Category: Poetry

Sadly, I’ve nothing new to report. Life is still tremendously getting in the way of everything literary. Keep your ears pricked up, however, for an update on Ministers of Grace within the next month.

I missed National Poetry Day in the UK. ::siiiiigh:: I’d hoped to have at least one draft of something out by then, but it just didn’t happen.

Better late than never? Here’s an 11 x 18 poem with the exception of the last line, which is 12, I first drafted a couple of weeks ago when I was sitting by the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Poetry nerds might recognize Gloucester as the location of the Dry Salvages, which is one of the reasons I was excited to get up to Cape Ann. It was a deliciously foggy morning when I threw down these words into my journal. I was still bewitched by the stars from the night before, when I’d walked along Long Beach in Rockport with my beau and had the opportunity to take a long look at the constellation Corona Borealis. The brightest star in that constellation is known by a few names: Alphecca is the most popular and recognizable, although Gemma and Astaroth are acceptable alternatives. I’ve always known it as Alphecca, so when I discovered its other monikers while redrafting it, I was fantastically pleased that esta estrella es una tocaya to my antagonist supreme of Ministers of Grace.

Might this be…coincidence? Or just an opportunity for me to write in Spanglish?

OK Enough intro. Read on, kids. ♥ EAB

Cor[o]net

I have questions for that wild nest of bright stars
to the north, that halved flywheel guiding blurry
seafarers from empire to empire. Up close,
your Gemmastone is a sister to the sun
as a clot of steely brilliance behind a
cloud. Tell me: which music do you sing when the
anchor drops and that center orb dips into
the Milky Way? Do you perpetrate the slow,
steady pedalling of a pocket watch, or
do you aim for our applause with a flushed out
flourish as your leitmotif? Your string of spheres
in chorus, each voice varies so that the tune is
a half-step higher to my sister than it lilts
in my own ears, so that he hears the rumble
of the sea in your harmonies when I can
detect the sharp, clinging shimmer of the wind.
Won’t you please live on in both conditions, as
instrument and adornment, and hold the center?

I went to the MoMA last Tuesday and had what can best be referred to as a religious experience. This is what I wrote about it. ♥ EAB

Transubstantiation

It’s underneath your heels, pushing you forward,
the breath of a whisper against your neck,
the tipping after the tap of your footfalls on the pavement.
You can feel Its hints within everything—
the alignment of the stars,
the engineer’s placement of protective orbs,
the deliberate care of a pencil stroke,
the line of limbs’ grace against negative space,
the brushstrokes that translated a drawn out Hallelujah
from oils and flat pigments.

Its coolness stalks you,
first appearing as goose bumps on your bare flesh.
Everything must stand to take notice,
you see, for when It comes,
you will know knowing.

Your strides shorten.
A guard stands watch before an homage
to beauty within terror,
and an angel overtakes him.
He smiles back, knowingly,
and softly singing sacred words
that find ballast within the curls of a melody,
the entire room is transformed into a temple, a cathedral,
where silent awe—pooling, swirling, rising, crashing—
overflows from the faithful
and into deep, empty wells the faithless,
and It steps out from a spot beneath your shadow to announce,
“I am HERE. I am EVERYWHERE.
I have always been EVERYWHERE.”

…and now for something completely unrelated to all things concerning Ministers of Grace.

These are two poems composed relatively recently that I need to release. I’m currently creating some much-needed space in my mentalemotionalspiritual closet, and it just won’t do, having these in taking up the floor in there.

♥ EAB

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Written in November 2012, this poem has a regular rhyme and an appreciable meter and/or rhythm, depending on which hairs you’d like to split. I entered this in a couple of contests and didn’t win. Boo.

Muñeca

Gripping the lip of the sidewalk,
tipped after the trip and shoved,
look closely: it’s there, thrown out,
but know it was once well loved.

There’s an old darkened mark from its maker
in the hollow of its left upper arm,
and it proves to be blue antithesis
to the rage of new bloodstains’ alarm.

Fresh scrapes on its hands and feet weep
with infection’s deadlier vouch,
and the wind and the elements frost
all its edges with tremble and slouch.

Its pretty dress panels are dusty,
with its precious seams torn wide,
bony fingers are clamped over wounds
holding on to its delicate insides.

The distress of its threads blast agape,
its thin hair is speckled with dross,
and the brittle feathers of crushed leaves
press defeat into its skin’s gloss.

Its sour mouth is open and hungry
and muted by the toothless disgrace
from the idling engines of indecision
that blare their exhaust in its face.

No one can hear its dim whimper
to be let past the gates of disuse,
far from where time is no ally
and away from a sunbroken truce,
where nightmares came to call on a bluff,
where “I love you” just wasn’t enough.

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Written in April 2013, this poem’s largely irregular—forgiveness doesn’t always feel natural, does it?—save the increase in the number of lines per stanza aside from the internal confession. 

Forgiveness

Enfolded in lace and linen, I accept your gift
and return my right to paint you with greasy, blameful colors.
It’s your privilege now to declare your shame to the world,
if you should ever want to.

Franciscan bedrock never put springs beneath my feet,
but oh, I’d tried to make it home for you.
I lit votives and made nice with all the saints and angels,
and I’d hoped that in such blessèd company,
you’d see you loved dearly me, too.

Photographs, mementos, well-intentioned words:
illuminated consideration now bestows the insight
that I’d stitched my wagon’s reins
to your papery cut-out star.
You’d planned our journey with a broken astrolabe,
and I got lovingly lost in your shadow of the Milky Way.

You were a gift, my gift, my bellississimo.
I thank you for letting me love you
without receiving your love in return,
for in doing so, you taught me how to love better, how to forgive.

My wound’s character has changed, so I weep for you now,
that you pour dust over clearly marked paths,
that you don’t hear the math in the music,
that you can’t know the serenity of the astronaut
who dares to glimpse the whole world beneath his feet
and let his senses capsize when he comprehends
his tiny place in it.

Raggedy windmill sails,
dried-up bottles of bubble soap with bent wands,
delicately packed toys that your children might never love,
punched out drum heads, recycled regrets:
I embrace my station in your history’s never-visited curio shelves,
beyond the displays where you rearrange someone else’s amplified dreams,
where you hide the things whose beauty you cannot bear.
I claim the right to grant you the peace you seek.

I cancel all your debts.

I sincerely forgive you.

Anodyne

…it’s the body’s betrayal:
microbiological entities
that are incapable of dialogue
or reason, just random injury that’s
predicated on susceptibilities
and sets of unpredictable hieroglyphs
that determine the coriolis of
the ear, the dusty webs of the irises,
(…) the strictly elliptical orbits of
the moons in my fingertips.

…the prescribed medicine spreads,
reinforcing nerves, galvanizing platelets
through parcels of cure all promising that
the sickness will not endure.

…and heartache and heartbreak can’t
absorb cure, and they can’t comprehend the
complexity of chemicals meant to
dissolve disease on a molecular level.
When the heart is most wounded, its betrayals
can extend from words meant to spread comfort
to encountering boundaries in loved ones,
from well-intentioned allies who really
ought to rescind their neutrality (…) to
the time-bending calculus of my memories.

…yet small parcels of hope—sparking pathways
of possibility—along with time
and its widening, erosive ways, can
crumble outmoded resolutions. They’re
analgesic, laying down snow fallen paths
that lie in wait to be (…) footprinted, and
(…) explored, unless…

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This had been dozing in my drafts folder for several weeks, and while recovering these last few days, I finally had the chance to revise and post it. It’s somewhat syllabically regular—sevens, tens, elevens, a four, and a few twelves, depending upon your dialect—and the lacunae and ellipses are meant for the reader to do some work around this opus modeled after an academic text.

Sometimes you just don’t feel like you have all the information, and it’s your job to fill in the blanks, right? OK? Good. ♥ EAB

It’s no secret that I take after the confessional poets’ model, and this opus on love and loss is no exception. Later tonight, I’m going to burn a slip of paper that lists all the things I don’t want to carry forward with me into 2013, and what pains me most in this poem will be on that list. 

moraine, n. /məˈreɪn/
1. a ridge, mound, or irregular mass of unstratified glacial drift, chiefly boulders, gravel, sand, and clay.
2. a deposit of such material left on the ground by a glacier.

Moraine

I have been displaced.
You shook everything loose. All
mirrors tease wholeness—behind
shelves of self-medication,
the smeary glares of barmaids—

most melodies are leaden—
swords and knives—and a barbed wire
lyric twists ’round my throat and
chokes out what I once loved most
about cheap musics.

Your fingers coiled tight ’round my
wrists when your instinct took hold
so that I couldn’t leave you.
You pressed your thorny will deep,
’til the head was stripped.

And whereas I was complete,
cracks formed, ’til I fell apart.

Nerves are all numb, ears
collect senseless sound, and tongue
converts nourishment to ash,
bone, and sand. I’m scant much but
a useless audit of time.

Light comes, night goes, and
I mourn for my greatest selves
shed on the floor of your cell,
all of them swept out on a
tidy Friday. Bruises should

shift—brown to gold—but howling
Gods of Retrogradation
have chained my splintered fragments
to a spectral band of deep
blue that just won’t heal.

Happy New Year! All the best to every last one of you that 2013 is your best year yet!  

♥ EAB