Improv 1 (week 5)

Meditation at Lagunitas
Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.


Improv:
“Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.” The lines we trace,
wire-tapped, as we are the long distance people.
We stymie our brimming voices
set on repeat after our dailies, our eulogy teas.
A man visits the zoo to buy a cage.
He throws tinsel across its bars:
a celebratory gesture, weaving brocade for the locks.
But you pump yourself over copper wire
through wrought iron claws and under wood-hungry mandibles.
These are our zoo pets—the grackle
who clasps your laugh, the queen bitch
between the walls who gorges on sweet sappy pulp
turning my chuckles to sawdust.

Junkyard 1 (week 5)

My blues turned skinny,
shuffled away and flipped its hat
upside to catch change the way
mange pants for a scratch
and old men wheeze their wives to sleep.
I laugh and take apart bologna sandwiches
cursing when the mayonnaise curdles under the sun.

Free Write 2 (week 5)

The first line comes from Komungakaa's poem Blackberries.

“They left my hands like a printer’s or thief’s before a police blotter & pulled me into early morning’s terrestrial sweetness, so thick the damp ground was consecrated where they fell among a garland of thorns.” The printer’s thorns consecrated my hands as I fell into terrestrial sweetness. The thief’s damp ground of thorns would not blot out the police, so thick in their terrestrial sweetness. This thief, fully terrestrial with a skull thick as thorns, catches me like a police blotter as my left hand drips sweetness on the damp ground. In the consecration of early morning I am Jackson Pollock with my hands pulled out like a garland of thorns. I am a thief with a blotter, a terrestrial printer dripping holy water until my canvass is a damp ground. These hands beg redemption, they will be consecrated and their story wrapped in a garland of thorns. The blotter pulled me up early, wrapped me in redemption and waited for the printer’s garland. A skull thick drips the terrestrial on my story, its ink pulling me back to morning’s sweetness to the damp ground where the words would fall among thorns.

Free Write 1 (week 5)

I spend evenings picking you out of my bed:
that skillet with electric blanket
I’m hand tossed, lightly breaded
with your body crumbs and
deep fried dreams.

Look for me, the daily special, all shrink wrapped
safe for home consumption.
My fingers dig sleep from the pan
chipping away the charred pieces
the way my alarm clock
lets the digits fall.
Or this warm spot:
your impress until I pull
blankets like palimpsest:
the pan that’s scraped again
yesterday pulled taut,
all clean and dry and used up.

How do I throw myself up?
With a razor and creme
my teeth will shine.
How do I attach rod to bed sheet
and hobo my life away?

Junkyard 1 (week 4)

My grandfather is all shave and no bristle
he squeezes his watch and his grapefruit
dripping seconds off his finger
like holy water Clorox
or a priest before vespers swigging
Irish whiskey from the chalice

Strategy Response 1 (Week 4)

“This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin

In this relatively simple worded poem, Larkin discusses with candor the affect of one generation on the other. What strikes me as strong or fresh in this piece of writing is the way in which its almost sing-song rhythm and rhyme scheme combines with its strong language to create a somewhat jaded nursery rhyme. The emotional register and especially the language used bespeak a somewhat bitter narrator, but the song like cadence and rhyming reign in the bitterness. This pushes the poem’s tone toward a more radical middle and keeps the voice from sounding like a teenager spouting an angst ridden tirade. More and more, I have seen good poets navigate successfully through delicate subjects that I typically regard as inaccessible. This poem, while essentially saying ‘fuck you’ to mom and dad, captures more than teenage anger or frustration because of the way in which it delivers its message. Furthermore, the subject of the piece is fairly straightforward and simple. The poet is not trying to spin several plates at once. the simplicity but sustaining breadth of the poem’s subject matter combine to deliver with potency. All the while, we don’t feel as if Larkin is dumping his family problems on us largely due to the melodic nursery rhyme style and the narrator’s composure in delivering powerful lines with journalistic sobriety.

Improv 1 (Week 4)

Almost Intervention
Adrian Matejka

My little brother lives
in Indianapolis
with its suburban rabbits

and warrens of junkies.
The neighbor’s mutt
growls at what he knows

is there. Maybe corn
kernels and tassels dressed
up as humidity. Maybe

the thin-lipped vinyl
in the siding. I don’t know
what it means to need

something more than you
need you. My brother
shifts from today to yesterday

in a halo of weed smoke,
slides down the concrete
driveway without mom’s

permission into somebody
else’s rusted minivan. He’s
geometric, all points leading

to the same happenstance.
He is a porch swing
with the bolts loose.

Improv:
“My little brother lives
in Indianapolis
with its suburban rabbits
and warrens of junkies.”
The rain pounds through
the phone as I hold
and he opens tuna.
Applying all his force to the cut,
he sends scales across the sink.
Good with wood, better with the knife
my brother lives on shavings
he’s rabbit-holed in the drain
picking out each silver member
sucking it between the gap tooth
that clicks the receiver of
our relationship. In the neighbor’s
garage, he tells me, sleeps
a ’76 Chevrolet Caprice.
My brother wants to steal it
says he’s got the keys in his pants.
Still with fish mouth he gnaws
on plastic straps. His front porch sunburn
dressed in dollars and cents as he turns
the achy chain of a Huffy 12 speed
while Jack and Johanna spit
past in crystal Chevrolet glory.