Dragons

The first one is still the best one,
a small scaled green dragon
hatching from a speckled egg,
small enough to close in a fist.
The others, metal and pottery,
covered a shelf until they were
packed away into a box
beneath the bed. Affection
for them dwindled and they
nearly went to the charity shop.
Instead they were given to my kids
to litter up their shelves: except for two.
The little original, still on my dressing
table next to my perfume and picture
of my favourite cat; now dead.
The other, a hand-made sleeping
dragon I lost like the friendship
of the person who made it: cold
and cruel as dragon claws.

NaPoWriMo begins today...

I did this a few years back and got some good poems out of it and I liked the routine of writing something every day and thinking about it for a long time first. Last time I just grasped around for inspiration but this year I saw that the helpful poet Jo Bell is going to provide a poetry prompt every day. This is going to help me to get started (my mind is a blank lately). Here is her first one and I will post the poem (first draft, rough thing) later today.

'So, my NaPoWriMo prompt number 1 is - write to yourself as a sixteen year old. What warnings, what advice do you give? If you have time - write back. 

[NB I know that some of these prompts will sound worthy or 'workshoppy'. But give them a shot, especially if they aren't the sort of thing you would normally do?]

Fleeces

'We move from green geese to sheep and grass today in a poem that both disturbs and intrigues. 'Fleeces' from Ruth Stacey on IS&T now.

'Are our lambs at the right school/to get the high results to land/
the correct job to buy the/most grass –'

Helen Ivory


'A dark hallucinatory Poem from Ruth Stacey. 
A poet that always cuts a little deeper. Immerse yourself in it...'   

Chris Guidon

You can read my fleeces poem here, at Ink, Sweat and Tears

Thistles by Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

The Toll House, Avoncroft

Stargazing: NPD 2012

If you don't have an iphone
you cannot hold it up to the sky
so that it translates the mystery

of the constellations, but instead
you could learn them off by heart,
view them through iris and sharp

memory, not dependant upon
battery power just the cold night
air sucked deep into your lungs;

Ursa Major, Taurus, Andromeda,
Lupus, Sagittarius and Hydra.

Rum

Taking the rum bottle you rinse
out the sweet sugar film and force a red
candle into the void

Each evening we light the wick, replace
it when flame melts into nothingness,
only the wax

remains, the liquid drips hardened
around the neck like the frill
of some long extinct lizard

I nurture the long drops like children
noting the growth and checking
for weeping fragility

What are poems but the flickering
huff and waft of the smoke
when the candle

gutters in the coil that sneaks past
reason and sense, the spaces
where emotion gets in

through the gap of the window frame
and my glass is tilted in the hand,
the liquid is burning amber

and the flame in the eye
is burning amber

All the Whiskey in Heaven by Charles Bernstein

Not for all the whiskey in heaven
Not for all the flies in Vermont
Not for all the tears in the basement
Not for a million trips to Mars

Not if you paid me in diamonds
Not if you paid me in pearls
Not if you gave me your pinky ring
Not if you gave me your curls

Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind

No, never, I'll never stop loving you
Not till my heart beats its last
And even then in my words and my songs
I will love you all over again

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At ten o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
 
And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'
Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in a four foot box, as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Briar Rose by Anne Sexton

does Briar Rose look happy? I think not

Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here to Papa.
Sit on my knee.
I have kisses for the back of your neck.
A penny for your thoughts, Princess.
I will hunt them like an emerald.

Come be my snooky
and I will give you a root.
That kind of voyage,
rank as a honeysuckle.
Once
a king had a christening
for his daughter Briar Rose
and because he had only twelve gold plates
he asked only twelve fairies
to the grand event.
The thirteenth fairy,
her fingers as long and thing as straws,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
her uterus an empty teacup,
arrived with an evil gift.
She made this prophecy:
The princess shall prick herself
on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
and then fall down dead.
Kaputt!
The court fell silent.
The king looked like Munch's Scream
Fairies' prophecies,
in times like those,
held water.
However the twelfth fairy
had a certain kind of eraser
and thus she mitigated the curse
changing that death
into a hundred-year sleep.

The king ordered every spinning wheel
exterminated and exorcised.
Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
and each night the king
bit the hem of her gown
to keep her safe.
He fastened the moon up
with a safety pin
to give her perpetual light
He forced every male in the court
to scour his tongue with Bab-o
lest they poison the air she dwelt in.
Thus she dwelt in his odor.
Rank as honeysuckle.

On her fifteenth birthday
she pricked her finger
on a charred spinning wheel
and the clocks stopped.
Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
The king and queen went to sleep,
the courtiers, the flies on the wall.
The fire in the hearth grew still
and the roast meat stopped crackling.
The trees turned into metal
and the dog became china.
They all lay in a trance,
each a catatonic
stuck in a time machine.
Even the frogs were zombies.
Only a bunch of briar roses grew
forming a great wall of tacks
around the castle.
Many princes
tried to get through the brambles
for they had heard much of Briar Rose
but they had not scoured their tongues
so they were held by the thorns
and thus were crucified.
In due time
a hundred years passed
and a prince got through.
The briars parted as if for Moses
and the prince found the tableau intact.
He kissed Briar Rose
and she woke up crying:
Daddy! Daddy!
Presto! She's out of prison!
She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear -
the fear of sleep.

Briar Rose
was an insomniac...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.
If if is to come, she said,
sleep must take me unawares
while I am laughing or dancing
so that I do not know that brutal place
where I lie down with cattle prods,
the hole in my cheek open.
Further, I must not dream
for when I do I see the table set
and a faltering crone at my place,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes
as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.

I must not sleep
for while I'm asleep I'm ninety
and think I'm dying.
Death rattles in my throat
like a marble.
I wear tubes like earrings.
I lie as still as a bar of iron.
You can stick a needle
through my kneecap and I won't flinch.
I'm all shot up with Novocain.
This trance girl
is yours to do with.
You could lay her in a grave,
an awful package,
and shovel dirt on her face
and she'd never call back: Hello there!
But if you kissed her on the mouth
her eyes would spring open
and she'd call out: Daddy! Daddy!
Presto!
She's out of prison.

There was a theft.
That much I am told.
I was abandoned.
That much I know.
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of fruit.
Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help -
this life after death?

Dear, my compass by Elizabeth Bishop

    Dear, my compass

    still points north
    to wooden houses
    and blue eyes,

    fairy-tales where
    flaxen-headed
    younger sons
    bring home the goose,

    love in hay-lofts,
    Protestants, and
    heavy drinkers...
    Springs are backward,

    but crab-apples
    ripen to rubies,
    cranberries
    to drops of blood,

    and swans can paddle
    icy water,
    so hot the blood
    in those webbed feet.

    Cold as it is, we'd
    go to bed, dear,
    early, but never
    to keep warm.

Dear John Wayne by Louise Erdrich

August and the drive-in picture is packed.
We lounge on the hood of the Pontiac
surrounded by the slow-burning spirals they sell
at the window, to vanquish the hordes of mosquitoes.
Nothing works. They break through the smoke screen for blood.

Always the lookout spots the Indian first,
spread north to south, barring progress.
The Sioux or some other Plains bunch
in spectacular columns, ICBM missiles,
feathers bristling in the meaningful sunset.

The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.
Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves
swarming down on the settlers
who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds
into the history that brought us all here
together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.

The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye
that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us,
a thick cloud of vengeance, pitted
like the land that was once flesh. Each rut,
each scar makes a promise: It is
not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.

Everything we see belongs to us.

A few laughing Indians fall over the hood
slipping in the hot spilled butter.
The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind.
Death makes us owners of nothing.
He smiles, a horizon of teeth
the credits reel over, and then the white fields

again blowing in the true-to-life dark.
The dark films over everything.
We get into the car
scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small
as people are when the movie is done.
We are back in our skins.

How can we help but keep hearing his voice,
the flip side of the sound track, still playing:
Come on, boys, we got them
where we want them, drunk, running.
They'll give us what we want, what we need.
Even his disease was the idea of taking everything.
Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins.

Sal Paradise wouldn't have got a lift from me...

On the Cautious Road....

then again, maybe he would have

Dress

A poetry friend posted about words that are endangered of going out of common usage, you can read Gary Longden's post here and the full list is very amusing. As soon as I read it I thought of the first line of this poem and had to write it. I think the reader can guess the meaning of  the words from how they are used but see what you think after reading the meanings on Gary's post.

I would look this angry if I had a
corset forcing my body into a fashionable
S shape
Potrait of Madame Paul Poirson
by John Singer Sargent

Dress

The trouble began when I said that from now on

I would only wear tea gowns.

His shoulders set, he put down his knife

And stalked off to sulk in his growlery.

I cannot help it, I long for loose folds and drapery

That can move with my flesh,

Rather than the constraint of the corset,

The binding weight of the bustle.

We argue in whispers of what gossip will come,

People will say his wife is lost in a widdendream.

He touches the edge of the transluscent fabric.

I know what he thinks;

Only his eyes may look at my body

Wrapped in fabric that light can seep through.

My mind weaves through the embrangle

Of rules that demand I must be contained.

Brooding on the muliebrity of womanhood,

I remove my choker and throw it at him.

I love this picture so much, how affronted
the fox looks under her feet.
Symphony in White, No. 1 by James MacNeill Whistler, 1862

Defending Walt Whitman by Sherman Alexie

'Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.'

Sherman Alexie by Rob Casey

An Illustration To Dante by Fleur Adcock

I have always loved this watercolour by Rossetti and I recently brought a 2nd hand book of collected poems from 1973-1974 and this wonderful poem by Fleur Adcock leaped out at me, because I knew exactly which painting she was talking about. The poem says so much, about Paolo and Francesca, Dante, Rossetti and Ruskin and the poet herself as she compares the lovers to her own experience and as a reader I recognise that tenderness in the painting, being lost in the moment of love.The poem is wise and witty, observant and personal.

They float in a sea of whitish blobs-
fire, is it? It could have been
hail, said Ruskin, but Rossetti
'didn't know how to do hail'.
Well, he could do tenderness.
My spine trickles with little white flames.

Scent

The dog walks at my calf, soft mouthed,

Completely empty of thought beyond

Pleasing me.

The earth steams,

Heated from the sun reclining on the horizon.

It is red like the corpse of a smashed fox

glimpsed upon the tarmac.

green verge,

grey road,

bright bloody fox

combined together

(though red is the colour

the retina is stained with,

and the mind will be able to recall it,

at moments like these,

when trying to describe the colour

of the morning sun.)

Wet legged from long grass,

naked beneath puritan, white nightdress.

Bare feet, boots pushed on in haste to walk

this eager dog.

Canine nose detecting everything.

The rabbit that fled from our footfalls,

The birds and mice that worried the stems

for seeds last night.

Ghosts of ourselves

walking yesterday and days before.

The dog knows my identity; female,

Pack leader, in season again.

The moon waned,

as the scent of pregnancy faded.

Comfort in the dogs blank loyalty;

The knowledge that at least there was one

other witness to a brief life.