Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

I’m here to share some poems a friend of mine wrote a couple years ago. His name is Chris Lance. Chris is not a full-time writer. He actually lives and works at the Austin Zen Center and is about to undergo training in the priesthood. But I think when he does sit down and write, he creates some great stuff. I’ve read a bit of his earlier poems from years ago, and when he told me recently he’d written some new poetry, I suggested he share some on a Poetry Friday. I was pleased to hear he was up for it.

I don’t want to sit here and analyze my friend’s poetry too much, but I will say this: I love how his poems strike out on such a clear and accessible note and then often surprise you. And I like how they can sometimes be so gentle and startling, all at once. I chose three to share today. Thanks and mwah! to Chris. Enjoy.

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Hey, wanna read something disturbing? Kinda spooky? Good. Check this out. It’s “Incubus” by Craig Arnold:

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs
on the peg over hers, and he’s inside.

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,
buys herself a minute looking for two
matching cups for the lime-flower tea,
not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves
and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.
She talks a wall around her, twists the string
tighter around the tea bag in her spoon.
But every conversation has to break
somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa
he sits, warming his hands around the cup
he hasn’t tasted yet, and listens on
with such an exasperating show of patience
it’s almost a relief to hear him ask it:
If you’re not using your body right now
maybe you’d let me borrow it for a while?

It isn’t what you’re thinking. No, it’s worse.

Click here to read the rest.

I don’t have much to say about this yet, because I just discovered it myself, and I’m still trying to get my mind around it. I’ll tell you this much, though: I like it. I think it works, either as a literal supernatural tale, or as a metaphor for a specific kind of bad relationship.

What do you think?

(p.s.: In case you hadn’t heard, Craig Arnold disappeared a few months ago while hiking solo in Japan. So, while thinking about this poem, maybe also spare a thought for the sudden loss of a young talent, and condolences for his friends and family.)

Since I’m all about telling you what to do today, I suggest you should check out what the other poetry peeps are posting too. Tricia’s on round-up duty at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

There’s this friend of mine. We share books and music. I do that with a lot of friends, but he and I will actually swap a CD or a poetry anthology and keep it for long periods of time, then returning it with many new thoughts to share. For the longest time, we swapped this nearly perfect CD (Holy Celtic Folk Music! It’s over twenty years old now. Does it get any better than “Fisherman’s Blues”? No, my friends, it just doesn’t.) And he once returned my copy of Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit with his own pencilled notes in the margins. I suppose some people might chafe at such boldness, but I loved it. It made the book even more special, and the next time I read it, I read it in all new ways.

I’ve had his copy of Charlotte Matthews’ poetry anthology Green Stars for a length of time now that is perhaps verging on inexcusable. But today, for Poetry Thursday-Slash-Friday (why not post one day early?), I have one of her poems to share. If you like it, you can thank me and my patient, forgiving friend, Shannon.

Charlotte, a writing instructor at The University of Virginia, won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ 2007 New Writing Award for Poetry for Green Stars, released in 2005 by Iris Press in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This poem, “Two Moments with Strangers,” which I once briefly mentioned before at 7-Imp, was originally published in Potomac Review — but is also included in the anthology Shannon probably wishes I’d give back already. This is a haunting story poem, one of my favorites of Matthews’.

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Are ya’ll sick of hearing about how awesome my job is yet? Well, tough, because I have to share this with people who will appreciate it: I got to handle a postcard written by Walt Whitman today. Just a quick little note he jotted off to a Cornell librarian, no big thing. But his signature, right there, large as life – I kinda teared up a little.

It got me thinking, and talking to a colleague about, Whitman and his place in the American poetic canon. I’ll admit, I don’t love every single poem the man wrote. He’s got an odd voice: part journalist, part transcendentalist, with a liberal dose of frank sexuality. But there’s no denying his groundbreaking contributions to the free verse form, and the use of poetry as sociopolitical commentary. And at his best, he can seriously stir up the blood.

Like in this one, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Take it, Walt:

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

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This is my brother and I when we were little. I was two years old here; he was three-and-a-half. People used to constantly ask my mother if we were twins. I remember this. As we grew, we maddened each other, as siblings so close in age do, but we wouldn’t have known what to do in a world without each other. In high school, we grew close. He was my best friend, and he very much shaped me, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, into the person I am today. Donnie and my high school drama and English lit teacher, rather. They didn’t know I was watching and learning from them how to be a human in this world, but I was. Correction: Donnie knew. I put him on a pedastal too much. But that’s ’cause he was brilliant and talented and funny and clever and quick-witted and he had subtlety in his soul and he was mostly quiet and mysterious and so shy and there was no one else like him and I could go on and on and he was humble about it all. So humble. You wouldn’t even believe.

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Welcome, Poetry Friday peeps. I’ve got a question for you: how good are you at holding grudges? I’m fabulous at it. If it were an Olympic event, I’d be a gold medalist 3 or 4 times over. At least, I used to be that way. I’ve mellowed a lot in my older-age, but in my youth my relationships with friends and boyfriends could be kindly described as “mercurial,” and less kindly as “volatile.” Lately I’ve been fortunate in being able to get back in touch with some of my old friends/enemies/friends again, and dumping all that old baggage for good.

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This week, I’m re-reading Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, a National Book Award finalist, published back in 1997. Lynch is an essayist and poet, but he also—as the first chapter’s opening line tells us—buries a couple hundred of his townspeople every year. Yes, he’s the funeral director for the small Michigan town in which he lives — or at least he was back in ’97.

It’s a moving, life-affirming collection of essays, despite how it all might sound. As I started re-reading the book the other day, my eye was drawn to an excerpt from Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” which Lynch uses to open the book. Then, I looked up the poem in its entirety, and I was blown away. Beautiful.

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Funny thing happened this week: I (along with MANY other people, including everyone I work with) was informed that, due to one person’s negligence and another person’s wickedness, our sensitive personal data has been released into the ether. Like, the kind of data you steal someone’s identity with. On our employer’s covering-their-asses advice, I immediately placed one of those fraud alert thingys on my credit info and checked out my credit report. So far, so good. But it’s still very scary; and as I keep hearing from other people, if anything does happen with my credit, the damage could be permanent. Evil-data-thieves may get to change identities like they’re changing underwear, but as a law-abiding citizen I’m apparently stuck with mine for life.

This is certainly the most concrete reason I’ve had for wishing that weren’t true, but it’s not the first time I’ve wanted to be able to start all over and wake up in a different life. Wouldn’t it be great to be an unknown quantity, a blank slate? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to escape from myself for a while, to fly under everyone’s radar — including my own — and be really truly free?

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Just when I thought that, for once, I’d chosen a poem written for adults, I inadvertently chose one this week that, evidently, has been adopted by the children’s poetry world as well.

This comes from British poet Brian Patten. It was first published in Love Poems (Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1990) and intended for an adult readership, though Patten has written children’s poetry as well.

I love this short, outstretched hand of a poem. I don’t want to go on too much about what it means to me, as I think a great deal of its appeal is its ability to invite the reader in, leaving room for many interpretations. I called it an outstretched hand, but it can also be a dare. An accusation. A wink. And so much more. Enjoy.

“I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can’t provide…”

You can read the rest here.

Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted by Carol at Carol’s Corner.

I love fairy tales. And I love fairy tale adaptations and allusions, especially when they don’t shy away from the darkness of those original stories.

That’s why I was so pleased to discover “Gretel in Darkness” by Louise Glück. It uses brilliant imagery to put a sobering spin on the classic tale by imagining what comes next — after the witch is killed, the mother is dead, and the kids are back at home, safe and sound. It’s not exactly “happily ever after” – and really, how could it be? What child could really make it through such a story (poverty, abandonment, kidnapping, slavery, cannibalism, and murder) emotionally unscathed? How does a girl grow up in a world where all the mother figures see infanticide as a reasonable means to fill one’s belly?

Poor Gretel. One suspects that she’ll never really find her way out of those woods.

Here’s an excerpt:

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .

Click here for the rest. You’ll be glad you did.

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This week’s Poetry Friday Round-Up is being hosted by Brian Jung at his blog, Critique de Mr. Chompchomp. I’m serious. How great is that name?