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Tag: poems

U.S. Highways

July 9, 2010 • • 4 Comments

 

We read lines and studied rest stop signs to
learn the languages that govern highways.

Electric rivers flowed outward from cities
in red trails along the eastern highways.

We lived on the salty French fry grease and
fast food feasts of American highways.

We waited through summer road construction,
rebuilding and slowing northern highways.

In the mountains, we squinted through the dark
studying switchbacks to discern highways.

Green shadows crept across the road through
endless rolling tree-lined southern highways.

We avoided the rest stop stares of owls
and meth addicts on nocturnal highways.

In the desert night, lightning played with stars,
and we saw God on the western highways.

The engine downshifted, slow to grip the
road; tires clung like goats to mountain highways.

At night in desert motel rooms we laughed
and followed love down unspoken highways.

Elsewhere on the Web

July 7, 2010 • • Leave a comment

Yesterday what with celebrating Joey’s birthday and all, I forgot to link to a handful of stones. My poem “Highway 73 to Port Arthur” is up over there, though I submitted it untitled and that’s how it appears. It’s an attempt to describe the scene along highway 73 in southeast Texas after the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which came only 3 years after Hurricane Rita did a number on the region.

In other cool news, two of my poems are included in Austin-based Virgogray Press’s latest chapbook anthology: America Remembered. The poems, which first appeared here at Coyote Mercury, are “Trickle Down Hope” and “Deeper into Texas.” The former was a response to a Read Write Poem prompt. In fact, I think it’s the first prompt I did over at RWP. The latter was also a response to an RWP prompt, though parts of it where taken from a draft of an older poem. I originally called it “It’s Like a Whole Other Country.” You can order copies of America Remembered here.

God Bless Johnny Cash

June 29, 2010 • • 20 Comments

This is my first attempt at a video poem. I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and  Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.

Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic ap, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.

The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.

Here’s the text of the poem. The title is from a bumper sticker I saw twice last weekend while driving through the hill country outside Austin:

God Bless Johnny Cash

I drove to the river;
it followed me home.

Sweated the night surrounded
by lesser freshwater demons.

Sang pelagic chantys
heard second hand

from deep-gulleted
birds plucking a thunder bass.

The earth ate the moon,
broke the fall of morning.

Twisted roads passed tallgrass hills
that can’t remember trees.

In the morning, I prayed
the dusty pick-up truck petition,

God bless Johnny Cash.

A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea

June 11, 2010 • • 25 Comments

After years in the desert, when he reached the empty sea,
he knelt in the sand and prayed to the rusted ships
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering black waves.
Syringes and glass glistened in the sand like ruined stars.

He knelt in the sand and prayed to the rusted ships.
In the grimy brownlight of evening, he collected treasures:
syringes and glass glistened in the sand like ruined stars.
From these bones of the past, he made her a necklace.

In the grimy brownlight of evening, he collected treasures;
he found bits of plastic and driftwood poisoned with tar.
From these bones of the past, he made her a necklace.
Imagining her beautiful again, he sang like the birds of legend.

He found bits of plastic and driftwood poisoned with tar
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering black waves.
Imagining her beautiful again, he sang like the birds of legend
after years in the desert, when he reached the empty sea.

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s weekly prompt. The form is called pantoum, and this is my first crack at one. I liked the repetitive spiraling nature of the form, which seemed an interesting fit for another of my post-apocalypse myths and legends poems (for want of a better term), though, I suspect pantoums are best kept short. The idea was to write in form about something that makes us angry so there’s some BP oil spill in this as well as a little bit of influence spilling over from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Using form to tame emotion is a good idea, I think. I’ve tried to write about the BP spill, but its hard to maintain control. Form helps. So does 3rd person narrative and walking so far down the chain of effects that I’m in a different world by the time I begin to write.

—

Just for grins, I de-pantoumified (de-pantsed?) it . It’s easier for me to follow this way since I can get lost in all that repetition, but it loses that legend-y vibe, I think.:

After years in the desert
when he reached the empty sea,
he knelt in the sand
and prayed to the rusted ships
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering
black waves. Syringes and glass
glistened in the sand
like ruined stars. In the grimy
brownlight of evening, he collected
treasures. He found bits of plastic
and driftwood poisoned with tar.
From these bones of the past,
he made her a necklace.
Imagining her beautiful again,
he sang like the birds of legend.

I and the Bird #126

May 27, 2010 • • 20 Comments

Today we’ll travel with I and the Bird
to discover the most amazing birds.

We’ll marvel at Rio Blanco shots
of Colombian sylphs and hummingbirds.

We’ll see colors galore in Singapore
on a camera-ignoring sunbird.

We’ll have to get stuck in the mud to see
Avocets, Willets and burrowing birds.

Supporting birding teams, we’ll stop to know
the beautiful woods surrounding birds.

Flammulated Owls live beyond rough trails,
but we learn the wild when surveying birds.

Stop for a moment to consider the
vultures, our maligned highway-cleaning birds.

The vibrant beauty of nature’s revealed
by children carefully coloring birds.

Near a hole on a familiar shore, see
Bank Swallows, brown-and-white scolding birds.

In Zion park, we’ll learn the stories of
certain condors, those distant soaring birds.

We’ll brave the coldest snowy days for owls
and hope all life birds will be living birds.

Viewer warning:  “Sex and the City Bird”
documents the habits of mating birds.

In a blooming sage garden, time stops for
close looks at Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

Recall nature’s red in tooth and claw when
we see crows are squirrel-tongue-eating birds.

Burrowing Owls and roadrunners remind
us of the simple joy of finding birds.

Spend a good day searching for Golden-winged,
Cerulean and other warbling birds.

A witty Straw-necked Ibis has some words.
(Who knew we’d find poetry writing birds?)

We can observe a Red-tailed Hawk’s high nest
and learn all about digiscoping birds.

Strange orange colors on Mallards’ tails pose
questions when we’re closely studying birds.

On the Gulf, pelicans will break our hearts
when we confront loose oil killing birds.

Shearwaters, jaegers and petrels will lead
us to boats for looks at seafaring birds.

We’ll see a Little Gull and lovely terns
on the southwest Queens coast while listing birds

In Madras, we’ll meet pittas and plovers
and sandpipers among the wading birds

“Always be birding,” that’s what we’ll say.
Even in parking lots, we’re finding birds.

That’s it for this trip, I’m signing off. Send
links for the next one to The Drinking Bird.

Beyond the Mesquite Trees

May 21, 2010 • • 6 Comments

Venus chases the moon into the mesquite trees
where a cushion of haze rises to dim their light,
break their fall so as not to disturb the golfers
coming up the back nine during twilight play.

A Carolina anole turns green, inflates his dewlap
as his clock ticks toward mating; he searches
along railings and in bushes, peering through
the dusky light for the female he knows is there.

Out over the Pacific Ocean, it’s still daylight,
could be tomorrow or yesterday or maybe even
next week, but in the brilliant sky, Venus and Moon
sail unseen, a slow pursuit like lizards stalking mates,

questions circling all night only to come up again
in the morning, looking different, but only slightly.

—

This started as a micro-poem posted at a gnarled oak and Identi.ca, where Deb hinted it could be a first line.

Nature Poem

May 17, 2010 • • 2 Comments

My students freeze—
how out of place

that slope-intercept
equation on the whiteboard

in this literature class.
Scrawled in blue, graphed

and correctly worked.
It’s poetry, I tell them.