radfrac_archive_full

$radfrac_archive_full: (writing)$

The supermarket must have had millions.
Why was it so hard to find flowers that day?
I walked everywhere, a one-man Internet
Crawling the city for gerbera
Iris, tulips, anything – why is there
Only one kind of iris for sale?
Gardens are rivered with foaming dragonfaces.

I was a bad gardener. Is that why
Flowers eluded me when I wanted to say
Whatever it was I wanted to say? Welcome home.
Don’t leave me. Hyacinths mean naming
Transience is not the same thing
As lacking faith. What year was that?
It must have been the last.

Here on my desk, gerbera, something local
And the one whose name sounds like falsehood
But I can never remember. Oh, Disbuds.
In the purple vase. I do buy myself flowers
Sometimes. Sometimes I pretend
They are for other people.

These ones I meant for a friend but then
Never brought to her. I hope she forgives me.

$radfrac_archive_full: (dichotomy)$

And today's effort. So only seven more poems to write in order to catch up.

Sonnet (ish) for B.

The ultraviolet gloom of bluebells
veiling the empty lots and medians
along the walk between our houses
reminds me (always) of cigarettes.

You know, when the poor man In Howard’s End
walks all night for beauty with nothing
but tobacco to feed on, and wins only
well-meaning sex and money, bad advice

and (spoilers) death. Much more difficult
to hand over beauty. Here, take these awful
bluebells, their ugly stalks and ghostly
always retreating indigo

Use them to colour in the peeling
lilac porch where we smoked and ate waffles
and promised ourselves to beauty
a long time ago, unless that was someone else

or unless I really meant sex and money.
Anyway, I don’t mean that now.

$radfrac_archive_full: (dichotomy)$

Hm, it took me even less time than I expected to drop off on the daily poems. I got to Day 2. In my defense: family visit.

Here's the second one:

The way heat persists
In the smell of these cedar
Blocks, about the size
Of a deck of cards,
Meant to keep moths away
Lights, in memoriam,
Gas fixtures in soft cages
And most of a moon.

That was a bad year
Despite the teapot full of gin
And a little tonic --
A cold summer full of strife.

Another year
He put juniper in his mouth
And asked: was that the meaning
Of my life?

The yellow moth wheels
Counterclockwise
The brown moths, whorled
Like wood grain, press
Themselves against the screen
Until it sags

If the taste changes,
If it turns sweet,
The answer is yes.

$radfrac_archive_full: (dichotomy)$

[eta] Now that I am sober, fact-checking confirms that the old new year was actually March 25th, and even the Gregorian shift (12 days) doesn't add up to April 1st, so I'll have to account for that somehow. March 25th happens to be exactly a week before April Fool's Day, so maybe I can do something with that.

I really ought to stop writing poems that require even desultory scholarship and just talk about my feelings.

[eta] Okay, here is a revised draft. Must go on to Day 2.

Running the cuckoo

It is the old new year.
Let’s be fools together –
Drink too much wine
And cross against the lights
At midnight on a Wednesday
When no one cares.

What have you stolen?
What misplaced
Forever? What
Have you borrowed
And ruined?
What broken and hidden?

I, nobody, absolve you.
It is the new year
Of broken dishes.
This year only
The crazed faces
Of shattered pottery
Will be blessed.

How have you bruised, bloodied,
battered yourself
This year, stumbling home
in sorrow and sublime
Wednesdayness?

I, nobody, will receive your muffled
Confessions.
Your lost emeralds,
Your brain tumour,
Your forged translations

Your desperate and your cheerful
Deceptions, your ecstatic missteps
And triumphant catastrophes.

It is a week since
The old new year
And we are still fools
Who cannot read calendars.
Still Wednesday. Good enough.

Salt the sugar bowls
Short-sheet the beds
Stretch saran wrap
under the toilet seat
I will balance
a bucket of water
over the door

It is the old new year
And your face and your hair
Are so clean

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