Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 54

Why I Like Weather

It's a restless, atmospheric spring day, I've been listening to Bach and looking at gorgeous images of Dutch tulip fields, and my own poem came to mind. This is from Earth Lessons.


WHY I LIKE WEATHER

Famous for always being there, it takes no hikes
or long vacations, leaving forty beeps on the answering
machine. Evasive, evocative, weather
is as much what you see through as what you see.
This afternoon my dog and I headed out
to find a pyramid of taffy-rolled cloud
wrinkling the sky's forehead. We circuited
the neighborhood, bemused by vast aerial doings.
The cumulus spread away, thin as bouillon.
Sun winked on the flanks of an airplane -- last buffalo
roaming the high plain. "He's smiling again"
I said to my dog, as if the sun
were a cloudy-headed Apollo
dashing from horizon to horizon.

I often take comfort from weather
as a folk remedy. It's good for blame, lovemaking,
moods, price dips, metaphors in talk of politics. Whether
you can think straight may be attributed to it --
"I'm under a cloud today." Forecasters will say,
"There's not much weather out West" --
as if air, moisture and electricity
flowing at the speed of thought around the globe
does not achieve the status.
Farmers and scientists pigeonhole energies
with chewy words: drizzle, Nor'easter -- like naming
your bloodstream Sally or your elbow Sam.
The sway of a temblor underfoot
makes me think weather churns underground,
loose and roving as comets and sea spouts,
ball lightning, St. Elmo's Fire, the katabatic winds
called foehn, Chinook, cow-killer.

Does the equator's airy calm -- the doldrums-- seep out
of the planet's bellybutton?
Is that a huge stomach I hear underfoot?
I like the Hindu belief that ultra-fine weather
circulates in our bodies, too subtle for computed tomography.
I suspect similar currents whirl inside earth's core
spinning magma like clothes in a dryer.
Weather crashes planes, sends killers
on rampages. Is it subject to the moon's pull?
Does El Nino come from rays of hypnotism?
I like to believe anything's possible, exercise
the muscle of wonder so it does not atrophy
and make me overly scientific, a calculating cynic
who sees a cloud and thinks only of ice.

We're made of weather -- electrons twirling
like tiny twisters, blood-tides rushing and pumping.
How can anyone predict how we'll blow?
Or what will come of our combative forces --
disease, health, madness, illumination?
Wild planets with fierce cycles of emotion,
we wobble on elliptical trajectories
toward idealized destinations,
subject to massive buildups of uncertainty.
We can be exalted as the galaxies and atoms
who share our mad momentum. -- But enough of chaos.

We need the comfort of names and laws.
A name can call you, but no one can be predicted by it.
And that's why I like weather: its events evoke
daily self-explorations that slam restlessly
hither and yon, seeking shape then frantically undoing it
for something better -- or perhaps just wilder and wetter.

My review of Barbara Crooker's More up at The Pedestal

I'm happy to have my review of Crooker's newest collection appearing in The Pedestal magazine's new issue. It's hard work, but I like book reviewing, which is a way of concentrating on poetry in an arc of expression, as a good collection must be. Here's my pull-quote from the review: "In these glass-half-empty times, Barbara Crooker takes a radical stance: she wants more. She celebrates the life of the senses in poems of praise, gratitude, and grief."

I had the recent pleasure of receiving an in-depth critique of a poem I'm working on and thought about the value of our connections as poets, how no one works in poetry, or in any art form, alone. The myth of the lone artist is just that: a myth. We must have lots of solitude, but we must also have lots of exchange, if only by studying one another's work and the work that's gone before. There is no solo planet for a poet. We are intertwined in this work.

Poem for Easter

After Reading Dante's Paradiso

We live in a heaven we take great pains to avoid.
Shielding our cheeks from a winter sky's
chilled fur, we hunch against the brush of air
that has rushed gloriously everywhere. We listen
into our phones so as not to be pierced
by arias in the pines. Clench worry's hands
to keep a woodpecker's drumming
from entering our bones. Stay separate.
Refuse to sail a cloud into evening's gold.

I circle your neighborhood. You switch on your motor
to cancel my hellos and drive by, tunnel-gazing
at the road. You will not allow yourself
to be distracted by a flock of red butterflies
that seem to have settled on the quince. You work
at not seeing the cherry trees' candlelight parade.
Busy yourself steadying a tea tray on your head.
It's hard not to look into each other's eyes,
down wells of the water we daily draw up,

but bliss is trying to leach into our cells
from the sheer forces of nature and humanity.
Happiness can sprout in a moment, absurd
amid the gray towers strafed by centuries.
Don't make a habit of paving over any space
where a tiny flower could pop or hold
your breath, so you can't nose around
as easily as an old dog finds a neighborly scent
and comes upon another circle of delight.


from Another Circle of Delight

Mesmer + Dickinson

Another for April, thinking we might get more of the unusual April showers today. First appeared in Pirene's Fountain:

Mesmer

Rain can be like Chopin,
all piano strings
and syncopated pauses, geometry
of blings under wheels
and rubber heels. A bliss
baptism from branches.
Drooled harmonies.
On your neck, wet
kisses slithering. Rings
around plop into pools:
ting, ting, ting, ting. Scriabin
zithering loss up your edges,
then his departure's
sudden, cold feathering.

And one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, which I hope to memorize:

HE fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

A poem for Earth Day

 
Every Morning I Try
to pronounce a divine name perfectly, knowing I can't really say its swallow-swingor enunciate the syllables a mockingbird loops in medleys, can't whisper vowels
of an airplane's rhyming trail.Names like that must be repeated as a flower lets pollen fly. I should mimic the closed bud's wise pause.
My human mouth can hardly shape the million-zinnia alpha letter, let alonethe final plosive dazzle – but I can hum the consonants of this green-button day –
and add several bandaged overtones to the morning-setting moon,echo two doves speakingto my dog, who rolls and rollson the name's final Ah.Since I cannot make that pure sound,
I will get down on the grass and roll with him,then give the next being I meeta courteous consonant dangling an ocean vowel.

first appeared in The Cortland Review (with sound file)

April poem

From my collection Earth Lessons, because the roses are getting ready to pop.






ROSA MAJALIS
Leaflets long, pubescent. Flowers deep pink in a corymb. Hips large and bottle-shaped.-- Rose catalog.

With five slim petals
she satisfies her procreative need,
enticing flying feet and wings to collude
in a rage to be perpetual.
Behind her sepals' five-fingered fan
she awaits the sun's caress. Sly señora,
she knows how to meet a warm hand.
Her private core is deeply gold,
pollinated with the musk of want
becoming tall. Each lingam of light
waggles its cache of pollen in the breeze.
Her stamens climb the sky
but her roots descend
eternity's steep stair.
Such fragile music
wafts from a gorgeous maw,
yet it excites in us raw
and lovely hunger.

Listening to poetry -- looking at animated poems

I was happy to find a link on Facebook the other day to a poetry video that was a collaboration between the wonderful artist and poet Patricia Wallace Jones, Beau Blue and his Blue's Cruzio Café, and me, animating my poem One Night, Light.

It made me think about the mixed-media possibilities for online poetry. I went to listen to the recordings of my poems that have appeared online and updated my website's Online Reader, which I'd like to rename Online Reader and Radio.

Billy Collins may have helped kick off this trend of animated poetry and mixed media spoken work, with his "The Dead." Whoever started it, it's a trend to watch. A really satisfying experience, to combine art and poetry, animation and poems.

Listening to poetry - Part 2

Thank you, Nic Sebastien, for featuring my reading of "I Spend an Afternoon with Monet" at Voice Alpha!

If you haven't spent time at Voice Alpha and Whale Sound, you're missing one of the most delicious poetry experiences you can have online.

So listen to some great poetry in April, as well as reading and writing it!

Some other places with the sounds of poetry are The Cortland Review and qarrtsiluni. More zines are getting on this bandwagon -- a very good thing for poetry! Any suggestions? I'd like to compile a list.

Listening to great poetry

Thanks to the wealth of free digital media, it's possible to incorporate listening to great poets read their work into your daily writing and reading practice. Last night i heard a great poet, Kim Addonizio, read, and it had a good effect on my approach to today's work. Here are some youtube clips. She read with the wonderful poet Susan Browne, and Kim also played some blues harmonica.

Kim Addonizio - Muse
Kim & Susan - several poems

And some of my other favorites:
Galway Kinnell - Oatmeal
Robert Hass -- I Am Your Waiter Tonight, and My Name Is Dimitri

And of course, I'm on Youtube too, though not great! (Yet. I'm working hard though.)

Poet Interviews

Ren Powell is interviewed on Fiona Robyn's Writing Our Way Home blog.

I am fascinated with poets being interviewed, the questions asked and the answers given, opening windows into the intensely private and individual process of creating poems.

I have an upcoming interview on Fringe with the fascinating Jeannine Hall Gailey. Stay tuned!