to any who happen upon these efforts, thanks to jamesthomashoward [who has a fourth name I have forgotten] who mentioned he is working on a long poem, I have begun my own long poem.  Mine is inspired by the fantastical imagination of Merwin and I am following his 13 line stanza set up as used in 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' from Migrations. 

38 Dreams from a Pillow [working title]

Pretend sleep is near awake’s exit.
Normal sheets and feather pillow,
Perhaps fresh from clothespins and lines
Under broad skies and sun where wind,
Still learning how to maneuver, stumbled
And fell, then stood to rush headlong
In play with linen’s folds and creases –
An unstoppable, toppling, toddler wind
With stories older than planet equators,
Older than solar flares. Every tug and shift
Leaving indelible prints of anecdotes,
epics, haikus, odes and folklore
To weave through a dreamer’s hair.


A feather’s nib, sharp as a needle, draws
A thread through pillow’s casing.  The nib
Sews an April night (pressed inside the season
As if columbine pressed amid pages of books)
To the dreamer’s cheek, and thence commences
An embroidery of delicate leaves. Stems sprout,
Stitched in and out, back and in, betwixt fabric
And lobe of the ear, veining up, crossing
One brow like a low running hill of brown firs
To lay veins out to edges and points. How
Green this sleep! How calm the dreamer
In slipknots of silk, stamens like days
Countless as dust motes in sunlight struck
On the stairs.  (Yes, this sleep has stairs.) 


The steps are a patchwork of starfish linked
Like calendar months.  A Tuesday comes down
As Friday ascends and two seals bark
Greetings or warnings of rain from the landing,
And, “G’day,” Friday says to Tuesday,
“And to you,” Tuesday says back.  In unison
They ask the green sleep of dreams, “Where
Has May gotten off to?  Has she lost all
Her hours again?  Such a time she has
With weeks! Spoils them, I say,” they say
In unison, “happy sunshine and zephyrs,”
They nod together, “will spoil a whole week
Every time.” Then Tuesday and Friday are gone.


Sleep wrinkles an embroidered brow:
should she follow an early day down?
Or follow late Friday up? These siblings
In marking time are fickle figures, one
generation of boring fifth days, might,
In the next set of seven, attend fetes
until Saturday’s breaking yawn. Sleep is
No fool.  And the two landing seals barking
“Rain! Rain! You’ll get yourself wet!” she
Decides to descend after Tuesday, who is
In pursuit of May, who pursues all her hours:
Dreamer on a starfish stair; hair, a fall
of wisteria blooms; face, as if in a bower.

[first four stanzas -- 34 more to go!]

These have a very sure touch, Lynn.  Very braided layered feel to them...I'm ready for more!

[next 3 stanzas of 38 Dreams from a Pillow -- only 31 left to write!  Thanks, Sue, for stopping by; am having some fun with time -- and not to be taken too seriously!]

The dreamer’s hands slip between cheek
And pillow, a wall of fingers and palms
The feather’s impelled to address, adorn
With nooses and knots and floss constructs
In shades of green and growing. A prick
At the back of one palm pierces lifelines
To emerge through the back of the other
And chain a shawl of forget-me-nots to blanket
Sleep’s rounding shoulder. Down after Tuesday
She descends. Steps of starfish fray undone,
No longer bond as letters of words,
Nor sentences, nor paragraphs, nor chapters:
The book of the stairs vanishes.
   

Tuesday is reading The Sun in a sun-soaked parlor.
“Oh, don’t mind me” he says, and sleep answers,
“No” and says “But who shall mind me?”
He says, “The hours,” reading his magazine;
“Patience will bring them along, likely as not
With minutes skewed by hands confused
With tangles of seconds.  Are seconds as knotty
In wakefulness as they are in dreams?”
“I don’t know,” the dreamer wants to say,
But her lips, now quilted with ribbon buds
In seashell shades of pink won’t budge;
Yet all the while she smiles and Tuesday nods
And grins as if she has sung an aria of weeks.



He looks upon her and she upon him
And where his eyes had been wheat and amber
She finds the left holds a fingernail moon
Of midnight, the right an apricot dawn.
Then patience rustles in with minutes
Bunched to her checkered skirt, dredlocks
Of seconds barretted back from increments
Of each face.  Minutes finger her rose bud lips,
Wind their locks about her wrists and rise,
Pulling dreamer and patience to a chaise
Under canopied sunsets where horizons blur
Into skies bolted together by light years:
Here, a dreamer idles somnambulant night.

two poem a day challenge poems.

4.11 poem a day challenge -- prompt = object

Gutter Cup

Who dropped you, styrofoam cup?
How many yards and miles traveled
before stopping at this gutter
with a crack in your lip and brown
ring settled around your bottom?
I am not pickin you up.  I doubt
either of us will ever be handled again.


4.12 peom a day challenge -- prompt = "So I Decdied to [blank]"

So I Decided to Walk

There was this pina colada waiting
in a tall glass with feminine curves
and a color like pale butter
with a wedge of pineapple clipped
to the rim and an ocean coming
forward and edging back for a path
on a shore to follow.  And I did.

There was this white dog
with blue-white eyes
and legs long as a wolf’s
and head wide as a wolf’s
waiting in the shade
of a parked Chevrolet.
He had a loping gait, when,
head down, hackles up, teeth bared –
he mistook me for a trespasser.

There was this thick brown rope
tied off to the axle of the car
and the dog’s collar, and
there was one yard of space
between my feet and his teeth   
when the rope stopped him.
So I decided to skip the colada.
Oceans are over-rated anyway.

4.13 poem a day challenge -- prompt = hobby [cheated and used an old poem!]

Deconstructing for Constructing

For three days I deconstructed
sweaters, saved bone buttons off cardigans
and rolled used yarn into balls, wondering
where the arms went (once they were gone)
and each cuff, left and right,
and each chest, left and right,
and how blank air must find itself chillier
without all those broad rows down the back,
without all these knits and purls.

For some months, maybe years,
I stored those balled yarns (yes, it was
years, it was decades) the way
Grandmother saved odd bits of string,
rubber bands, containers from cottage cheese
(dish soap kept on the counter because
under the sink was gone over to stacks
of reusables she never
reused).

Now, I knit socks
in bright stripes of what was, wondering
if the yarns will remember my feet
half so well once I’m done.


4.14 -- poem a day challenge --  two prompts. First prompt: Write a love poem.  Second prompt: Write an anti-love poem. Simple as that.


Love Poem: A Jar of Love

A jar of love is like that box
inside the box of Christmas ornaments,

that small paper-wrapped package
with red curly ribbon

and the tag with a sentiment about love
or friendship, the weightless one

never opened because it’s the thought that counts.
And there’s no “thing” to hold or wear

like a scent or earrings or a scarf
to exchange for a suitable color, a less

busy print, all the while nodding
with pleasure – and heartfelt thanks,

knowing the coins came from that clear jar
with a slot in the lid where kindnesses

accumulated, the one kept on a shelf
with red jam and Elsie’s chow-chow relish.


Anti-Love Poem: Lot 4-Sale

Between the house on the corner
and a driveway halfway down the block,

a field of man-high wild mustard
blooms yellow flowers and white grocery bags.

The sacks fill and deflate like lungs
from the tall stems in the fickle wind,

three lungs to a plant here, one there,
heaving as if tormented by unfulfilled lust

after bodily loves
they’ve only known the labored hand of,

the foreplay of having been used,
then, emptied, thrown aside –

are caught in an unwanted field, 4-sale
for a price, ballooning white sighs.




4.15 poem a day challenge -- prompt = use title from a favorite poem and change one word

In the Afterlife

The ground rises with dismantled bones.
The millipede who has traversed ribs
and metatarsals finds respite in a tunnel
where vertebrae no longer hold.

In elm roots, a hankering to penetrate,
the sow bugs do a slow tango,
quartz breaks in a multiplication of fractures.

The saprophytic fungi feed.
The toadstool emerges: one leg wearing a hat.

I am a feast for wood and what would be.
I give away all of me freely.
I pick out a sombrero and serape,

learn to dance on one leg in the damp.
Nothing is new, not even this.


[after “In the Evening”, Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry]

4.13 poem a day challenge -- prompt = hobby [cheated and used an old poem!]

Deconstructing for Constructing

For three days I deconstructed
sweaters, saved bone buttons off cardigans
and rolled used yarn into balls, wondering
where the arms went (once they were gone)
and each cuff, left and right,
and each chest, left and right,
and how blank air must find itself chillier
without all those broad rows down the back,
without all these knits and purls.

For some months, maybe years,
I stored those balled yarns (yes, it was
years, it was decades) the way
Grandmother saved odd bits of string,
rubber bands, containers from cottage cheese
(dish soap kept on the counter because
under the sink was gone over to stacks
of reusables she never
reused).

Now, I knit socks
in bright stripes of what was, wondering
if the yarns will remember my feet
half so well once I’m done.

© Lynn Doiron



Dear Lynn

For me this is a very beautiful and delicate
weave of a timeless imagery that works wonders.

I read into the last word of the poem "done"
a myriad of meanings.

Would it be tooo tooo revealing to exchange "gone" for 'done' ?
For me 'gone' would flow nicely with Deconstructing and the
timelessness of the here in the hereafter.


a warm smile
silent lotus

Thanks, Silent.  I could've sworn I posted a response here yesterday.  Appreciate the suggestion.  For me, 'done' has two meanings -- done with the project at hand and done with this side of life -- and 'gone' narrows the meaning to 'done with this side of life'.  But I do appreciate your thoughtfulness with offering the idea.

4.16 poem a day --- prompt = color

[an effort at rondeau]

Green

Green grows sharp, each tender sprout
breaking ground – needles rising out,
pushed by a thimble of busted seed
to stitch a green stitch, slim as a reed
or wide as a celadon cabbage leaf

or high as sequoia’s top green bead
of elongated fibrous shine. The need
of life, this photosynthesis shout.
           Green grows

and with green, whether flower or weed,
cornucopias of apples, oats, wheat,
orange carrots, orange oranges, stout
bamboo poles rife with greening beans about
to burst green pods: sustained and pleased
           green grows.

4.17 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "All I want is [blank]

“All I Want is Working Parts”

For these hands to have bendable
fingers, unswollen joints, knees

with the proper fluid, toes
that don’t piggy out one another,

eyes able to find a speck on the horizon
and know from a functioning imagination

the speck is a pink-winged pelican
inbound from Coronado’s Olympus,

for sunsets to rise up in apricot
orchards of light and waves to ebb

into continuations of magic, sonatas
of sound in working ears at daylight

and dusk: buzz of mosquitoes, the bite
and the bead of a bloodspeck on skin.

a white smile in a brown face full of age and youth and gladness
a brown uniform worn daily at hacienda de floresta's security gate.
news flash today: he is dead, beheaded for helping someone

I've seen that many of your Mexico poems are drawn from life, so when I read one like this, my stomach turns, I cry.

I am still crying.  the kindest face you ever saw.  always helpful.  always merry.  lovely, lovely man. and I didn't even know his name.

4.18 poem a day challenge -- prompt = write about an interaction

Unattended

If I had attended the rosary
for the seguridad who tried to stop
the kidnappers from taking
the sixteen-year-old son of a wealthy neighbor,

the guard whose name I have been told
since his murder and beheading
was Juan, the guard with a sister
who looked so much like him except
perhaps older than his middle years
but the same white hair, brown eyes,
lined face from incessant smiling,

the guard with a wife
who could not wail
or speak
or see
because what beat for a heart was gone
from her chest and there, inside
that coffin, flown forever from her chest
to lay with him in his –

if I had attended
I would’ve searched out a brown cricket running
along the foot of the wall, looking for a way out.

Just Wow Lynn.  I'm loving these...rock on.

'An unstoppable, toppling, toddler wind' -- superb line.

keep pushing lynn, i think you're going to give birth to something quite wonderful.

james