its hem and sleeve; see

for a moment how we’re knitted together

in the wind that keeps tearing us gently from our names.

Vasiliki's April Poem

Hello dear poet friends-- here is another poem from my manuscript. This is one that has stumped me, because I've tried more than a few times to see it published, only to have no takers. The other poems sent along which I valued less were the ones picked up. Any insight about how this poem is received would be so helpful for me.

Ektachrome

he left me
a ring
of partial glimpses

//

pellucid Pelasgia
partial coinage
of a man-made image

//

or something like this
tangible language, this audible curve,
this emotionese

//

the way I see it
I was left
to translate him

//

man takes a woman
on a wedding trip
before I was born

//

last look upon home
the village square, the field,
family harvest of exile

//

I lift his disembodied eye
to my eye, find no archive
of anecdota but shed and shadow

//

recognize this slide, Cézannesque
basket of fruit, dappled wall
I plucked this fruit, too

//

how to square my sepia-toned 1980s
pastoral with 1960s Kodachrome
tray of glass-bottled sodas, metal ashcan

//

his markers of industry,
what I artfully sought
to leave out of frame

//

apple, o apple of my eye,
he called me
matia mou, you are my eyes--

//

why this slide?
I pressed him,
slides are better, they last

//

last, little pools of memory
in this cold water
we  trickle
              over

Claire's April Poem

Hi all! I am missing out on Easter with my family due to an aching back. So while I am lying here, I thought it might be a good time to post my April poem. Looking forward to reading yours!

KNOT GARDEN

Was this her habit before Dad’s diagnosis:

Trailing me down the backporch steps, initiating

conversation even as I close the car door? I beg her

to Go inside, you’ll catch a chill, triggering her final litany:

Don’t forget to lock your doors. Watch out for black ice.

Once, in a Scottish castle garden, I hid from her—crouched

like Eve in boxwood shade. My shame? A simple thirst

for my own mind after eight days of shared hotel rooms,

train cars. In peace, I focused my lens on the knot garden

and she was there: knee-deep in interlocking circles

of germander and lavender, silver-gray santolina

shimmering in noon heat, stock-still as if the life-force

within her had departed, something bereft in her profile,

the curve of her belly where I first resided. I called out Mom!

and in my lens she came alive again, raising her arm into air

thick with summer as she stands now under golden porchlight

and a waning November moon, waving, waving.

Kasey's March poem

Inverting the Winter

with lines by Louise Bourgeois

For a lifetime I have wanted

to say the same thing. Daubing red

paint against the sky, taking it away

in a different print. More blue then.

Laid down amid the shapes that mean

lake, mountain, house until the spaces

between them tremble and flush

with color. Over and over

the etched plate pressed to paper. Nothing

is lost. Inverting the winter tree

so branches become roots, burrowing

the mute earth. So roots become

branches, cradling a woman’s face.

Breasts press outward from

the trunk, her pelvis nestles where roots

descend. It was a subterranean,

unconscious land that I longed for.

Over and over the paper’s thirsty skin

opens to drink in pigment, ink. Over

and over the tree’s stripped limbs

stroked with crimson. Now they reach

in every direction, rouged. Now

for the sky behind them. Now for the blue.