The Poetry Marathon

12: from the Palace of Justice:

Jury. Duty.

Consider the weirdo of Walden, Henry Thoreau,

writing a friend about the death of his brother—

an inexplicable death—

small cut on the finger—

hadn’t even hurt.

Perhaps (he wrote) we never assign

the sufficient cause for anything,

though it undoubtedly exists.

Which is why I hate jury duty.

And why I loathe civil cases,

teams formed to pair dollars

with consequence deliriously ungraspable—

For want of a nail, as the proverb goes, kingdom lost—

Some nail.

Because everything’s related, including me

including the adversaries

including you

including the dead brother who remains dead

and glittery causes swirl and eddy like galaxies barely fathomed.

(I think this is about 100, excluding the reps, but I got confused and gave up. )

Love, loss and grammar

[Golden shovel from “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living: in that world I shall abide for ever” Sophocles]

Not “hi it’s me” but “this is she,” as I

Was told by my mother to whom I owe

My uptown grammar, my pedantic brio, a

Punctiliousness in speech that, the longer

I stay around, the lamer it grows. I pledge allegiance

To sounding smart, to showing you I know to

To make a subjunctive case when needed, peppered with the

Interjections of a foul-mouthed sailor, or really of my dead

Father who cared less for grammar than

For words, bad words and funny words in funny voices to

Make us laugh. Malarkey!, he’d say, and o the

Delight. How words breed life, repeat first loves, fill the living:

Hi, it’s me. In each word my connections, every one, in

The history of its use before it was mine and that

Tale of what it’s brought to our Wednesday world

You will never know my malarkey and I

Won’t fathom yours, but tonight we shall

Put away dictionaries and tell the stories and abide

In translation for ever

It was always blue

Actually it wasn’t always blue. In college I used to say that it was black because I felt sorry for it, black because no one else ever chose it. And black is very rich indeed and I still wear it all the time, have ever since I started smoking at 18 and it’s been almost forty years but I don’t remember saying that about black but my old friend Lloyd told me that I used to say it and he thought it was funny, which is why I said it duh. And way back in sixth grade when we finally had the house painted after many years of not having the house painted after writing on walls and leaving cruel caricatures of each other on them and resting our greasy heads on them and spilling milk and sodas on them and laying on the cheap wall to wall carpeting and rubbing our grubby feet on them, that’s when I chose yellow, lemon yellow, sunshine yellow—whatever it was childhood I’m not going into it—which choice fortunately was tempered by three other walls in a pale pale creamy yellow so anyone who came to my 6^th grade slumber party could see my budding sense of restraint, my respect for the fine off-whites except they couldn’t because the furniture I’d chosen at just around that time was bright yellow nearly neon yellow and the bedspread I’d chosen for my matching twin beds was yellow yellow not-mellow yellow with some red and green. Fun fun fun. Again, not going into it. Still, over the years I joined the rest of humanity and chose everyone’s favorite color blue, blue blue. True blue, like a pack of cigarettes the parent’s smoked. Not that really, and not denim blue but navy blue is the one I like, Yale blue, Vreeland blue, and occasionally as for my wedding invitations which were an enormous and grandiose splurge a dusty grey shade known as French blue, which is I guess very nearly confederate blue—I never thought of that before—gross—but the ink was expensive and I was sure that meant my husband and I would be happy and rich and sophisticated ourselves, which we might appear to be if you stand at the other end of the football field. Ahem. And truly I’m surrounded by olive my glasses are olive, three jackets are olive, several scarves olive, I’ve had years of olive which is Saturn’s color, the color of the lord of lead, the king of failures, a color for depressives, a color for armies who traipse in the mud, a color for European landed gentry and for autumn and its various heartbreaks. Favorite sweater olive. Favorite corduroys I wish I still owned olive. But still, even today if you stop me on the street, or if just now I see the word “color” in a poetry prompt? Blue, baby.

9. A Noiseless, Impatient Spider

(apologies to Mr. Whitman)

some spiders fling their filaments

and do not catch the other wall

poor spider thinks maybe I didn’t need

to get to the other side

or (more often) thinks

maybe I’m just not good enough to get to the other

thinks the other didn’t want

me                         (some spiders are whiners)

thinks I cannot make

a bridge to fucking anything

not all spiders know

what Walt Whitman was talking about

and (face it) Walt wouldn’t know them, either

8.

Rimbaud, Four Days Post Grooming

Is it a crime not to care?

Sometimes it is a crime not to care.

After the grooming, Rimbaud is snarling,

glazed-eyed, miserable. Wedges himself

into the carrying case he used to avoid.

Someone has hurt him? Of course someone

has hurt him. Then he had a good day, or two,

breezing the city streets, summer swinging,

but now he doesn’t raise his right ear

to the word “walk,” doesn’t glance up at

the rattling of his leash, doesn’t leap

to a treat. You know how he feels.

And you know how long it can go on.

Sometimes you wonder: what can we

do about this pain?

Sometimes you go to bed.

As for Rimbaud, give him another day.

Haiku

imagination

begat God, or the reverse

run to a pew, kneel

6.

(Wallace Stevens says) we say God

(Wallace Stevens says) we say God

and the imagination are one.

I’m as curious about what one is – is one ever? –

as I am about what God may be.

(Besides a woman.)

(I tire of pointing it out.)

While the imagination is fertile like a womb

and brings forth yadda yadda yadda….

So okay. I guess.

Comparisons do break down.

I also wanted to be indivisible but

there was generally a component

to the component,

another side to that door –

four sides, actually – with a cautious stipulation,

minor equivocation in whispers overheard

from the next room, a damned good reason

these three shouldn’t be joined asunder

and I will speak my piece

and I will forever hold it

and it will all be one.

Breakdowns, though inevitable, cannot be predicted.

A poet spends a life staging love songs

to the imagination

which is a church

with many sides, built to get us out

of the trees, out of the house, into the win

and lose, the love and lose, the publish

and failure, more failure,

an imagination that races not like the cliché

but really hurtles to stay ahead of the block

inside the ice cream emperor and fashion

in poetry and the right secret facebook

group and the rot inside. Sorry not sorry.

The truth about the church. The truth about

the number one. The mystery of the holy trinity

and if the imagination is running the show, God!

Knowest thou what ill there is?

Ismene, sister, mine own dear sister, knowest thou what ill there is, of all bequeathed by Oedipus, that Zeus fulfils not for us twain while we live? Nothing painful is there, nothing fraught with ruin, no shame, no dishonour, that I have not seen in thy woes and mine.

Antigone works to wake her sister:

It’s bad, honey. We’ve been done wrong.

Knowest thou what ill there is?

Clouds lowering from a sky not theirs.

The sister glowering: she wants (she needs)

a date with her boyfriend

who doesn’t like it when she’s late.

Knowest thou what ill? Only half kidding.

Because sis is no dumbo. Antigone has

a point, like any obsessed sermonizer.

Yes, ill’s gone down again (again!).

But knowest thou how ill A’s ranting is?

It razors through the sky no longer theirs,

a long broad arc from a father’s crime.

Who wants to track it to the well? Knowest thou

what ill there is? Your ill, she means. Wake up.

Knowest thou what ill there is?

Ismene, sister, mine own dear sister, knowest thou what ill there is, of all bequeathed by Oedipus, that Zeus fulfils not for us twain while we live? Nothing painful is there, nothing fraught with ruin, no shame, no dishonour, that I have not seen in thy woes and mine.

Antigone works to wake her sister:

It’s bad, honey. We’ve been done wrong.

Knowest thou what ill there is?

Clouds lowering from a sky not theirs.

The sister glowering: she wants (she needs)

a date with her boyfriend

who doesn’t like it when she’s late.

Knowest thou what ill? Only half kidding.

Because sis is no dumbo. Antigone has

a point, like any obsessed sermonizer.

Yes, ill’s gone down again (again!).

But knowest thou how ill A’s ranting is?

It razors through the sky no longer theirs,

a long broad arc from a father’s crime.

Who wants to track it to the well? Knowest thou

what ill there is? Your ill, she means. Wake up.

Sorting it out                (palace of justice 4)

this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was the fare this was not fair this was fair this was not fair who pays the fare this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not the fare this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fair this was not fair this was fa