2008 PFFA Poetry Competition - Starting Line

[senia]

Wait

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight.
One night down. Mark it. “What’s that word?
Extirpate? Wait. It’ll come. Where is he now?
Math class? Distracted? Decimate? Wait.”
You fade to footsteps, distance, silence.
One day down. Mark it. “What’s she doing?
‘In my room’ Way too late. Wait. What is that word?
Obliterate? Worse. Much worse. Wait.”
You dream of sounds, “Daddy! Watch! Again?”
Four lives down. Marked. “Eliminate? Wait.”

[romac1]

Thanks to the three first-round judges - Barbara Jean, Jee Leong, and MEHope - for working so hard at the unenviable task of extracting ten poems from the thirty entries. I'll post the names of the ten finalist poems below.

I have to do a few other things now but, when I get back (in a few hours), I'll re-post the ten finalists at the end of this thread and let George Szirtes know that they're all his. When George makes his decisions, and the final results have been posted, we'll reveal the identities of all the authors. Good luck to the ten!

The ten finalists are (in random order)...

1. The Swimmer

2. Articulation, After the Accident

3. Catch and Release

4. That Which Brings us

5. Camping

6. Souvenir of London

7. You Wake

8. Sheathed wings

9. Bergen

10 Extrovert

[romac1]

Finalist #1

The Swimmer

You wake to car sounds, radios.
The cold sunlight strained through muslin
is a choked back utterance of light.
Your morning cup of tea has cooled
in my hands, so absorbed
was I in watching you sleep, I forgot
to wake you. In another scene:
the sound of waves thumping the shore.
We're both awake, focused
on the other's lit face, a candle's gleam
between us. The tea is jasmine this time.
Steaming. My hands are white and slender,
reaching back and forward through time.
I'm a swimmer uncertain of my own buoyancy,
and thus trapped in ceaseless movement
to stay afloat. Time is green and turbulent,
like tea whisked from fine powder. I'm always left
surveying the room as it drains away,
and you with it as the next surge
of limbs carries me forward, back.
No matter the room: basement flat, cafe, caravan,
the furniture always smells like damp earth,
or bergamot. And you, forever waking,
waking. In this succession of dim scenarios
I have become a failed stove holding lukewarm liquids,
my white flame flickers like milky arms
hauling their cargo through restless seas.

[romac1]

Finalist #2

Articulation, After the Accident

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
like klieg lights on brass, summer grass tickling
your hair, Route 9 on your right. Anniversaries
of your death increase geometrically,
here, after it. You worry about your fingers
glowing, free-willed, spooky blue, self-born.
The notes are no longer under your sway,
you are told again. And again you are told
all you got to do is true swing.

You hear nothing of it here, beaten step-
down cafe with cool crew in tow. You tap
force and speed, 'tips multiplying, for all
anniversaries increase, every second
per second you get to put the glow on.

[romac1]

Finalist #3

Catch & Release

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
caging my hungover husband to your bed,
and you duck beneath the duvet, try to swallow
the key. But it’s your kitten
attacking the movement that wakes him.
He stretches, smiles, already
clocking his escape. Soon, soon.
Right after your teenagers leave
for school. He tells you he loves
your Crystal Gayle hair, and that down there,
especially that, notes the match, as he slides
into his Dakotas and shakes out his lumber shirt.
Don’t you just love his inland drawl?

If the dream-come-true were true,
the derby, the eight-foot-six sturgeon
and the hours it took to land it,
I’d be swollen with pride, pregnant perhaps,
as the Chilliwack River in spring.
But he’s a liar with a dusty boat, my tell-tale
masking tape still stuck to the tacklebox clasp,
and no picture proof of fish or piss-up.

He seldom tracks lower mainland mud,
or sheds, through our home. Black leach
choice bait in the reeds, Evinrude at full purr,
elbow on knee, he just trolls
the pothole lakes for trout,
hands me scissors for snags (snip). He tosses
panfries, old boots, or dead loons back.
I return to my parasol and book
as he kisses another hooked-back cheek goodbye.
He smiles, admires his one flip-flopping keeper,
all the while wondering
if you were even worth the fight.

[romac1]

Finalist #4

That Which Brings Us

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
clanging your windows as if, by its glacial brightness,
it could shatter glass. Buildings
in downtown Chicago launch skyward
and, with an off-hand glance from your sixth-floor room,
you’re in the grip of memories: mesas rising around you
as they have risen for centuries around your kin.

Perhaps remnants of a dream, some notion
inside you that still craves to connect with those
who’ve imagined this place a “limestone canyon”,
who travel its streets as if asphalt rivers, venture
to the Great Lake’s swollen lip, watch rainbows
of contorted oil spills swell under a ball-peen sun
hammering its chill into whitecaps that lift and fall
as though heavy sighs.

The plateau planes, the wind-hewn features
of your Havasupai face have morphed
to hybrid-Anglo above Oxford shirts, pinstriped ties,
beneath blunt-cropped hair that sits as a black squat
upon your head; you’ve shortened your name.
Ivy League erodes aboriginal as you stride to work
in sweeps of wind that bound off entablatures
and quoins as if cliffs and buttes.

It presses you through corridors of laser-cut stone,
high-rise steel, not so very different from the gullies
of your youth, crevices carved by blue-green waters,
chasms you’ve exchanged for endless horizons.
But the world has turned flat and this city is the filmy snakeskin
from your grandfather’s stories, a phantom that shifts
like sand beneath your feet.

You’ve made your wagers, watched closely,
but shell games end to reveal nothing-- no pea,
no trace of sagebrush, no red-ridged earth for you
to stretch across as if a perfect perforation on the edge of sky.
Still, you hurtle congested pavement,
a solitary rock tumbling within populous schist,
not recognizing man-made canyons are worse than empty;

beneath vaulted facades lies a transient abyss,
one that siphons vitality with each corner you pass,
each surfeited block. Nor do you know, one frigid afternoon,
you’ll stand stock-still amid this jostling mass, look up,
entreat a patch of blue, beg to feel warmth upon your face,
keen your eyes
in search of the condor’s wheeling.

[romac1]

Finalist #5

Camping

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight, the little skulls
of mushroom moving in the wind. You are jigsawed to the ground.

The children play a game of hide-and-seek. Are these earthworms
hiking up for air? You feel them on your back. Some odd,

earthly spa. You stretch, flat as a lotus pad on the water. Someone
is with the children. Your husband, with a timer, watching the game?

A langur, looking for its casuarina tree? They're safe. You can sink
in further, where the water draws out your bones, and your face

turns nude. The eucalypti skyscrape. You watch their tops,
their long legs. Their long tresses. And you wake to bonfire,

guitar notes, moonlit shapes, the little skulls hiding, seeking.

[romac1]

Finalist #6

Souvenir of London

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
on skin goose-bumped with deja-vu. God
has been gone for half an hour, precisely,
and it's your duty to live now. You wish
he'd picked a warmer day to immortalise;
the hiss of tyres on rain-slick street
raises your hackles as you wait for the spray
to soak you, again. You're a thousand times
crosser than you were the first time
but you're stuck with first reactions; you
smile the same rueful smile, shrug
the same shoulders. The tourist-red bus
shudders round the corner, unavoidably
on time with its burden aboard, passengers
with the same boredom in their eyes
that would show in yours if you hadn't been
so in love the day you were saved.
The view behind you clears of traffic,
the chimes of Big Ben shiver the air
and you do your silly smiley jig, and stop.

The hiss of rain-wet tyres swells behind you;
you wait for the spray to hit, you wish
it was a warmer day, you wish you were
a starfield rushing infinitely towards the watcher,
an endless line looping through the spectrum
in restless knots, anything that can't remember.
Yet when you see, dim through the screen,
the hand of God move towards the mouse,
you want to let loose a great shout, "No!"

[romac1]

Finalist #7

You Wake

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
flashing through pacing trousers; broken cheek
to earth, the grass face-high. Over siren voices,
professional boots ask you your name. Lately,
questioning often wakes you; shop-coats
and uniforms, enquiring where you live. Your own
questions equally unanswered. They gather,
while you shiver, in your slippers, and try
to follow the seam back, to your cashmere coat;
your lucky suit; your briefcase. Back, to waking
once, on a long drive north, the satin road
stitching out of the darkness beyond the wheel.
And a momentary doze had never explained
that misplaced hour, or, in the backseat,
the talkative stranger; the road behind, unzipping.

[romac1]

Finalist #8

Sheathed wings

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
on my neck as Potter fumbles on
about beetles: sheathed wings
and exoskeletons in all the corners
of our world, my buttons opening
your eyes as the boys outside,
with their indifferent tools and clumsy banging,
wake you to this room,
these thighs, this trinity
of head, thorax, abdomen
and later, across your desk, my legs open
like elytra, we bang like Christmas beetles
into glass.

He raises his eyes from the diary,
the remaining leaves, like the bed
he sits beside, lie empty, abandoned like a cracked cocoon,
the boy who spun the words metamorphed and gone.
Around him in the ward
he watches the rise and fall of patients sleeping
like pale beetles, pinned to the sheets
by cannulae, masks, the weight of death.

Somewhere a radio is playing and sunlight,
like a cold hand around his wrist, reaches
through the winter window of the ward
and slides across the paper by the bed.
He doesn’t have to read it. He knows
how the crash killed his son:
how the boy's head burst against the glass
the chassis a crumpled crying shell against a wall,
radio still piping Coldplay.

He thinks of that last day:
the boys below the window with their racket
of radios and growling cars;
his students, fidgeting and nodding
like feeding worms through Potter’s beetle oral.
He had drifted off, head against the glass,
his mind fingering
the image of his son, head down,
writing, a twitch of shorts beneath his desk.

[romac1]

Finalist #9

Bergen

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight
that bounces off a window where the neighbor hangs
gray sheets which warm no hope of bleaching white.

Your mind turns over every word you spoke,
like stones, to find an acrid taste that’s paved
the tongue. You rise to fill your lungs with smoke.

And cough up brittle bits of bitter words
bitten off to keep your job, your hands
full of tools and tasks and wheels that turn.

Around the day, from ass-scratching dawn to elbows
that carve grooves in bars until the sounds of night
remind the hands to tip a final toast to home,

towards home, a rock strewn path, a stagger stepping row.
A cloudy apron’s bound around a moon that washes
dirty sheets still waving from the neighbor’s window.

The yellow fog that curled about the house the night before,
grows dizzy as it circles and stumbles on the cobbles,
then throws up greasy smoke outside the door.

[romac1]

Finalist #10

Extrovert

You wake to car sounds, radios, the cold sunlight.
The new house steals the white of sleep.

In the dark of a documentary, quick-bitten nails
and slivered fingertips are braille for slivered thumbs.

One morning, a supervisor cites the wrong god,
and you see the jokes before they happen
and fixate on seventh-floor teeth.

An urge at 3 a.m.
to rearrange the living room
scrapes the moaning hardwood floor
and draws your husband down
to habits he’s never seen.

Eavesdropping seconds from Farragut Square,
you catch the low tones of the man behind
telling a woman last Saturday morning,
alone along the C & O Canal,
and the instinct to keep moving while eyeing the woods
for the dozen deer not ten feet away,
stiller than the trees.

You drive to Potomac for your sister,
then hike the Catoctins in the cool fall sun.
When whisky sinks you on her couch,
legs aching from the day’s inclines,
finally you dream.

They’re not your friends, but you know them all,
and work the room in a recovered patter
come back for the night.

The next room opens, smaller and empty.
My arm across your shoulders, my head an inch away.
You know what’s said doesn’t spike into words,
but the sound finds your corners on its own.

You wake to the unlit rustle by the window,
and make it to the door in time for the doe
darting in moonlight across the lawn
to a buck that never moves.

Five years on, when you sell your house, you’ll write
the highway mouths the words outside of town
on a post it note, and wonder why.

[Sorry]

Excuse me for asking, moderators, but can you please tell me when the winner of the poetry contest will be revealed? If it already lists this information somewhere and I have missed it, please accept my apology. I mean to imply no disrespect, I'm simply curious.Thank you,
Sorry

[romac1]

Excuse me for asking, moderators, but can you please tell me when the winner of the poetry contest will be revealed? If it already lists this information somewhere and I have missed it, please accept my apology. I mean to imply no disrespect, I'm simply curious.Thank you,
Sorry

Hi Sorry

I didn't give George a deadline. He's a busy guy and he's doing this without being paid, so you'll just need to hang on until he's made his decision. I guess any judge wants to 'live with' the poems for a while before making a decision, and George wants to comment too, which also takes time and thought.

Patience...

[Sorry]

Of course, I understand these things take time; please forgive my impatience, it's just so exciting!

Sorry