—

And with a prose poem, that’s the end of another year of napowrimo. I managed to write poetry every day: 22 small stones and 12 long poems including 2 ghazals, 1 pantoum and 2 prose poems. I’ll write something more reflective of the experience in the next few days, but for now I’m happy I managed to do this.

Now for a shameless plug: the paperback edition of my book is still on sale at Amazon through the end of the month, which is only a few more hours.

US 290 East

Most Beautiful Thing

highway, the highway, oh beautiful thing
flowing under a circling sky
our son asleep, eastbound
wildflower spring, old prairie towns

flowing under a circling sky
blackland prairie, gnarled oaks
wildflower spring, old prairie towns
cedar along barbed wire fence rows

blackland prairie, gnarled oaks
long rolling hills, windblown grass
cedar along barbed wire fence rows
speeding trucks, dusty roads

long rolling hills, windblown grass
our son asleep, eastbound
speeding trucks, dusty roads
highway, the highway, oh beautiful road

—

This is inspired by Fiona Robyn’s new novel The Most Beautiful Thing. Since I’m doing napowrimo, I figured I’d use it as a prompt for today since this is the day Fiona is blogsplashing the book by offering the Kindle version for free. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read her novel Thaw, which I enjoyed very much.

—

I administered our state social studies test to a group of sophomores and juniors in the cafeteria today and so I had a lot of time to study the posters in there. File this one under ekphrasis.

Somewhere on the withered plains, coyotes
howl and cry as they leave their lairs tonight.

Lonely weather satellites trek all through
the salted skies like robot prayers tonight.

You claim constellations for forgotten
nations on dusty roads we share tonight.

Your voice, mellifluous, you whisper and
name the hurricane wind-stirred air tonight.

Come thunder and southern lightning storms you
rejoice, “Let rainfall be our heir tonight.”

—

I’ve had my students experimenting with ghazal writing. It’s been interesting, and some of them have really gotten into it. A few had trouble grasping the radif (that repeating word at the end of each couplet) and wrote some decent poems sans radif. Trying to help them figure out how to get a radif in there, I turned to Johnny Cash and suggested they try his example from “I’ve Been Everywhere”:

I’ve been everywhere, man.
I’ve crossed the deserts bare, man.
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man.
Of travel I’ve had my share, man.
I’ve been everywhere, man.

Not a ghazal really, but a ghazalish chorus at least. And so I got a few ghazals that use homie and dawg as the radif. Several of them worked quite well and would even make decent raps, which is why I think the kids who are serious about rapping really latched onto this.

Oh, and mellifluous was the word of the day. Bonus points are added to any assignment in which students use their SAT words of the day.

glimpse of moth pulled
into light, flash of wings
a windshield smear

night moves as
any night made slow
by tons of steel in motion

a woman in white flutters
from the embankment
onto the tracks a door

closing on the night
flash of her lost eyes
and then the thump

half a mile gone
before he could react
or reach to pull the brake

a million moths
flit in spaces between
the shadowed trees

—

The other day a butterfly smashed into my windshield. Just a moment to see its beauty before impact and nothing I could do. That reminded me of a some stories I’d read a few years back about the effects on engineers of people who commit suicide by jumping in front of trains. There is nothing they can do but watch, turn away and in some cases spend years trying to forget.

The deals we reached beneath this tree
portended its pale and broken dusk.

I always dreamed I’d shoot your scenes
beneath theses branches at golden dusk.

Long years and days withered away
and swallowed you in barren dusk.

Odd limbs still live and mingle with
new high rise lines in token dusk.

Somehow you found the way back home
all through the long moth-eaten dusk.

And the songs of city birds suggest
the dawn of some new-woven dusk.

—

This is for Joseph Harker’s Reverie 14: Ghazal Boot Camp using some of the words from Wordle 51 at The Sunday Whirl.

Note for non-Austinites: Treaty Oak is a 500-year-old southern live oak in downtown Austin. In 1989 some jackass poisoned it. After a major recovery effort, it survived and said jackass went to jail for a good long time. It’s still a big tree but only a fraction of its former self, yet ten years later it started releasing acorns again.

write your poems in the sea
write your stories in the sand

the moon tries to pull
away the ocean but

only scatters tales
through the sky like fireworks

or knives dulled down
from overuse

I knew a man who claimed

constellations are knives
that slice up the darkest nights

this morning I saw Aquila,
Lyra and Cygnus

sneaking up on spring

When angels hatched
he barked and stared, head
cocked and ears erect.

The first of the angels
lifted her goddess eyes
to this desolate wind-scoured
world of stony hearts
setting moon, roaring sea.

The dog considered the angel
a moment (which would count
as seven moments in human time)

then he trotted back to town
and lay outside the souvenir stand
where the owner usually left
a bowl of scraps each morning.

—

For Magpie Tales #112

—

Announcement: My book, Birds Nobody Loves, is on sale (15% off the paperback) throughout April in celebration of National Poetry Month. You can order it from Amazon or my e-store. I don’t know when (or if) the price will take effect at other retailers.

and great gray ships bristling with missiles,
floating bombs wrapped in asbestos
blankets, and then the submarines, silent
sharks run by strange bearded men.

During the cold war this was comforting,
amid all that monochrome uncertainty,
but when I see grey fighter planes tear
so unfamiliar now across gray sky

beyond circling swallows and vultures,
lost in all that grey, I begin to wonder
if this is why the Queen paints her ships blue.