TinkerX

Cold, Stiff

Walk with me again
like we walked home from school when
sticky, yellow buses couldn’t wait
for drama and debates.

Snow-congested, gravid Boston skies
harrowed moisture from the corners of our eyes.
Trees shamed bare of gaudy, orange leaves
stood naked, proud of winter’s clarity.

Breath comes quick. Too cold to talk.
Legs pumped, rubber boots cracked ice, we walked
and steam rolled from your mouth like smoke.
I watched you bend your neck, your shoulders bowed

as wind rode your arching back, your hair a tumbled, yellow cloud,
the only light in a fading day
of dirty white and depthless, concrete grey.
Movements slower, harder as we near home.

Stiffening as cold seeps into bone.
Nearly numb just before entry.
Eyes closed, fingers dead, you fumbled for my key.

Brittle

You can spank a bad boy with a finger-thick willow switch,
cut fresh, dripping green and running full of summer sap.
Or you can curl it back, head to tail upon itself, end on end.
Go even further, make it bend into the Christian fish;
an alpha. Then let it snap! The tension gone, it rises, spinning,
falling, finally. Lost in high grass by the swimming hole.

That branch’s brother cut in winter’s short, sharp noon won’t yield
up one degree of give. The juice that lives in sun and rain is gone,
sucked down to ground. It sleeps in rocks. The willow only knows
of it in dreams of caravanserai, eastern gifts and tales of kings.

“Softly,” is the wise-word of the willow on his darkening wind,
his long-night solstice wind that shakes the lights and brittle bulbs
hung on the changeless, undead pines.
The willow sleeps and waits for limber times.

Snow Angel

Fallen, fallen in the snow.
You can point, but she is gone.

We name the hole the thing. The wet recess
where she once lay. It’s long hatched
its angel, though.

Wind and flakes have now erased her footprints there
and back. Two wings. Two legs. A head.
A halo where
she shook her snowsuit hood.

The hole is not what’s real.

The angel is revealed, released and dances now
with cocoa and a powdered doughnut. How
the white fluff coats her fingers,
coats her cheeks.

Winter wind seeks cracks, lifts twists of sugar
and of snow, dusts eyelashes of angels
as we watch them fall
and watch them dance
and watch them go
to sleep.

All written in the space of about a week. Who knows why this happens? Perhaps John Hodgman.

Click to read. Or just enjoy the titles.

• Always Boy
• He dances with ghosts
• one day
• Wait, wait

Howdy, y’all. Enjoying my vacation from my folks’ place in northern Tennessee. Lovely new home, new neighborhood and, for my Dad, a new office. So… now that we’re all caught up.

On an earlier post, Matt commented and asked for another writing exercise. I enjoy; a) writing exercises, and, b) taking requests. So here we go.

I’ve often said that creativity involves breaking things up and putting them back together again. But different like. So today’s exercise involves the matching of narrative elements with descriptive ones… differently.

1. Think of an activity you could possibly write a poem about. Let’s say… sailing.
2. List narrative elements that go along with that activity; basically, verbs. In our example: getting wet, pulling on ropes, steering, navigating, ringing that bell (I’m not a sailor… maybe I should have chosen differently… oh, well. Too late).
3. For each of those activities, write out some descriptive terms. For example, “navigating” might yield, “lost,” “concerned,” “confident,” “ambitious,” “anxious,” etc. At least one descriptive term or phrase for each action, please.
4. Now… as usual in these exercises, time to mix it up. Grab another activity. Let’s try… dancing.
5. List narrative elements for dancing: flirting, moving, shaking, jumping, gliding
6. Now the finisher: write a poem for that second activity where you match the descriptive terms of the first activity with the narrative elements of the second.

Why do this? Two reasons. First, many young (in their poetry) writers have a hard time distancing descriptions from their most commonplace elements. Not our fault; our brains always jump to the most reasonable, usual thing. So when you say, “glide across the dance floor,” you’re not programmed to think about sailing, but about feet, floors, shoes, partners, pretty clothes and (in my case) a rainbow fright wig.

The whole point of poetry is to bring new meaning to a situation for the reader. To expose something unexpected. If you can break apart descriptions from actions, you can start to find out how things truly (or at least poetically-truly) are, rather than just how they seem or are mundanely described.

The second reason for doing this involves extended metaphor; also a toughie. Most people can come up with a quick metaphor to describe one action. Doing so throughout the entire course of a poem is a bit trickier. This exercise forces you to do it; every element of the dance will need to be described in sailing terms.

And, as soon as you start thinking of it that way… there are possibilities, aren’t there? Does a nervous, first-date guy not “navigate” the dance floor? The sound of the band is like waves crashing around him. And he wants to bring the event home, safely. To harbor? To get a glass of punch? Or is “the safe harbor” going to be taking her to bed? Up to you.

Any way that you can force bits of assumption apart, and then bring them back together in new ways… that’s a good exersize. It’s what being a tinker is all about.

Where there’s smoke

The thunder came back for a third time last night.
Explosive light spattered behind and beyond,
too far up the county to preview the drums
with a white, sharpened, spark bone
jammed into your eyes.

Sitting, not sleeping (for how could we sleep?),
as the fists of the clouds beat down on the tent
that night stretches over our streets and our eyes
now pointless as shelter
from violent light.

Each rumble is different, a fingerprint boom.
One feels like a train rolling over our graves.
While the next is a branch cracking under your foot
in a forest of black fingered
dry-as-dust wood.

The first wakes us up and the next pulls us out
of our beds with a fist of sound gripping the sheets.
By the third… we’ve relaxed, and got milk for the wait
while mountains of air
converse with the heat.

They talk to us, too, of course. Querulous bombs.
The volume is such that it’s hard to make out
what the words are. But listening, closely, we hear:
“Don’t fear us — we’re only
the gentlest of signs.”

* * * * *

[with thanks to Shannon whose comment improved this]

Bad Pun

he defines “untied”
as “tied to nothing”

no hope of hope
no jump into a lake of cool
sweet summer peace
no rope swing leap
from earth to air to water

boys fly free

men tire
mourn
hang rubber
on a dying tree