poem – Page 50 – don't confuse the narrator

clearing away the clouds

First kiss

It’s there in the air between them.

As hands sketch fragmented curves,
fingertips graze its surface.

They worry it with words,
map points along the borders.

Their tongues taste the edges
of possibility until they find its shape

in the space where their lips meet.

I came across an earlier draft of the above in a stack of papers I was about to throw away, but I can’t find any trace of it on my computer. I don’t think I’d deliberately discarded it, but it definitely needed work.

There’s still a way to go, but it’s given me something to think – and write – about.
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verses and versions

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been re-visiting some old poems and re-drafting, revising and re-writing.

Some of the changes are substantial – whole stanzas, refurbished, renovated, knocked in together or removed completely. With changes like this it’s usually clear whether the result is an improvement.

Other changes, though, are less clear cut. I feel like Oscar Wilde when he said he’d been hard at work all day on a poem: “This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”

I know that every little detail of a poem is important, but sometimes I feel that recognising the exact best version is like trying to find the prettiest flower in a patch like the one in the picture.

haiku for fools

Although I can’t find the date on the About Times Haiku page, I can only assume April 1st is the kigo (seasonal reference) that has justified this page of “Serendipitous Poetry from The New York Times“.

In addition to the 5-7-5 syllable “rule”, the NYT explain:

A proper haiku should also contain a word that indicates the season, or “kigo,” as well as a juxtaposition of verbal imagery, known as “kireji.”

They then admit:

That’s a lot harder to teach [as] an algorithm, though, so we just count syllables like most amateur haiku aficionados do.

It’s rather late in the day, so I’ll simply offer a picture of the weeds in my garden – a “juxtaposition of vernal imagery”, which is as close to a kireji as I can manage right now.

Note that the weeds are certainly green and also rather cabbage-looking; perhaps they would have been good subjects for April Fools’ Day pranks.

paschal moon

With nicotine-stained fingers, she pushes aside
the net curtains of the clouds and stoops
to look through your bedroom window.

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voices from the past **

My past has caught me up: this afternoon
I checked my e-mail, as I always do,
and found a message from an old flame who
I hadn’t seen since school. Out of the blue
a bolt that sends me tumbling through the years
to adolescent angst and teenage tears,
to poems scrawled in chalk while classmates jeer
and playground fights that fade when Sir appears.
I was his One True Love, there’d be no other.
At sixteen I was far too young: I fled.
But now he’s tracked me down; who needs the men
from Pinkerton’s when Google is your friend?
(Though Google’s failed me time and time again
in my attempts to trace his younger brother.)

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