December on Long Island

Wrapped in an afghan that outlived grandma,
you lie on the couch and mumble
that the tree’s leaning to the left
as we jam it in the stand.

Dad, cursing, denies it’s crooked,
until he steps back and informs us of this fact
as if you’d never said a word.

Then he returns to the truck,
leaving melting footprints on the rug.

Mom brings in some ornaments
and also abandons the scene.

The doctors agree that you shouldn’t be here for Christmas.

You should get to the clinic, the program,
the euphemism, immediately.

“Aspirated vomit. Sedate and restrain.”
You should never have been discharged without a plan.

Dad says it sounds like a country club.

Mom says whatever it takes.

I say as little as possible
and let you direct the routine.

“Hang that little soldier on the left.”

“Are there more of those gold bells?”

“That’s good. I’m feeling minimalist this year.”

You spent Advent with a ventilator in your throat
while storms swept through like grim adolescent moods,
sleet, hail, snow, rain, and random days of clarity.
Now you sit there, watch movies, and wheeze.

I plug in the Christmas lights,
although I put no stock in Christ.

You stumbled through the sliding doors,
screaming of hell and slavery,
swinging wildly at nurses and orderlies…

three days before we found you in ICU
with its blinking red and white lights.

Do you even know who dropped you at the hospital?

I stand on my chair and adjust the star.

I ask what’s next
and you know I don’t mean the tree.

We hear Mom chopping something in the kitchen,
Dad grunting as he shovels snow.

“I don’t know. I’m skeptical.”

The fire sputters in the grate.

“I only recognize one higher power,
and it’s kind of hard to surrender to the weather.”

We gaze out the window,
where reindeer graze on a neighbor’s lawn.

You sip some broth and cough.

Then your head lolls on its haphazard pile of pillows,
so I darken the room and doubtfully listen to you breathe.

Outside, as the sun goes down, the wind picks up.

Something from Before

A poetry mentor I had took the class out of the classroom and walked us around outside, pointing at sculptures, people going by, trees, empty benches -- inviting us to sense deeply into these things, find new truths there, or make up stories, and put what we found into poems. That left an impression on me, and leads me toward prompts that involve a physical doing, an assignment, a mission, so that the poem ripples from things moving both inside and outside the mind. 

This week, find something you wrote before. 

"Find" could mean digging something out of storage, taking something off the bookshelf, or calling a relative to see if they can send it to you.

"Something" could mean a page from an old notebook, a poem you published, part of a letter -- but certainly a sample of creative writing and not, say, an old shopping list.

"Before" could mean a week ago, years past, or circa 1979.


Use that piece of writing as the basis for a new poem. There are many ways to go with this. You could quote yourself whole-cloth and then write "part two." You might interweave old lines with new ones. You might refer to the old writing without quoting it. You could take the seed of the idea for the old piece and use it to grow something brand new without ever looking back. You might write about the self who wrote the past sample....

Knowing us, the new poems are going to be ... beyond words...


LABEL: Before


Related: http://www.zefrank.com/youngmenowme/
Childhood photos are recreated by the adults those children became.

shy ghost of a star's mother, R U youtubeable?

- I wanted to demonstrate for an upcoming writing jam how poems might manifest in ways other than pigment on paper

- The form is close to a "Kelly Lune" (3 words, 5 words, 3 words)

- Some pieces of of the words broke off, making them even harder to read (hence the translation above)

- A main inspiration came from the idea of forming interesting words into physical objects. "Youtubable" appeared in conversations a few times recently.

- Something about Youtube stardom, how we shine from our cores in a way that's often hidden or distorted, how video makes ghosts of ourselves...

Bounce

Today, they say, the birth of a planet
is taking place — evidenced by nothing
but bounce. Under a star,
propitious or not, a world is whelped.

Meanwhile, we are playing cribbage,
not realizing the dog has run off.

Bouncing starlight. That’s the clue.

It’s bouncing, they explain, off dust
100 times smaller than the smallest
of my thinning hairs. Dust so small
they believed it wouldn’t bounce.

You cut up a jack. Two points.

Your face is blank. Are you concentrating,
strategizing? Should I be concerned?

Are you upset that I’m skunking you?

I could say something sweet.

Maybe you’re angry about yesterday.

You smile, play a three. It’s all in my mind.

The newspaper says the most beautiful things.

“Planetary systems are blossoming.”

“Ghost clouds of the Milky Way incubate stars.”

Telescopes are spinning on satellites
above the lawn chairs in our back yard.

The newspaper deploys words I don’t understand.

We look, we listen, we deduce.

I make up stories in my head
about the stories in your head.

Sometimes I ask.

Sometimes even you can’t say
what’s going on in there…

Annoying, absurd, until suddenly
I too discover I'm spinning,
inexplicably
out of control.

Down the block, the dog
turns three times, curls up.

Infrared, ultrasound, coreshine.

Ghost clouds and dark cocoons.

The pre-embryonic phase.

(Photo of heartbreaking beauty
courtesy of NASA/Caltech.)

“We’ve found a new way to peer into them,”

an astronomer tells UPI.

“These huge areas where stars are born,
they’re shy and hide themselves.

We see them, but we also see through them.”

You hit 31 on the nose.

I’m lousy at counting cards.

I don’t begin to understand the odds,
let alone the moon, other galaxies
or wifi or my carburetor. The sky is alive,
yet we keep searching it for signs of life.

“Why the hell did we have that argument?”

I ask, as you count the points in the crib.
No reply, except the sun
shining through the ginkgo tree.

“I think, mainly, because I skipped lunch.

I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Low blood sugar. Low self-esteem.

“I can’t make any sense of it.”

this window, this ground, this being

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
the window that lives
in the flesh and
pulse of my
energy
is a
torus
of energy
that opens out
only after condensing
and tightening around the
pure narrow stream of expansive
isness carrying the touch that is awake
to itself beyond any frequency of identity
that can change or contort the very aliveness

that is that simply is that is that is that simply is

so tight that only that which is empty full empty
moves through a kind of feed zone where the
cognitive semblance of what is perceived
has only the breath of the breath as a
ride to its own ecstatic turning in
to itself and back again all in
the very same moment
as the torus itself,
the inner and
outer curve
of space
being
space
being
opening
and closing
outward inward
spreading narrowing
arching out concaving in
the delight of movement as itself
no other not needing any identity but
this augmentation of harmonic dissonance
freedom pure freedom clear of intention clear
choiceless such as beauty itself rises from and cries

this one this all open out condense in penetrate emerge

such that blooming dying birthing arriving surrenders
and tempers the form through this window into itself
sourcing itself feeding itself through and through
as through and through attenuating its very
nature back into itself as the essence
that it will once again arise from
returning to itself returning
as both the rising and
the falling tastes
the measure of
the other
as the
other
falls
against
the rise and
rises against the
fall of spread open
wings, wings which taper
as they lift touching air to space
space to air to alight only to fall again
to the ground of beingness, this ground here
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

today, i am curled a logarithmic spiral

sinking towards my interior

pulling memories, dreamings, a few regrets,

a small hurricane, some watermelon seeds

and a model of the expanding universe

(made from 3 jillion smears of silver frosting)

into my garden of rebirth,

cultivating my soil on low hum speed.

i am not bright, not emanating

until you come by, splashing me with your whir of light

grinning me out of my private depths

with that cherry wide glitter of love

until my nautilus revs like a motorbike

and i start giving off a gentle shimmer,

holy union of my core smolder and your winged gloss.

they say this is the nature of starbirth

how clouds of everything ever possible

hang in dark whirls,

quietly generating all that gods will ever claim

unseen

until you look with the right wavelength,

and see their coreshine scatters the blaze of nearby stars

until you see how noticing

makes all the difference.

The Guest

The Guest

When you arrive at the tavern,
you breathe, first, on the window,
draw a wet spiral toward the keeper inside
You have wandered
crabwise
for years,toward this beaded light,
pulling the thread from edge to center

whistling along the periphery,
But here it is,
pulling you from the aching and brilliant day
to this even greater night.
If you follow that call
to the dimly lit threshold,
you’ll know you’ve arrived
by the catch in your throat

as you stand,
teetering on the liminal
wood beneath your soles,
wondering,

are you welcome? You know, peering in,
that you will sweep this cabin empty
if it is your nature
and even still, yes, Welcome

You knew
the moment you stepped
from the great prairie,
delivering punctuation
to the infinite
with this one word,
resting on its carpetbag,
drawing its name in the sand

coreshine

the lint and dust
of creation, shed rabbit fur, old eyelashes
the dried salt from tears shed over 10s of 1000s of years
all swirls up
as dust devils in small desert tornadoes
slithers by as low sand in the wind along the ocean walkers
even this much duff:
imagine whole galaxies of cohering bits of
stuff, possibility realms in microfloating stubble
a realm of ten thousand-million dust streams in sunlight,
swirling into
the great recycling machines of fluff
turning turbulence, liminal matter, and the forgotten

into star shine from the dark cores of creation.

stir me, furnace of stars, see through my dense and transparent center.
generate something that shines in the night of me
opalescent, generative, possible.



-Scooter Cascadia
Denver, Colorado

Space Time Villanelle

The sun will flare out in its final state
and broil the galaxy with all its brightness
as all the seas of earth evaporate.

Man comes onto the stage a tad too late,
about the time the sun hits midlife crisis
and flares out wild into its final state.

No time to take back Eden - it's too late.
Five billion years at most is all earth's life is.
Too soon its lovely seas evaporate.

So say the experts who foresee our fate
and with their best predictions slice and dice us
as Sol prepares to flare its final state.

It's best, I think, to snuggle and create
and love like mad beneath the waving cypress
before the seas of earth evaporate.

I live in hope of heaven's bliss - but wait -
when we've been there six billion years - oh gracious!
Forced to watch the good sun's flaring fate
and all the seas of earth evaporate!

Coreshine and Ghost Clouds in the Milky Way

Read this article, gaze into this picture regarding the depths of space and write a poem inspired by the concept of "coreshine."

KEYWORD: "coreshine"

CORESHINE and the dark core of stars, about GHOST CLOUDS in the stars? wow......

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/09/dark-ghost-clouds-of-the-milky-way-discovered-incubating-new-stars.html#more
"Ghost Clouds of the Milky Way Incubating Stars"

It's an article about how much larger (and potentially faster) the particles surrounding new dark cores of stars are, and the phenomenon they call starshine which happens when this cosmic dust surrounds the dark core. They thought the light would shine right through very small particles, but the particles must be larger than they thought.

QUOTE:
"'Dark clouds in our Milky Way galaxy, far from Earth, are huge places where new stars are born. But they are shy and hide themselves in a shroud of dust so that we cannot see what happens inside,' said Laurent Pagani of the Observatoire de Paris and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, both in France. 'We have found a new way to peer into them. They are like ghosts because we see them but we also see through them.'"

"Pagani and his team first observed one case of the coreshine phenomenon in 2009. They were surprised to see that starlight was scattering off a dark core in the form of infrared light that Spitzer could see. They had thought the grains of dust making up the core were too small to deflect the starlight; instead, they expected the sunlight would travel straight through. Their finding told them that the dust grains were bigger than previously thought -- about 1 micron instead of 0.1 micron (a typical human hair is about 100 microns)."

all the summer’s drought of rain

slants down now in autumn sheaves

crashing off umbrella edges,

transforming this huge window to a vertical pool.

having been around and around the world,

this water is now temporarily destined

for boston harbor’s chilly swash

before lifting off again.

i move in this city as a stranger, gawking

like i have been transported to a movie set,

the people, buildings, cars half real, half roger rabbit.

jaw slack, it comes inside me

rapid fire sense-landscape tumbling, ever new

even though i still don’t really believe in it,

still certain i am walking in toon town.

it helps when i see it’s creature-ness lumbering,

transportation of nourishment down asphalt arteries

thrum of city breathing in breathing out

we are just organelles that wear raincoats

vital little energy generators.

and, rushing off to do our jobs, help this animal live.

the dark sodden evening lights up with

golden squares stacked in stories

behind which people move --

mystery of a red sweatshirt flash goes by,

now some people are eating dinner,

here somebody plays a trumpet that i can’t hear.

the roiling life of this city, and the key to it’s mad magic,

is in tiny secret motions of cellular beings

playing out behind infinite window stages.

i can’t tell if i long to unravel them all

or whether the greater joy

is to marvel, revel

in the pregnancy of collective veiled mystery.

i am a visitor here, but everywhere is the same –

our tiny flashes combine into a great coordinated light.

we live protected if we are lucky,

wrapped snug in some cytoplasm or other,

looking out at the rain.

Sam's Window

I drove all afternoon to see my friend.
I’d never known a more trustworthy man.
Sam lived above his aging mom and dad
In an attic room he’d shaped with his own hands.

His room was spare – a kind of hermitage
With creaking varnished floorboards laid with care,
A bed, a desk, a large Greek lexicon
So he could study scriptures after dark

After tucking both his parents in.
At 45 he’d never asked for more.
And laid out in the middle of the floor:
A giant pane of inch-thick window glass

Through which he viewed the living room below,
The fading sofa, TV, easy chairs,
Where his parents sometimes spent all night.
“This way I can make sure they haven’t fallen.

As for the glass, I ordered it last year
For a contractor who never picked it up.
It took six men to haul it up the stairs
and lay it in this custom frame I cut.

It does the trick. I spied Pop fallen once
and Mom too weak to help him back to bed.
There’s no way I could let them live alone
or in some wretched convalescent shed.”

We sat in silence. The long room smelled of pine.
I asked him if the glass was safe enough.
He broke into his first grin of the night.
“Watch this,” he said, and switched the room lamp off.

The large glass seemed to vanish in the dark.
Where it had rested now gaped a great hole.
I suddenly felt dizzy looking down
Into the glowing room twelve feet below

And just as I drew back, Sam took a leap
High above the hole with a yelp.
I cried for him to stop, but then – too late –
All six-foot-three of him flew through the dark,

A silhouetted shape of outstretched limbs
Heading straight for sure catastrophe.
But then he landed on what seemed thin air
That seemed to give a bit, but held him firm.

My mind knew what had caught him. Nonetheless,
he stood there flaunting the miraculous,
like Christ atop the waves of Galilee
as Peter gaped in incredulity.

Five of Ten

The sun lights up to piercing bright
ness the multiplanar web floss of autumn's spidering harvest.
Spiders come out in autumn to harvest the dreams of the year
and its fruiting (in flight).

Light so harsh, sideway sun,
all I can see are leaves, crimson clusters of yew berries,
and webs and floss:

One web, a large dial, a stylus to another timespace continuum
only eight strands on the edge and a donut hole of apple tree greenery possibility beyond, aslant from me. Closer in a large geometry radiates, rainbow flickering in the slight breeze. Some of the webs I can only see because I spy the spider in the middle,
a spot of brown seeming to hang in space, to fly. Wait, webs work because they are barely visible, because something can try to fly through. They are mesh but also air. [The air of the web is its most functional component.] It's ironic to notice and glory in their beauty when they are momentarily lit. Their true purpose is a darker one, more kin to shadow and flicker. They function in twilight best if also best praised in sun.

As in Abrams' Balinese webs, they must be viewed with soft eyes, seen whole,
the myriad of them a metapattern of shining, radiant rainbow spangle, taut lines to sundry circles, Nets cast to flight. A maker's symphony of complex weavery. A multiplanar dream. A galaxy.

Suddenly the wind brings another into view and I see the graceful legs weaving out from spineret's fine floss, in the moment of making. Is the air to floss ratio the same as in outer space, the space between atoms/electrons/matter and matter? The space between electrons in an atom, is it that wide? Like the web of outer and inner space?

How do they decide where to attach and swing, silk fluming,
to build their webs? They like the edges of things, how to connect something to something else.

Here I am, half way through the semester, fifth day of tenth month - so 5 of 10 in more ways than one...

Here I am, perched on the edge of the year, insight slanting in,
hovering on my discus of connections, between the edges of things, half- air, swayable, fragile, a momentary artwork praising coherence,
functioning in twilight but artworthy in moments of sunspangle.
Placed at the center of my thinking, furiously weaving.
Or just waiting, surfing air and an ocean of flying things,
waiting for the next great thing.


10-5-10 r2

Goodbye

They’ve lined up at my window tonight,
ancestors, lovers, querulous neighbors,
teachers and bosses, boorish civil servants,
that kid from third grade…
a host of spirits unable to rest.
Murmuring, they wait for their turn
in my mind. Perhaps they carry grievances
of their own, but this is not why they’ve come.
I keep them on call to relive my petty complaints.

They don’t rap at the glass or scratch at the screen.
They don’t stagger, bleeding or moaning,
up my street like drive-in ghouls.
They dress neatly, queue patiently,
very much alive to me,
no older than our last encounter.

Astonishing, how I can adorn
the fecund plum tree outside my bedroom
with resentments. It takes focus and devotion
to burnish the delicate ornaments of my anger
and string them so carefully in the limbs.
Even better, the tiny ringing that they make,
swinging in the wind as the leaves yellow
like aging affidavits in some bitter archive.
A tree would let them simply blow away
but I do not forget.

They’ve lined up at my window tonight,
no matter that it’s three floors up.
I have time for each of them. I cue
their agitation and we repeat our scenes,
hurling invective again and again
so that someday — maybe someday —
I may reinterpret these lines.

I treasure my invisible guests,
cherish their argumentative gifts,
make a fetish of my pain.
I gladly open my own wounds to the night.
Because I’ve never been good at saying goodbye.

"Black Phoebe"

Sure as a leaf tangled in spider thread
means there are spiders (and trees), feral cats
mean feral-cat food thrives beneath our tread.
But they're asleep now—or maybe got caught.
Through the conference-room window—from inside—

I see a small bird with black back and white
belly whack the dragonfly in its beak
against the rail—once, twice, thrice—then it eats—
gone—and flits from view faster than a spark.
After the meeting, I check the bird guide

we keep in the creative lounge we call
"the hatchery," where, by bay views, we come
up with ways for our clients to attract
money from people through multiprong cam-
paigns. We're some brains behind AB&C.

All these entities of mind, mouth and limb.
Once, out to lunch, I saw jellyfish swim.

DA

Door to Window; Seen to Unseen

Go to the window. Take some time there. 

Then write about something you sense through your window, but can't see from where you are looking.

Please take this (and all prompts) as you will. Your window may be a meditative space, a pool of water, someone's eye, or a photograph, as easily as a physical window. You might interpret "something you can't see" as something out of sight, something ephemeral, something abstract, or even something wholly visual, but described in non-visual terms. This isn't to over-think the assignment, only to empower each of us to ways that any prompt can generate inspiration.

This week, let's try posting as unique blog entries instead of as comments to this prompt. Then we can decide which we like better. When you put your posting up, assign the keyword "window" to your post to help support site index-ability.

"Beyond Limitation" by Lauren Ari

equinox: aquarium

when the doorway becomes a gaping gulf
and i, upturned, go swimming down into the gully of
my life,
i swim past fish bellies
synchronously gliding,
my life an aquarium blue.

i don't know the names of the beings
whose arms sprinkle guidance daily—
i sense their immensity,
incomprehensible.

this aquarium, this room
seems to hold my world
but at the season's doorway,
i sense greater presence:
the expanse beyond
invisible glass
that contains, protects, constrains me.

perhaps the wheel of time—equinox and solstice—
marks out the equipoise of knowing this space and sensing beyond.

are these time's doorways into ocean?


Scooter Cascadia

Inaugural Prompt: Autumnal Equinox 2010 - A Doorway Into Balance

For this inaugural prompt of our creative time together, during this time of change to autumn, we are invited to write about balance: how is this time of year a doorway? Stand in a doorway to write the first words of your poem.

NASA's blue doorway

These truths

IMINURU
URUNIMI
IMUNURI
URINIMU