In Which I Compare Love To

It is like the skin of a cucumber,
the odd breeze I feel when I say cascara
when I only mean orange peel.

A blonde hair left on the floor--
this will hopefully be a flower
and, on the off-chance, a wire tap,
a means to read the bumps on my head.

On the table: two apples, a small juice box, and a thick spread
of soft, longing smiles.

The reach of dogs is immense--
running, creaming the hell out of
the frisbee, the jump not known
to human fingers and heels. Swamps
gardened and lingering in the backyard,
this is Florida, this is probably
the bayou, this is an immense mess of
bugs and frogs and a thickness
I can taste. The soup-smell of density;
the incongruousness of walking beside
pretty places, a hand to hold and the
feeling of walking upwards. Once
my heart fluttered and those thoughts
attached to it were you, dancing
in a dress that wore you, that clung to
your hips, melted the floor. Once,
when the water across the river had
risen, you dreamed about its length,
the wonderful words of the sun
and the row boat that looked like a wing
hanging on the lower lip of the drifting earth.

i think i'm making a series...called In Which I Compare Love To

Rolling honey between our fingers, when will this somber walking turn
into what salad greens feel like at their last possible moment--a hook around the corner of your body, and mine?

It sounds as if love were wearing us like untied crocodile shoes, singing
about the ocean, checking its blood pressure with its right, big toe.

Donna Lee (for my brother)

This is a drop of the past, this
strum, so fast
how it rides my brother's solid
fingers that sped as strongly
as they clenched, how they ride
his hair, his cool, tireless jaw
how cross his eyes looked
till that quick caress, how fast
it took to turn notes, licks
how cross how untired
that mouth that cawed
his sweet dat dweets, songful, each.

No longer mourning those blues,
brother how cross those notes
turned how fast they ride
behind you now crooning
lonely, lonely to new tunes
blues of the past no longer
this is rock this is elegy
no longer, this music, like water
how fast it rides, how past
it must feel, lonely drop
in your eye, how cross it must be
how cross your face gets how
it rides into your fingers like
the insides of flames when you reach
out for your six string case.

Heat

The only thing I do to keep myself
cool is open the bedroom window
and turn high the ceiling fan.
The rest of the apartment swells,
slightly, on the precipice of summer,
as in the sluggish way the mint
creeps over to the window. It
is growing flowers (the mint), which
I've never seen before, since
I'm new to gardening, planting,
most things wild. They are
white and huddling inside a pod
(each) and hinting at something
though I can't really tell what--
green turning into green; a lilac,
if only just to say the word and hope
that is what it is, something white
like forgiveness ought to be
when colored inside someone's face,
inked around the edges, a depth of frame,
a finish of red, the sunburn after
standing outside for so, so long,
wallowing and sublime, like plant life,
like a perpetual blues song on play.

Untitled, After Reginald Shephard

Petrarch likes my moves. He likes my use

of legs, desire of legs, smooth like moons

pinned to ceilings of little boys' rooms
(though the air wasn't on, the birds on

the wallpaper flitted about at around two

when he was awake and aware

of the viscosity of summer--how

it dove-tailed a bit then banked left

into a September known as birch tree,

ash and hush).

My bike's wheels rush like the music

of dolphins, clatter to the ground and wish

(I wish) to call out to my lost love (the

almandine shape of Spring--he is fifteen

and holds her hand as a tea bowl,

as a glass)(he is fifteen and begins to blow

his nose and think of marijuana). Petrarch

knows how to find my love, my hand.

He likes this,
this music where I give and give, then take a little back.

*note: the short, short lines should be indented all the way to the right most part of the stanzas...

waxing poetic, and some thoughts on the recent completed workshop

so i recently finished a couple-months-long workshop hosted by the poet in residence at gdubs. i went there with great expectations: finding a community of writers, enjoying the benefits of shared poetry (i.e., commenting on each other's stuff, offering serious praise and serious criticism and receiving some of that for myself), and lastly being provoked to write in a serious and more productive manner. i think, after all's said and done, i got a tiny bit of column a, a tiny bit of column b, and not a lot of column c.

i really don't feel i've improved over the past few months. i think i've started to adjust to a different type of experimenting with my poetry, but improving? i don't know. i didn't feel like the tidbits this poet offered us were too worthwhile, and it didn't seem like he was always up for conversation afterwards. i have some pretty serious thoughts on poetry, and i feel the need to keep myself entrenched in it; i have burning questions and asked him plenty, but didn't really get too much of an answer from him.

i think one of the things that i encountered in this class is the type of reader of poetry that goes for the content of the poem, trying to get its meaning instead of what i usually see my writing as: an act. most of the time, i have an over-presiding idea or feeling--sometimes just a line or a word that triggers the rest of the poem. i don't always know what the message is behind it, but it always seems to want to go somewhere and then trail off to another place, kind of like that robert frost quote that i learned a while back: that a poem should be like ice on a hotplate--it goes one place, then off to another, it wanders. i like that about poetry, and i strive for that in my poems. but a lot of what i work with, and a lot of what i like to do and just happen to be doing is sensory things. the poem should sound for me, should cohere in a different sense that may not necessarily make sense, or apparent sense. i think that's the benefit of having a reader read things: there's meaning to be made within the reader's mind, and there shouldn't be any idea that there's a real message that the poet always wants to get out. images should be a manipulative inside the reader's mind: they're clay things and get molded by whatever the reader is intent on seeing.

now, is this me being lazy and saying, "i'm not going to revise?" i don't know, i don't think so. i'm going to revise...but perhaps maybe leave abstract things in? is that good or bad in terms of coherence of poetry, in terms of keeping a clear vision of what the poem wants? i don't know. i suppose when people say "i don't get it" there are two ways to see it: one, they aren't allowing themselves to read the poem in a way that leaves "sense" at the door; or, they don't get it because there's something too obscure that's blocking the image. perhaps it's a little bit of both.

like, take my poem "In Which I Compare Love To." I had this first draft, and it's completely obscure--to me, it's a lost-love poem, but is that line "Any longer and our smiles will refuse to point", etc. actually saying something? Is it too obscure, or is the poem allowed to actually stay that way and be fine? I don't know. Now, it's in partial rhyming tercets, Abb, Cdd, kinda thing. it's also expanded. that increases the "readability," but really, is it what i wanted? is the act of the poem that i originally had in mind, that i originally felt and wanted others to feel gone because i've expanded it? sometimes it seems that way. so who should i be? the one who follows his own rules, or the one who follows others rules? or, should i be the one that follows his own rules while taking others' into account? what did i do before, when i was in college, that made these poems i wrote different? was it the challenge of the class, the amount of talent and pure want to improve inside the room?

for now, i'm pretty sure of one thing: poetry is an act. it should be felt. it may be a dance, and a refined one at that, but at its core, poetry's got to be something that hits you in the gut somewhere.