The wind blew gray and humid,
the Gulf thick over the prairie,
catching trash and leaves and pollen
and a lone scissor-tailed flycatcher,
the first to arrive this spring, suspended above
a crepe myrtle, his tail forked, balancing
on wind, navigating toward a perch.
It seemed those last few feet against the wind
became as significant a struggle as the journey
of thousands of miles flown between
Central America and this narrow limb.
Such it is to be in the moment
when attention is required:
the scale of the task
falls secondary to action.
In this way, we can reach the tree
no matter how far we’ve traveled,
and, like that bird,
we can leave if we want
without a second thought.
And each day the workers waited
for the renewal of their daily permits.
And when the clouded sky lightened,
they watched insects flicker and glow.
And old folks spat on the ground,
mumbling toothless legends of times
when all bugs weren’t lightning bugs,
when leaves burst forth from trees in spring,
when you could drink the rain and rivers,
when the sky was dark and there were stars.
And the memorists were shoved back,
kicked and beaten for their lies.
And everyone agreed with what we know:
since the beginning, all bugs have glowed.
—
A response to Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo prompt #2: The Old Acronym Switcheroo. I went with RWP as Radiological Work Permit.
I’ll be sticking with my usual no blogging on weekends routine, though I will still be doing NaPoWriMo, but the poems will be micro-poems posted at a gnarled oak, to which I do sometimes post on weekends.
1. While I was out of town last week, I forgot to link to Four and Twenty, where one of my haiku was featured as the “Four and Twenty of the week.” Check it out.
2. You may have noticed the type on my site is larger. Ever since I redesigned the site in Jan 2009 to ditch the 2nd sidebar and widen the content area to accommodate larger photos something has bugged me about the font. I’ve tried different fonts but after reading iA’s The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard (h/t Dave for the link), I realized that what was bugging me was the size of the font relative to the expanded line length.
I tried a larger font, and I like the results. How does it look out there in blog land? Easier on the eyes?
There’s something enchanting about old tools. Not power tools, but rather the ones that require maybe a little sweat, a little swearing and more than a little skill to use. They’re the ones that live in sheds or hang in garages like old mysteries gathering dust and perhaps a little dulled but still so useful to the hand that knows how to wield them.
These tools are relics of a time when people still made things and made them well. In some cases, these tools made things and kept the world running before I was born. Made things I’ll never see and yet when I look at them and sometimes play with them (because that’s all I really know how to do) I imagine a world in which we didn’t throw things out the moment they broke.
My first hammer
There’s solidity to those old tools hanging around and still ready despite the shiny power tools that can do a job faster but will themselves be recycled long before they’ll ever be passed on. These are the tools I was given as a kid and the ones I inherited from my grandfather and my dad who I’ve assisted (because that’s all I’m good for when it comes to carpentry) on a few projects.
Dave Bonta’s new chapbook Odes to Tools (Phoenicia, 2010) has gotten me looking at and appreciating these old tools in my garage all over again. The poems originally appeared on Dave’s blog Via Negativa (you can still read them there) but in book form they become like the tools themselves, somehow sturdier in their stately analog elegance.
My favorite in the collection is the ode to one of my favorite tools, the coping saw, a tool I’ve used, misused and loved longer than most others. (What a glorious day it was when I learned I could replace that rusty old blade!) In Dave’s writing, this most space-hogging and least dense of tools becomes a jumping off point for examining ideas bigger than the tool itself, and the coping saw’s sturdy flexibility becomes a near-Taoist metaphor for the strength found in yielding, a certain wisdom in emptiness. From “Ode to a Coping Saw”:
Perhaps because it is flexible
& maneuverable
[…]
or because it encompasses
so much empty space
somehow
it copes.
It’s a fine collection, well worth multiple readings, and like the tools it celebrates, I suspect it will never stop working no matter how long it may sit on the shelf between reads.
The grackles opened
Like gates in the trees
Shadow birds, eyes glistening
You could almost imagine
These noisy shades
Abandoning tangible birds,
Parking lots and steel dumpsters
In their odyssey through
Suburban woods,
Clacking and creaking
Like machines or clocks
Ticking away the last
Hoarse seconds of winter.
The guy from the attorney general’s office
blamed the nouns, sources of all trouble—
people, places, things.
Combined with certain verbs—
assault, distribute, trespass and possess—
these nouns form gangs of complex sentences,
fragments of lives half-lived and run-ons
rambling through the detritus of car crash lives.
The simplest, though, tell of kids locked up,
looking out at the free, positions of attention
in the parking lot, half-listening
to mockingbirds refining their own syntax
as they mimic the ringing fire alarm
while we wait to go back inside
where we’ll try, again, writing
sentences that don’t mimic the past,
sentences that aren’t destinies.
I’ve got two micro-poems in the latest issue of Four and Twenty (vol.3 no.3 – pdf) out today. There’s an untitled haiku on p5 and “Optimist” (another vulture poem) on p14. Go check it out. There’s lots of great micro-poetry there.
My poem “Visions of a Healthy Planet” is up at qarrtsiluni as part of the currently unfolding “Health” issue. You can even listen to me read it. Go. Check it out and be sure to look around while you’re there since there’s a lot of great writing to be found.
