Insert Snappy Title Here

[Blythe]

Thanks M! You are kind to stop by and comment

[Blythe]

Slippery House

one breezy day we watched
the ducks surf down the rapids of the creek.
they offered curse-quacks in a similarly nonchalant way
of two long-married thick-skinned drunks.
I wonder about their slide through the current
in the same thought as I consider my unlived lives:
how easy to make a mistake and go under, bedunked
in the stillness that we take as a race.

[Donner]

Hi, Blythe,

Ok, Three Ways to Play Ghost in the Graveyard is exactly why I don't watch horror/slasher movies. It's not enough that you found one way to scare me, but three? Seriously, that's a great format for exploring differences in a single tradition, telling ghost stories being one of them. I'm sure every culture has its versions.

Slippery House - You use an everyday, mundane observation to make a much larger one about N's life and life in general - how easy to make a mistake and go under.

Donner

[Blythe]

Thanks Donner Always here to scare.

[Blythe]

Reasons I Shouldn't Be Allowed on Balconies

1. It is too hard to find mercy
when looking down from on high.
There's innocence down below
and it doesn't deserve
all that the heavens dump on it.

2. It's too easy to shake the devil's hand.

3. I'm eager to test gravity.

4. It's easy to shift blame
and a drink, once spilled,
takes a good moment to splash
in which you step away
as your friend peers over, laughing.

[Blythe]

I love a poem about how to write a poem.
The author, Shulamith Wechter Caine, uses the extended metaphor
of a warrior practicing her aim, singleminded, unerring,
gathering precision about her like a stormcloud
and undistracted by the enemy’s preparations – murderous-seeming,
from so far away – could not turn her eye
from her target, from her blank page.

The joke of the poem is like a happy balloon
that you can loft again and again with a light touch of your fingertips
and watch float back toward you, the easiness of bright colored poppable latex
and its bob against gravity. Simple as that.
But you’ll never win, and so you lose interest
in the bop bop bop, you stop putting up your fingers to flick
and the balloon lazes to the ground.

It looks so easy, so welcoming, and yet
it takes a vigilance so tight
it could burst you.

Maybe my old English teacher is right,
I’m more of a math person. It’s true
I love to solve puzzles. But still, I’m going to go practice the words
until they are also true for me.
 

[HowardM2]

"Background #1" is great fun; a cartoon but in a more realistic setting and with a fine last line, bringing in the innocent victims of collateral damage even in a cartoon world. I love the juxtaposition of the magician as automaton and the magic as a creative force in "The Marvelous Orange Tree"; the way the two ideas are in opposition but also in a necessary balance for the full effect of the performance. I really want to show this one to some magician friends to see how it tallies with their own experiences. Fine job. A good bit of a similar interesting ambivalence forms the basis of "Restoration." It does make me wonder about your interest in magic and where it's taking you. "Slippery House" presents a fascinating look at a clearly uneasy marriage; the last line is wonderful. The first stanza of "Looks Simple" reminds me of the lessons of Zen in the Art of Archery and the lengthy journey to acquire the archer's skill; the contrast with that by keeping a balloon in the air is a remarkable change of perspective that opens whole new ideas, which are themselves modified by the awareness of even the difficulty of maintaining the balloons aloft in the third stanza, while the fourth takes us to a new view from a different perspective yet again. An excellent complex meditation. Fine work all around.

[Blythe]

Hi Howard - thank you for the close reads and words of encouragement.

The magic pieces were inspired from a kid's book of magic I picked up randomly at the library, with quite beautiful and intriguing stories and images. There will be more to that series. I'd be interested to hear what a magician might say!

[Blythe]

those who engage in acts of piracy are called pirates
unless they’re in the admiralty or decked
out with honors and bestowals of some grace
that lets them walk between the lines of a lexicon.

but when you’ve stolen the hills behind my house
you’ve become something more, following a vampiric thirst
for whatever blesses the soil; god or demon? Your trowels
rake lines until nothing is left for me to walk on.

[Blythe]

The mouse gapes at Manhattan.

His whiskers pucker, not at the arc of massive skyscrapers

but his nose zeroes on the cathedral’s proud point at clear blue –

a clear spirit, this one, unplugged from a mundane worship

of money, theft, violence. Oh, it’s a cavern,

it’s a natural tabernacle, this city gooseneck. Shafts

of sunlight flood Grand Central

with the grace of weary millennia traveled.

Do arches and globes form complementary

worlds suspended from late train tables?

Happily, Atlas provides his own sinew

as an answer; a mouse wouldn’t know his head

from the cat that wants to decapitate him.

Sinew and Rockefeller until you almost set

the city on fire; dangle above the world from the wick,

friend, until the light catches you.

[beeswax]

Blythe. Having never learned to swim I avoid deep water. The third column reminded me why. Scary stuff – clever piece.

Restoration – the part about the subtle fault made me stop, think, and then go back for a second read. I like when a poem does that for me.

In Slipper House, I love the image of the ducks . . . offering curse quacks (like) two long-married, thick-skinned drunks . . .

I enjoyed the balloon metaphor in Looks Simple – a far from simple minded metaphor. It appeals to me more than Wechter Caine’s. Who is this Wechter Caine? I should probably know but I don’t.

Partially Seen I’m interested in this mouse view -- how each of us view place/time/situation – informed by partial perspective.

Your poems made me think. A good place for this insomniac to be – no one else awake – I was alone with your writing.

[Blythe]

Hi beeswaxy, I appreciate you taking time to look over my stuff so far.
Here's Shulamith Wechter Caine's poem, a favorite of mine. Originally published in the Atlanta Review.

How to Throw a Spear or Write a Poem
by Shulamith Wechter Caine

Before you begin, you must love to hold
the spear between your fingers, love

the heft of its notched and polished shaft,
the sharpened point, deadly as innocence.

And when you begin, do not fear
your enemy’s skill, his decorations

and medals for heroism in battle.
Do not think of the iron and leather

armor your enemy wears, his grimacing
facemask, his fearsome galloping horse.

Practice throwing the spear again
and again—you do not need a partner*—

until it flies by itself in the chosen
direction, the keen-edged point piercing

the target clean as your knife slicing
an apple. That is also how to write a poem.

[Blythe]

1. Sim Sala Bim
For some in the audience, the words burlesque and vaudeville conjured the majestic
height of magic – fantasy unfettered by legitimacy. For performers,
the dance and swish meant life bought one more washed-out
sunrise. Fantastic enough for the wicked and weary alike. One thousand thanks,
one thousand times this old body rises from the edge to walk and sing
one thousand more tunes. One tune, actually. One song
from the remembered nursery – the sun of childhood
remembered by us all.

2. Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, Ghadis
When the night of your unanswerable question comes –
as it will, son, to us all – you unearth the names of these cities
and fill your mouth with the dry pebble words until you fall
asleep, and the answer tumbles into your dreams.
Beware the ruthless virus that these words can carry.
You see forward in strobes, rocky shoals wait in the dark patches
but the light beckons you, come forth.

3.
Make it your own, your own, your own

[Blythe]

People would always tell me you had a punchable face.
And, sadly, it was true. And when I visited you today in your real estate
office right in the center of High Street, Irish twin made good,
second-to-youngest of six kids, twenty years since I last saw you,
your face has become, if you can believe it,
even more punchable. It looks like you got cheek implants
to give a fist more surface area to land on.
But I could still see that boy who nearly succeeded
in teaching me how to drive stick, were it not for that hill
on Skelp Level Road, where you have to pull away upwards from a stop
into oncoming traffic – even though it’s a sleepy rural lane,
the boy who failed to seduce me in the pool one night – any night,
really – because I was scared of the large spiders that sometimes skittered
over the water in the dark, yeah; the boy who handed me a parcel
of mushrooms then toted my body
all over town one night, finally dropping me
back home where my dad was still up and watching The Great Race
and I sat, gape-mouthed, watching the most amazing pie-fight,
a scene of such absurdity and rage you don’t even
need hallucinogens to feel the raw colors,
and the kind and generous soul of you was there
in the way you had shared the fortune you had
earned or worked for or were dumped plain into with as many people as possible.

(Still a shame about the face though)
 

[Blythe]

Time to go back through the day

It was a tough wake-up, and the to-bed sounds rough as well.
I’d drank too much wine on Friday, so Saturday morning
woke in a heap of bell bongs. Bong on my brain, bong on my head.
My mate has insomnia; it’s a poor chronic tone
for the shape of a healthy mind, poorer still
for the harmony of a large family. Despite. He wasn’t up for upping with the kids
so we shouted for them to pour their own cereal, dig their own waffles
from the steam of the freezer so we could zee.
The whole time I spilled out on their pallet
was spent worrying they were choking on bites of blueberry Eggos.