National Poetry Month: Prose Poem

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It's National Poetry Month, and suddenly my well has run dry. When I had no particular excuse for writing and posting poems, they popped out, the way babies do sometimes. But just as soon as I tried writing a poem for April 1, the first day of this month devoted to verse, I went into labor of the sort I experienced with my first child: many, many hours of pain and hand wringing and nothing happening.

In fact, not only did the labor last long with little consequence (I finally got a dose of Pitocin after ten hours of labor with dilation to just two out of ten, and that helped speed things up: she was born three hours later), but she was incredibly late. My due date was April 2; she arrived April 30. That would be like the whole of poetry month devoted to expecting her immanent arrival, daily.

She finally did arrive, though I thought she'd never come out. She just took a little more tinkering and tweaking than we expected. And what a masterpiece! Some of my best work yet. This month we celebrate a golden milestone: Lesley turns 30 on the 30th.

This year for National Poetry Month I would like to present poetic forms. I want to try new forms I haven't before, like a cinquain, sestina, triolet, etheree and a rondel. I may write in forms I've already tried, like villanelle, sonnet, tanka and haiku. Besides attempting my own, I'll also post examples by other poets.

Today's form: prose poem. Prose poems are prose pieces that aren't broken into verse lines, but still include other poetic traits, such as metaphor, figures of speech, lyricism, and heightened emotion. One way of writing a prose poem is a letter, which I'm using. It's followed by a sweet prose poem by Amy Lowell.

Here's my prose poem to the baby I waited and waited for in our little house in Pasadena, California, thirty years ago.

To My Unborn Child

Dear Baby ~

I was thinking of you so I thought I’d write.

How are things? I’d love to hear from you.

Your room is ready.

I filled two brown grocery bags with avocados from the trees and the ground out front. I only picked the ones that were heavy and ripe, like my breasts. Dad took them to work to give away.

Did I mention your room is ready? I straightened the picture above the crib last week. I’ll teach you how to do that. See your grandpa taught me. He did it constantly. He couldn’t go through a room without straightening a picture. It’s OK if you don’t get it right at first. You just have to practice. After a while you’ll be straightening things for everybody like Grandpa.

Madeleine, our beagle, keeps misbehaving. When we let her outside, she keeps digging under the fence and getting out. One of these days she’s going to get hit by a car. We should probably tie her up. What a pain. I hate giving her a spanking. I just really have no idea how to train her.

Well, I miss you. Wish you were here.

I love you,
Mommy

She came, and then we had to learn everything;

but the loving came oh so naturally

The baby who finally arrived

And another prose poem:

Bath

by Amy Lowell

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
     The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. 
     Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

 Amy Lowell

1874-1925

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Big Blue, swimming with "yes"

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I thank you God for this most amazing day, 

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, 

and for the blue dream of sky 

and for everything which is natural, 

which is infinite, which is yes.

~ e. e. cummings

The last post was a bit of No.

When you’re a child, you want what you want, freely, if you’re lucky. But somehow, sometime you learn not to want everything that you want. Because someone says NO. Then, when you hear No often enough, after a while you start to say it yourself. Pretty soon it's your first response to a lot of things. You even say it before the question is asked, before the want is wanted. I hate to say it, but for some, it even becomes their favorite word.

There’s a woman whose life seems to be the answer Yes. (My favorite word.) Shelley Gill was at Don’s school last week, and he said she was the most inspiring assembly speaker he’s heard; the kids thought so too.

What Shelley always wanted was Alaska and a dog. When she turned 18 she moved from Florida to Alaska with $14. With her $14 she bought a husky dog. Years later she became one of the first women to compete in the 1,100 mile dog sled race, the Iditarod.

When Shelley Gill's daughter Kye was nine, she wanted: To swim with a Blue Whale. She knew all about them, because her mom had been working to protect them, driving a whale-research boat, hanging out with marine biologists. Though there were once at least 200,000 and maybe as many as 400,000 of them swimming in the waters of the world, by the 1960s blue whales were on the verge of extinction because of hunting practices. As you may know, the blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived on earth. Bigger than dinosaurs. A blue whale’s heart is as big as a VW Beetle. She eats 4 to 8 tons of krill a day. A blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant.

National Geographic says:

Blue whales are baleen whales, which means they have fringed plates of fingernail-like material, called baleen, attached to their upper jaws. The giant animals feed by first gulping an enormous mouthful of water, expanding the pleated skin on their throat and belly to take it in. Then the whale's massive tongue forces the water out through the thin, overlapping baleen plates. Thousands of krill are left behind—and then swallowed.

Shelley Gill in Alaska

Did mother Shelley Gill say No to Kye, that no one could swim with such a creature? You might be sucked into that cavernous mouth like the little krill!

No. They traveled thousands of miles down the coast from Alaska to Baja, Mexico. They took a little boat quietly out on the Pacific, to a spot where blue whales range within one hundred yards of shore (the same place where 29,000 were hunted and killed in one winter season in 1932). But every time the boat approached, the blue whale would pull farther away. Finally the boatman said, “I think you’re just gonna have to jump out of the boat and into the water.”

They did. The boat left them in their snorkel gear treading water, and the blue whale slowly glided up to them. Blue mama nudged and hovered. Kye reached out and touched the skin near the whale's eye that's the size of her soccer ball. They gazed at each other, eyes to eye. "Time stops. This moment belongs to Big Blue and me. I twirl like a manta ray in her surge, dancing in the depths of her deep, blue sea." They played and swam a surreal ballet, a human girl and her mom with the largest animal that has ever lived, because the girl wanted to. That's the book Shelly Gill wrote about it at the top of the post: Big Blue.

Photograph by Flip Nicklin, National Geographic

 detail of Anne Barrow's illustration of Kye swimming with a blue whale

image found here

photo found here

image found here

photo found here

I imagine that yes is the only living thing. 

~ e. e. cummings

Watch and listen to Sir David Attenborough talk about this magnificent creature, the blue whale, and find out how long she can stay under water without coming up for air.

Then fill your ears and heart with some fresh Yes from Richie Havens, who still knocks me out forty-one years after Woodstock with "Freedom" (my second favorite word), his improvisation on the Negro Spiritual "Motherless Child."

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Poem: To be an inanimate object

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To be an inanimate object

Enough of mind, and heart.
Someone turn me off.

Pack the story into a deep, arid trunk.
Don’t write any more in fluid ink.

Siphon the dark running river to put out the sun.
Cut out the moon like the bottom of a tin can.

Fix the bolts, tighten each hinge, hang me on a nail.
Let the dust that floats down be the poem.

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Poem: Four Crows

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Four Crows:
between winter and spring

The white blanket’s thrown off.
Meadow grass is flattened and combed like hair,
sore with winter, and wise with sleep.

A phoebe imitates a man imitating a phoebe.
Goldenrod stubble pokes up like tossed hangers.
A dry ball of hydrangea tumbles to the barn.

Why didn’t Doe eat it, in such a winter as this?
O her hoof prints are gone now, though I invite
them with my longing eyes

around tree roots that look like arms and legs
lounging in new green bed covers of moss, and the litter
of Russian olive leaves like a thousand just-opened eyes.

Umber pine needles are arrows, and four crows,
suddenly rising up at my approach, point in her direction,
which is everywhere, and nowhere.

My entry for One Shot Wednesday. Follow the link and discover new work by wonderful poets.

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Nouvelle 55: The Girl by the Window

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The Girl by the Window, 1893
by Edvard Munch

Art Institute of Chicago

The Girl by the Window

Afraid, gulping bitterness,
she padded to the windowed moonlight,
to see if it were really so.

“You see? She is leaving. Look at her trunk.”
Grandmother’s voice was a triumph, like a horn.
Grandmother didn’t know her own trunk
was packed for just such a night as this.

She was afraid she would never leave.

This is my first nouvelle 55, a flash fiction.

I wonder if you're like me at the moment. My attention span is shorter than ever. I feel restless. I can barely make it through a news article or op-ed without feeling that there is something else I should be doing, thinking or saying. Living in the moment, this moment, now, has never been more difficult. Strangely though, yesterday I read longer in War & Peace than I have up until now, go figure. I had my laptop open, looking up facts about the Napoleonic Wars. I couldn't get enough. Tolstoy's beautiful writing, where I ride each sentence like I'm tubing a slow-moving river, kept me riveted for hours. It also inspired me to write fiction. Very, very short fiction.

Flash fiction, micro fiction, what the French call nouvelle. Steve Moss challenged people to write them in 55 words, no more, no less. I'm in the mood for Paris, so I made up this genre: nouvelle 55, which is flash fiction, based on a piece of art, in 55 words. This particular nouvelle 55 is a meditation on Edvard Munch's painting "The Girl by the Window." I'd love it if you'd try one. There are helpful tips for micro fiction at Heelstone here. Go ahead, find a piece of art for inspiration, and write a nouvelle 55.

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The River and the Moon

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I walked along the river at noon.
The trunks of tall black trees stood their ground
along the banks, while the river pulled backward.
On I walked up current, toward the river’s past.

I thought of the moon, a world away, invisible.
I walked and thought how different
my life would be without her, how the world
would come loose at its edges. I wanted her,

the way I want my mother’s face, knowing full well
her time is past. We scatter our petals into flowing water,
loving the mystery of disappearance. They say
that tonight she will return, oh so close, larger even, than life.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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My coat

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My coat is not big enough

for the body of the world.

But it is too big for me alone.

The sleeves hang like bells,

my arms ringing for someone to hold.

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