30 Poems in 30 Days: Day Seven Prompt

Picking a Bone
Did you know the coracoid process (from Greek  κόραξ, crow) is a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scalpula? "Coracoid" in itself means "like a raven's beak", with reference to its shape.
The adult human body has 206 bones. An infant may have from 300-350 bones at birth. Some of these fuse together as the infant grows, for example in the skull, sacrum and hip bones.
How well do you know these pieces of your body?  Is there one bone with which you are most familiar? Today’s prompt is to research and write about a bone in your body, picking a bone, being bone tired.  In my poem below (published in Sierra Nevada Review in 2009) I imagined how Tamsen Donner viewed the bones of her dead husband.

Tamsen Donner commits horrid acts with her husband Oct 1846

“…the cabins, by order of Major Swords, were fired, and with them everything connected with this horrid and melancholy tragedy were consumed…” 

-        Edwin Bryant, with the Eastward-bound army

after conquering California, 1847 

The tent, canvas from the wagon, a pebbly texture

sagging with ice, crackling

in the cold night air.

Wind’s monologue. Dead-cold trees.

From within,

Tamsen and her dying husband

watched the layer of canvas

fearing its failure,

the loss of that distinction

between inside and outside.

Storms lasted 10 days at a time. 

Starving so,

bones show through

into a new shape of the person.

Now the body is the shape of what’s inside;

the inside emerges.

After he died,

she stroked his body, the bones

and the tendons like wrapping twine

around his femur, his radius and ulna

bones.  She dressed him. Then

she undressed him

to use his clothing to warm herself. 

He lay naked, under a threadbare quilt:

Midwest quilting socials, bills sewn

into the squares, that hope,

scent of freshly cut grass.

She removed the blanket and

wrapped herself in it,

gazing and not

gazing.  Was she still

the woman who married him? 

Was he, in death,

the man she married?  

Tamsen licked his wrist, remembering.

She used her teeth, as when he used to bite

little purple marks into her neck.

She nibbled along

the inside of his arm - she felt most familiar

with this part of him, what was visible as he worked,

what touched her

when he held her face to kiss her.  Most familiar

and most proprietary. 

A penknife was all that was needed

here to slice out a piece

like the curve of pink melon from its rind. 

The axe was used later

maybe, to cut  

the bones. Her tongue

ran across the inside

of the inside of his arm.  Its damp baby-pink

surprising beneath the brown

paper bag skin

as if here

was the man she married.  Here

was the untouched

part.  She savored the hope of him,

in the hard white desert of winter: 

his release from the packaging of his body,

and for her, a surrender

to the inside, the outside layers collapsing

inwards, heavy

tent walls sagging. Silence pressed

upon her. She chewed slowly

to make him last, the soft

pink arm, her eyes closed

in pleasure.

30 Poems in 30 Days: Day 6 Prompt

Writing the Political

You may think you know what is political in poetry, but after you read these 9 poems, you'll think something else.  I am linking David Biespeil's blog 9 Post Election Poems You Must Read Before You Die from The Rumpus because he has collected 9 beautiful poems about desire and close observation and compassion.

What is political, anyway?   George Orwell in his 1946 essay Why I Write, is "Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

Today's writing prompt is to explore the kind of society you want to strive for. Desire to push the world.  Have you seen something rolling down the sidewalk, or in the conversation between two people, or in an activity that you've participated in, that could  be the place to begin your writing? Engage your desire, observe closely, and connect with compassion.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

30 Poems in 30 Days: Day Five Prompt

Ordinary

Barry Lopez: When I was photographing, I used to ask other landscape photographers to consider that the Sierra Club and Audubon calendars they were shooting for were not all that different from the Playboy calendars these photographers would never associate themselves with. They were consciously trying to create gorgeous, overwhelming images. They created them in response to an ideal about the beauty of landscape that was, qualitatively I think, no different from men choosing certain types of bodies and arranging them in certain kinds of poses to mirror a set of expectations that American men associate with erotic feminine beauty. Some people were outraged by the suggestion, but I would make it anyway. My argument was, “You say that you want to see landscapes preserved, but what you’re photographing are the voluptuous landscapes, so I’m having trouble believing this if there are no photographs of the beauty inherent in an ordinary landscape.” This is one of the ways advertising and public relations have compromised art and writing, you know, in the twentieth century. Advertising has become a force for corruption, in my mind, as far as language and imagery are concerned. As time goes by, it’s an industry I’ve come to have little respect for, although I have known people working in advertising whom I still hold in some regard. I’ve worked in it myself. It’s just become so compromised.

1.     Write about an ordinary landscape, some place where we wouldn't think "nature" at first.  The scrap of grass behind the Safeway dumpsters. The urban creek full of highway runoff running along the street. Just regular and ordinary. Can you find a place that isn't advertising anything. Is there beauty inherent in it? Is there a larger significance?

30 Poems in 30 Days: Day Four Prompt

The Glimmer

“It’s an image, but it’s an image that has a kind of a ‘glimmer’ to it that suggests itself as worthy of being written about and of having metaphoric potential.  I don’t really want to know what that metaphoric potential is.  I just know that it glimmered at me.  I don’t want to think too much about that, because I don’t want to use this brain- that big analyzer – because I don’t want it to lose its magic its power, before I’ve had a chance to combine it with other unlike objects.” – Pam Houston

“For me, the combining of those glimmers is what makes the potential of a story different from the potential of real life.  If you go out in a boat in Alaska and see a pod of orcas, that’s a really powerful experience.  And there’s no way that language is going to live up to that: theres’ no way that I can describe that in a way that is going to be better than the experience of someone actually going out and seeing the orcas.  But if I can put those orcas next to a conversation about, oh, let’s say imminence and eminence, some conversation that’s got tricky word play in it; if I can put that next to a seven year old with three dozen balloons, well, all of a sudden I might have something.  ..And then I can make something explosive and beautiful in its own way that is no longer dependent on what it feels like in a boat to be with those orcas.  It’s about the combination of the orca and the burrowing owls and the little girl with the balloons.  So I go in there, with what I think of as legitimate pieces, these glimmer things, and I know they all have power.” – Pam Houston

Make a list of glimmery things in your life.  Think of moments of travel. Places.  Animals you’ve seen.  Objects, a view, two minutes of overheard conversation, an image that seems incredible.  In the list, describe each one in a paragraph.

Now choose three separate "glimmers" to connect in a little vignette.  Don’t think and don’t analyze.  Just write and surprise yourself as they come together without effort.