Poem-A-Day #289 : Tension Break

Tension Break

Sight of a dandelion about to open

The tension

Paper tear noise of it

The fabric pull

In there a small quietness

The center

A vision of things as they could

Poem-A-Day #184 : Finches (after Eduardo C. Corral)

I often see the odd beauty in the brutal. I read Eduardo C. Corral's poem To a Straight Man this morning and it caught me completely. I was especially caught by this movement:

               the buttons
                         on your jacket
     are finches
               I wanted to yell
                         as you vanished

These finches blended with those that Charles Darwin collected. Some of these finches were stolen in 2009 and were feared to be used to make high-end fishing lures.


Finches (after Eduardo C. Corral)

Read the poem about the beating again
then again

Do you hear the sound of the finches in it?
          the are popping from branch to branch
               they do not hover like a falcon
          they do not create wake
     behind them in the air of this space

Then again
the beating poem

In the room in the basement of the museum
the case full of Darwin's finches is emptied

Use the displaced beak of the finch
                    as a needle to patch the hole in your jeans
the golden green of light filtering through late summer leaves
          is thread enough
     possibly

Feathers make lures for fly fishing
the glitter on the ends of these hooks is light
in puddles
on cobblestones

Finches collected during the second voyage of the HMS Beagle
Natural History Museum, London

Poem-A-Day #180 : Modern

Modern

In the bent metal siding your reflection is a mass of muted shades hard to label as you
though there is want to see you in the not you

Broken water is what all of this feels like
stone tossed into the lake then gone forever and then all you want is the stone that is gone

This is not a breakup poem these are words about the self about the missing thing
the thing that never was anyway but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


This is the curse of the bent metal reflected word the blobs of color across its surface are static
there is no nostalgia nostalgia is for nostalgia

I want to say you are beautiful but how do we say that
@--'--,-- I suppose or I like your colors reflected in this space tell me what they look like for real

Poem-A-Day #31 : Night

Night

          Blue shadow on the cheek

                    Smudge of gray ash in the fireplace

                              At night the vines hug the walls they are heart-shaped purple and bleeding on the bricks

          I'd say they were bougainvillea but that's obvious they may as well be ivy itching at the stone walls and pulling mortar from the cracks hiding animals hiding so many windows

                    You hide blue with orange

                              The cadmium is opaque is breaking

           In the YouTube video they show the woman covering the man's face with thick tangerine-colored concealer then with thick beige concealer then with rouge

          I don't get a five o'clock shadow

                    The bricks pop and fall the mirror hides itself

Re-Read : The Witches

The Witches
Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (1983)
208 pages

I was 9 when The Witches was turned into a movie by Nicolas Roeg and Jim Henson. It was 1990. It was Jim Henson's last film. If you've never seen this film, you should. Angelica Huston is great in it. And, talking mice!

Talking about Jim Henson makes me all misty-eyed and sad. It's like a very real and raw wound. At the age of 9, Jim Henson dying was like a family member dying. It was an odd first real moment of dealing with death.

The Witches is not particularly sad, but it is definitely dark and it for real touches on death more than once.

What I remember loving about Dahl is that he never once takes children for not understanding complicated concepts, like death. He assumes they understand. He expects them to. Reading Dahl is being taken seriously for the first time.

For those who've never read this book here is a quick run down. A boy is orphaned while on vacation in Norway and goes to live with his grandmother there. She tells him about witches. The parents' will requests the boy be raised in England because which is what he is used to. The grandmother and he move. Once there she becomes ill and her doctor recommends a vacation tot he seaside. Once there they uncover a plot to kill all the children in England by turning them into mice. The boy is transformed and must save the day while a rodent.

At the end the boy is a mouse and he and his grandmother decide to spend their remaining years alive fighting the witches of the world.

That ending is what I have always remembered about the book. The boy and his grandmother have a very frank discussion about her being old and probably near death. He asks how long mice live and a really sad talk about a few years follows. Both are upbeat though, because neither wants to go on without the other.

Sad and beautiful.

It gets me misty-eyed the same way talking about Jim Henson does. If I had to pick two people, who are not relatives, who shaped my world-view they would be Henson and Dahl. Henson taught me about kindness, education and love. Dahl said that was all well and good but there are dark things out there so be ready to kick their asses.

Re-reading The Witches reminded me of the simplicity of the work. And how good a writer Dahl really was. He manages to take a very basic story of children taking on the world and infuse them with a magical sense of realness. Close to what the world feels and looks like to a child. Scary and amazing.

And that's what we lose as we get older. The amazing is replaced with more scary. I think we all would do good for ourselves to remind us of the amazing. Everyone go pick up a Dahl book. Read it. It will take you only a few hours. Then go watch an episode of Sesame Street or The Muppet Movie. Then watch the video below. It will make your day better. I promise.

Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.