The Poemling

A stargazing ragamuffin, who's so greedy her gaze blazes when she captures the elusive into two adjacent phrases. Poems likelier on weekends.

[poemling-blog]

Update

This is just to say that my tendency to post less and less here will probably continue. I’m still writing (in fact, probably taking a creative writing class this semester), but for a variety of minor reasons posting on Tumblr doesn’t seem like such a good idea. I’ll probably still post occasionally when I have a line I want to share anonymously, but for the most part you can expect silence here. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my stuff!  

[poemling-blog]

Edges

Edges of things: your hair meeting your neck, the doorstep of the sleeve, the places nestled behind the ears. Your smile flashing out like a wild thing, a toothpaste ad tumbled off the billboard, gone earnest. My hand on your heart singing of importance.

Light comes to our bench, the back of your neck warm and glowing, and I can't tell which part is us and which – the world.

[poemling-blog]

Interference Effect

change is no steady ascent

where the waves overlap looking back pulls you under stronger still

with wildly doubled amplitude you'll oscillate a while swinging only through instants where past and future cancel into calmness

and then with tear-cleared eyes: the new pebble

[poemling-blog]

One off the winning number

the last thing I let go of is a strand of your red hair

you were each thing I'd dreamed up but one

so you weren't the one but you had his hair

by now I understand that kind, smart, and sensitive mean nothing beyond themselves

but I can't muster the faith that your flaming halo wasn't a sign from heaven

I still can't believe that in fact I wasn't unbelievably lucky

[poemling-blog]

Solitary Confinement

in quiet contemplation I'll find my inner light

every day it dims I am stiller I don't want to stir the slightest breeze might extinguish

this failed experiment was abolished in 1913

I am cruel and unusual to myself

listen

what if my light lies with others

what if sparks fly between us

what if we glow together

go you are free

[poemling-blog]

The Understanding Woman

Bolesław Leśmian

(...) Why does the soul seek darkness? Why does it call it fate? We'll never be together! Time's steps – an empty plod. Is someone there inside me – some non-me, some strange mate, Succumbing to these sorrows which I deny in blood?

Oh, look now how I labor, how helplessly I heap Quaint obstacles around joy until it's blocked from view! Look how I wake my sorrows at midnight from their sleep, And bypass every garden when heading towards you!

I could squander my soul now on flowerets for you, I'd find you even death-blind, in crowded star-stream bends, Protecting my own joy, though – is something I can't do! You understand this, don't you?                                                  The woman understands. (...)

[poemling-blog]

Tennis

I. I am lost in a timeless space, a haze. Days dissolve unseized. I have no hands for catching, touching.

I am made of repellent stuff and watch the world go by on its parallel track without a newton of attraction.

II. But on the court, I see it, bright and electric: the instant.

I slice around it, past time and ahead. The pieces thin and thin, I'm closing in on the needle in the haystack, the instant.

Laboriously, I am oiling my machine, feeding it data, endpoints of awareness, until it clicks.

III. Inside the felt instant, so much fits. Coiled tight to a point, its entire trajectory, the court spot it'll hit.

And I fit too, shot back into the world,

all of me on the tip of the racket.

[poemling-blog]

Writers’ Circle

The story bores me, but I'm in ecstasies over this sci-fi's place names. I smile a dreamy smile and say I love the sounds. I see how they see me then – a little crazy, a little imposing. A poet among prosies. When my turn comes, they don't know much about poetry, but – I smile – I don't either. Eyebrows are raised – but no, really. I try to explain – I wrote before I read, and when I read, it's also by writing. I am a receiver tuned in to weird small wavelengths. So many times I run verses through myself and nothing, nothing comes out. Or something gurgles inside, drives me to pick up a pen,   play back a garbled message.

Why this line, not that? I try to explain: I was catching a moment of wholeness. (Listen to me!) They're too nice to ask: couldn't you say it clearer? Yes, that's called prose – but also no, nothing is clearer – to me. They make suggestions out of politeness, I take them the same way. I'm too attached to my words, I know – but I let the meanings come and go as they please.

It comforts me, somehow, how little readers get. Little transmitter-receivers, all of us stutter and saunter along, warbling and warping our songs.

[poemling-blog]

Domesticity

O sweet unbridled domesticity: it's the wild roses that make the best goddamn jam!

[poemling-blog]

Like This

to love like this with lungs full ears athrob with crickets butterflies fluttering free

with your whole meadow (which grew around your growing up)

with every bit of blooming weed wild roses loosely petaled

to love like laughter to love like arrival home with hands which were small once

[poemling-blog]

Art Assignment: Measuring Histories. (“Self-portrait with 48 Feelings.”)

What this is. I sketched a self-portrait in pencil, then divided it into 48 parts. Over the subsequent 12 hours, I paused what I was doing every 15 minutes to measure my emotional temperature, by noticing and writing down some of the feelings that I’d been experiencing over this interval. Then I chose one of the 48 parts of the portrait, and attempted to translate these feelings into color within the chosen interval.

Why I did it. Something I do all the time is analyze my feelings. Something I never do is measure them. I tend to think of all my days as either perfectly wonderful or horrible, and I pretend to myself that the latter sort don’t happen. If I don’t count them, they won’t count. But in the back of my mind there’s an image of myself made up of only those bad days, the hidden me I’m afraid to face. This was an attempt to face this self – to see just how much good and bad goes on in a day I anticipated would be of the darker variety.

What I learned. We’re anything but black and white. 1. The vast majority of my emotions on an uneventful day like this seem not to have a simple positive or negative valence. Like colors, they have a definite character, but unless I put them into a bigger picture, they don’t feel particularly good or bad. 2. I feel a lot. At first, I planned to choose a single color per 15 minute interval, but that wouldn’t do justice to what my “measurements” told me. Nearly every interval had some “positive” feelings, some “negative” ones, and plenty that were harder to classify. 3. You can almost go crazy in 12 hours. By the end, I had no idea what I was feeling at all.

Name: Eve

Pronouns: She, her.

[tigermond]

Wow. What an excellent response to the assignment. Just…wow. This is great. 

[poemling-blog]

Thank you! Your comment made me genuinely feel warm inside. :)

[poemling-blog]

Art Assignment: Measuring Histories. (“Self-portrait with 48 Feelings.”)

What this is. I sketched a self-portrait in pencil, then divided it into 48 parts. Over the subsequent 12 hours, I paused what I was doing every 15 minutes to measure my emotional temperature, by noticing and writing down some of the feelings that I'd been experiencing over this interval. Then I chose one of the 48 parts of the portrait, and attempted to translate these feelings into color within the chosen interval.

Why I did it. Something I do all the time is analyze my feelings. Something I never do is measure them. I tend to think of all my days as either perfectly wonderful or horrible, and I pretend to myself that the latter sort don't happen. If I don't count them, they won't count. But in the back of my mind there's an image of myself made up of only those bad days, the hidden me I'm afraid to face. This was an attempt to face this self – to see just how much good and bad goes on in a day I anticipated would be of the darker variety.

What I learned. We're anything but black and white. 1. The vast majority of my emotions on an uneventful day like this seem not to have a simple positive or negative valence. Like colors, they have a definite character, but unless I put them into a bigger picture, they don't feel particularly good or bad. 2. I feel a lot. At first, I planned to choose a single color per 15 minute interval, but that wouldn't do justice to what my “measurements” told me. Nearly every interval had some “positive” feelings, some “negative” ones, and plenty that were harder to classify. 3. You can almost go crazy in 12 hours. By the end, I had no idea what I was feeling at all.

Name: Eve

Pronouns: She, her.

[poemling-blog]

Measuring Histories - Sonya Clark | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

Today we talk to textile artist Sonya Clark, who applies the techniques of textile work to represent her personal and cultural history. Her assignment draws ...

I’ll be posting a response to this Art Assignment soon. I’ll attempt to do #3 on the instructions below. (Though I’m reading “measure” and “history” somewhat metaphorically.)

1. Think about an aspect of your personal or cultural history that is hard to imagine 2. Select a material to quantify, measure, and actualize that history 3. Or, do something familiar to you for as long as you can and measure it to see what it lines up with from your personal or cultural history.   

[poemling-blog]

Commonplace

Every poem I write is either empty or about me.

The world has collapsed before and I wanted everything to be different than it was.

I keep punching you, maybe because you're someone else. You're commonplace, like delight at Hamlet.

I guess I couldn't think quite straight – I didn't quite exist.

I'm not the first to say this, but who is ever the first?

[poemling-blog]

[On the Night Agreed On]

Bolesław Leśmian

On the night agreed on, on the night eyeless This eagering body came to me in silence, In glorious unmourning, in secret it came To me – and it answered only to your name.

(...) It clung to my chest – generously fragrant, Faithfulling, submissing, perceptively flagrant... In darkness – in gladness – with tears near releasing, It swooned from excess of underdeceasing. (...)

[poemling-blog]

Strawberries

Paradise meant luscious produce. Fresh each day. That's it. It doesn't look like much from here, but not knowing how to want more was part of the package. Eden returned each June, and we carried bags of joy home from the market. Dill-swaddled baby potatoes, wax beans smiling in yellow, aromatic cauliflowers, cheery cherries. And the raspberry tomatoes, in a color you wouldn't believe at once orange and pink, glided over the tongue, ripely perfect. But better than perfect were the small things of enormous smell, red almost into blackness, the sweetness edging on decay – strawberries for pennies, strawberries. My first English word. I wanted to carry over my love to the foreign land, but the dictionary lied. Strawberries were cucumbers painted red, big bland beauties. Truskawki stayed untranslatable.

Outside of Eden, there's a stand selling organics at exorbitant prices. Much is better on this side, but the simple things all turned complicated.

Oh, my strawberries, plucked unripe, carried far from home, still sour on the inside!

[poemling-blog]

Rain

Armies of raindrops are plunging to their death. My bangs drip into my eyes (another untended bit of me getting in the way, clouding my vision.) Things are sticky.

I herd my thoughts out of the rain, into a cozy corner, open a book for them. They only huddle at the doorstep, sheepishly eying each other.

I try to squeeze something nicer out of the rain, but I'm swimming against the current, oppressing me down.