Thistling at the Seams

_____________________________________________________________ Spot I: Groceulogy in Gravel Gum in hair and cheek bloody from skidding across gravel in the trailer-park lot comes with fear and punishment: It was a picture day. I should have not fallen off my bike. This is the story. This is the lesson. This is the permanent pothole on that side street flanking the pig's way to market. I worry the biggest lesson my children will learn from me is how not to be a mother. The story rotates 180 °. Hope to god, as you stand there with your bunch of cilantro and romas  that there  isn't too much story in the woman behind you. Those big red lips,  that forward lean.  That officious maternity.  Some are eager to empty, and the sound gravels you.  Learn to recognize a eulogy when you hear it. It might be yours as you ride into the lot.

This poem is a sort of experiment, playing with an excerpt from William Wordsworth's The Prelude , Book 12, the book that lays out spots of time, a concept that noodles deep into my brain-heart. Several lines at the beginning of stanzas place the reader in a certain aspect of time. I did something similar here, letting an aspect of time organize each stanza. And I let sound and recent events guide the word choice. I like the images that appeared, but am not certain how I feel about the poem on the whole, although I do like the end. It conjures for me an image in which I look at a photo of my grandma (who died in 2008), and she--in the photo--turns her head to look back at me--outside the photo. Were that scenario to happen, I would become everything. I miss her. ___________ Fool Parade And midnight came. Bottle rockets exploded behind our bedroom window. The bear tore through our badminton net. Chipmunks burrowed the seeds out of the pansy pot. Inside the house the hardwood creaked

    This poem started with this tree, which sits without its top in our back yard. It was decapitated by a storm before we moved into the house. While my daughters played in the snow, I stood and scanned this tree from the bottom up, realizing that each time I do this I feel gutted when I get to the top and there is no more of it. Wrapped up in these thoughts are my unregistered feelings about my husband's recent cancer diagnosis and chemo treatments. We learned he's getting the full dose and recovering well from it each cycle. I hang on such phrases.  _____________________________________________________________________ Five Attempts at Hope Present i.                           When I found out, the birds flew in slow-motion silence. White rooms and phone calls began to bead together the hours.  ii.                              Sun heats skin  to sweat and stomachs to storm. Husband is getting  t he full dose and bouncing back like a cat, they say. I hoard these words. iii. Wh

  This poem began after I came across the word haar in a Tomas Tranströmer poem (I think). When I looked up this word I'd never seen, I found that it's a cold sea fog and also an object-detection algorithm relating to pixel intensities in adjacent rectangular regions. The poem brings together images that surfaced as I thought about these two different haars in connection with the rowanberries growing on the mountain ash in our back yard. _____________________________________________________________________ Haar Now is the time of rowanberries. What a cascade of recog-- when I eat rowanberries raw my lips pucker warm and crabs ignite my dreams after a long steep in a fogged ship. Break the surface--big sea  exhales  the cold beginning of time. A single berry pixelates in the dark sky. The constellations of every civilization surge at once--turn together a singular ceiling, an infinity of skulls. Crabs have ten legs and all these nights haunt the sky over my bed. Myth overlaps m

This poem has seen many shapes. I like this shape it's in right now, although I'm still wrestling with what I mean by 'wrangling time' and what I think the relationship between time and language is. Maybe I just thought it all sounded interesting at the time, but I'd like more precision. Nevertheless, I'm leaving this poem as it is, as an anchor to think about what I mean by 'wrangling time' and, then, how to wrangle it with language . _____________________________________________________________________________________ Mint Leaves Burn Wild When a leg is breaking, when a record skips. Time expands sometimes, and sometimes shrinks. Confined to the couch with cast and Boléro, a lengthy om, a call for toast. In slow motion, a desperate request flattens into noise. Some sounds a mouth  won't do. How make my pharynx do anything ? Somebody, god, make my uvula trill and my memory spit up the gold. I want to speak the language of the soil, perturb the sinus