Stories and pieces

There's an art to it: letting go.
Or perhaps that's what art is. 
I'm a monkey, hand in jar, and craving
every candy, but I'm trapped
with full hands and an empty heart.
where every one is a child,
smiling, vested in filthy rags and hungry,
let them, too, find the world and love -
peace without me, or pieces
crushed in my unyielding clasp.
there is always a choice
there is often a goodbye
hello, mon ami, farewell.



I'm appreciating Ted Kooser more with each poem I read. He captures moments of time as exquisite pictures, as though he's frozen moments of ordinary and, by radically shifting our lens, transforms them into the extraordinary and the beautiful.  A female figure-skating into the future; an overweight fisherman becoming weightless in the moment of reverie, casting into the lake of peace; a poem within a poem on morning rushing over the hilltops.
I felt the need to cry and soak my tears into the moments of incredible joy, melding my experience into those poem-graphed. As Ted Kooser sends me skating, dreaming, trembling at the dawn soaring in like swooping hawks, and Robert Bly reminds me of the Virgin and her candles, and how a starfish is more than it seems, and how to unearth the mystery of the night. Poetry gently soothes me and I wish I could fly on these words and lift others off the earth with mine.
What a magic these poets possess - what pulchritudinous prowess.


-- I invented the word poem-graphed
-- I had to use the word pulchritudinous. It's the lumpiest word for beauty ever imagined. Like if I was writing a story from the perspective of toads, they wouldn't consider each other beautiful, but pulchritudinous.

After Years

I wanted to write a poem, tonight, as a self-portrait. Something comical, satirical, and surreal that I might read later and remember fondly. But this week has been overwhelmingly busy at work, and I'm loathing screens at the moment. I can journal just fine, but the instant I sit at this computer for writing, the words look tired and unappealing.


After Years
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell
- Ted Kooser (Delights & Shadows) 

I really appreciate Ted Kooser's poetry. He started out working as a life insurance executive, similar to how I am just a computer programmer. It's difficult starting out with poetry, but it is encouraging because so many of the other famous poets seemed to get jobs as poetry translators (Bly, Simic, Bishop etc). But Ted Kooser, like Wendell Berry, seems more human, as though this poetic mastery is within my grasp, also. And his poems delicately peal open the folds of my heart and sew intricate flowers into the lining, hurting and beautifying my life at the same time.


Draw away the curtained lines,
let the petals bloom in summer light,
touch-kiss and unravel
the eyelash webs of sleeping life -
what do you see in the wells
dark and deep of my soul?
a tiny child, believing in miracles,
or superheroes, high in the skies.
but no, child, these streets are owned
by villainy.
there's no good, not here, they warn me.
but search still deeper in those pools
of mystery, and you'll know
there's fire in my eyes


yucky. not a poetry writing night, that's for certain. I guess I'll let Ted do the talking and I'll just listen as his words pour over me.