Please visit Bolts of Silk. My poem “A Texas Highway in Springtime” was published there today.
Have a look around too. You’ll find lots of good stuff there.
by James Brush
Category: Poetry
Poems, thoughts about poetry and links to places that have published my poems
When you use spider silk to build a nest,
You take an awful risk.
This is what I learned from a hummingbird
Trapped in a spider’s web.
Still alive, the bird fought for his freedom,
The spider watched, waiting,
Shrinking back when I moved to intervene.
I gently pulled the bird
Out of the sticky tangles of the web.
Afraid I might crush him,
My fingers, trembling, pulled the silk away
From tiny, tightbound wings,
Glowing iridescent in the sunlight
When I opened my hand,
He shot into the air, flying swift north,
seeking another web.
—
This is a true story from a few years ago. I’ve written a few other poems about it, but this one is the latest. I’ve been experimenting with writing lines with specific syllable counts and sometimes stumbling into formal meters. Experimenting with rhythm, I guess.
Check out more good stuff at Read Write Poem, where you’ll find a number of folks who wrote a poem a day for the 30 days of April, aka National Poetry Month. I didn’t shoot for that, but I did write more poems this month than usual, many of which are at a gnarled oak or in my journal. And, I revised a lot of older ones.
Roiling clouds, grey as the mountains,
spill across sky, over the plains.
Farmhouses wrecked by the violence of wind,
mute warning for those still stuck to earth.
A blizzard’s first kiss bends roadside grasses,
travels through tires and axle to my palms
clutching the wheel. I don’t remember cars
or birds. Every minute the colors bleed
toward an iron uniformity.
I forget to believe in gravity.
—
I’ve been working on a series of road poems lately. Some new stuff and some old ones I’ve been revising. Read Write Poem’s prompt for the day was Road Trip so here’s a road poem.
It comes from a trip I took up to Colorado on ’94. One day, I decided to drive up toward Cheyenne because I’d never been to Wyoming. There was a blizzard coming in and, well, that led to this poem.
“Discrimitive insight”
(viveka)
is the enemy of avidyā
and therefore the chief instrument
to disentangle us from
the force
of the gunas.
It cuts through tamas
and rajas
like a knife, opening the way
to realization
that the core of our identity
is separated
by
a
wide
gulf
from the continuous ebb
and
flow
of the tendencies that capture
the attention
of the usual individual
and are everywhere
regarded as pertaining to the
Self.
—
I have no idea what this is about. I tried a Read Write Poem prompt called Thirft Store, where you arrange found lines into a poem.
The basic strategy is to find a passage of prose, keep it exactly like you find it, but change the line breaks strategically to call emphasis to the aspects of the passage you find poetic.
I decided to get a book from my library that I haven’t read (yet) open it to a random page and grab the first two sentences my eyes fell on. This is from page 304 of Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer.
The end result is more of an exercise in line breaking than an actual poem, but it’s a useful exercise, I think, since it allows me to experiment with creating the look of a piece with total objectivity rather than having to battle preconceived notions when adjusting the line breaks in one of my own poems.
So, here it is, for what it’s worth.
∞
A young oak trembles:
the dying gusts of winter.
Flowers in the grass.
∞
An hour before sunrise,
rain drizzles through the trees.
A wren sings nearby.
∞
Swallows fill the sky,
returning on springtime winds,
far above our kites
∞
Just water on the pond—
the ducks have gone north.
Clouds cross a daytime moon.
Jays work on a nest.
∞
At migration’s end,
a scissor-tailed flycatcher
perches on a wire.
∞
I build my garden
and plan my meals.
The birds watch
and plan theirs.
∞
hailstones
rip through trees
and melt
∞
Spring’s first hummingbird
huddles against the cold.
Waiting for the sun.
—
These are for Read Write Prompt #72: Spring Is Sprung. I’ve been bogged down with other projects (a video, a series of poems, my job) so these are taken from my other blog, a gnarled oak, where I publish haiku and haiku-like things about nature (mostly). I’ve been writing a number of spring-themed poems there so I pulled some to share here. I also cross-post most of these to Twitter, so if you’re into this sort of thing, you can check that out too.
Happy spring!
Dreams, like dew in the early morning,
drip from a shipwreck survivor’s rag.
Each glistening drop a chance, hope
against another day of slow gnawing
thirst.
Dreams are dew in these latitudes—precious, scarce.
To cling to one is to forsake the other.
Staring at the dew collected on his faded rag,
he squeezes it above his mouth.
Each drop a moment’s
relief.
In the blistering afternoon,
dreams of early morning dew
fly off like the shorebirds
he imagined yesterday.
He marvels at each drop,
each perfect liquid globe,
like the one surrounding him,
that only delays
thirst.
In these shimmering drops,
he sees sharks and a noose
tied by his own hand.
Each dream falls due
against the night,
the moon’s reflection,
endless rolling waves
fade
like dreams,
like dew
in the early
morning.
—
This is for Read Write Poem: It’s all about the First Line. The idea was that participants would contribute a line of poetry and then choose someone else’s as the starting point for a poem based on freewriting from the borrowed line.
This was heavily influenced by Jules Verne’s The Survivors of the Chancellor, which I read last week as part of my Lost reading project.
The first line, “Dreams like dew in the early morning” was provided by Sam at thinking cities… Make sure to pay him a visit and read some of his poetry. It’s good stuff.
—
I’d been working on this to submit to Postal Poetry but by the time I finished, I found that they were no longer taking submissions so I offer it here. It’s based on, and is really a remix of, a draft of the poem that I posted with the image about three years ago. I’m still working on the longer version.
It’s disappointing to see Postal Poetry go static, but I found it quite inspiring as I had never thought to combine images and words like this, which is werid considering the time I spend writing and doing photography.
I’ll probably post more of these here as I come up with them. Thanks, Dave and Dana, for the inspiration.
And, in a odd circular kind of way, and with no connection to poetry, the very day that Postal Poetry stops, my old friend Andy starts up his own site, which is about traveling in Texas. Check out Texas Rhodes Trips.
Every tree along the trail to the pond wears its own cardinal, each claiming territory and attracting mates, filling the air with song. Gnatcatchers and kinglets hop through the branches with the chickadees. Blue Jays build a nest by the pond where the ducks had been until yesterday when they got the migration call and departed for points north. With all the birds alive and calling attention to themselves, the deer skeleton was quite a shock.
on a bed of leaves,
a deer skeleton picked clean,
save one furry hoof
Another one of my small stones is appearing at a handful of stones today: “Beet Stone.” Check it out.
It fits with this week’s “South Austin Chili,” though the beet was sliced for a different recipe, and the poem was written several months before the chili one.
Black beans, fresh rinsed
obsidian jewels,
drop through fingers
feeling for stones.
Pasilla chiles, toasting,
warm the air. Later,
ground and simmered in oil,
they seethe in a mild lava.
Chocolate softens,
flows into the chili—
an ebony swirl
rippling on a midnight sea.
—
This is for Read Write Poem’s What’s Eating You?.
One of my favorite things to cook is The Soup Peddler’s South Austin Chili recipe in his Slow and Difficult Soups. I like the end result, but I love the process of making this chili. The time spent in the kitchen working the ingredients and listening to music while enjoying a beer as the pasillas toast in the oven is sheer joy.
The chili itself is wonderfully rich with a slow chipotle burn, and with the chocolate added it comes off almost like a mole.