Poems
January 30, 2007
The Rejected Semi-Finalist
I haven't posted a poem in, let's see, nine months, so I guess it's about time. Besides, there's stuff going on in my life poetry-wise: Chanson posted this cartoon from Matt Groening about questions poets don't like to be asked; last week I was notified that my collection of poetry is one of 26 semi-finalists (out of over 1000 books submitted) in a very prestigious first-book contest (the prize being $5,000 and publication, so of course I'm planning to win it); and I got this funky rejection letter yesterday that reads
Dear Holly,We were fascinated by these poems, and drawn to them, particularly to _______, but the decision finally went again using anything from this batch. Do send us more by and by.
Of course I'd rather read that "we love all these poems and will print every last one of them," but being told my work is fascinating is better than other responses I've gotten, such as "interesting subject matter but language is too ornate" (from a journal with a very ornate title) or "too self-satisfied for our taste" (from the most self-satisfied journal I've ever seen).
Anyway. Here's a very old poem--15 years old, actually, published 12 years ago. The title means "an ode in which you discount or rescind something you'd said in an earlier ode," and in this case refers to sentiments I'd expressed in love poems, but somehow outgrown.
Palinode
All of a sudden that tall green thing outside my mother's house
turns into a sunflower lurching in the mildest breeze.
Here's what I say: a great sense of humor is even more useful
than a great set of breasts. I think of men I've kissed
but shouldn't have and what sets the friends apart from the fiends
is why I felt I had to do it. This is what I learned:
the negative pole of an energy source is called a cathode
and some things have to revolve around it. I let one guy
pummel my heart into a bloody brisket while he traced kisses
down my neck and used my hips for a bannister. A great sense
of drama is even more useful than a great sense of humor and I
must have cried at all the right times. But the best
thing of all is a great sense of relief: "Bye bye!" we said,
and waved and smiled, and all of a sudden there's no oscillation
in that smile, no lurching around like a sunflower.
His big luminary moon has dwindled and waned and slunk off
beyond some horizon I can't even see, and however I might
have wished for something to rise in its place, I can't help
thinking that I've lived with worse things than solitude
and flowers that turn their graceless yellow faces to the light.
Posted by Holly at 10:52 AM | Comments (2)
April 28, 2006
Bad Habits
This entry on Dale's blog, about why it is that we buy books and don't read them and then go and buy more books, reminded me of this poem, which starts off being about that very same thing. It's another old poem, written and published in the early 90s.
And oh! Guess what! This is my 200th entry.
Bad Habits
I have books I've never read,
and I buy more.
This makes me sad,
so I imagine I will read them all
in a burst of desperate determination
when I reach a place without bookstores.
It's not that there are no bookstores,
it's that the place is an island.
No, it's not that the place is an island,
it's that I make my house into an island
and pretend I can't leave.
That's when I start reading.
The story doesn't go any further than that.
OK it's not that the story doesn't go further,
it's that I'm afraid to admit
all that's left to me is hope
for a happy ending.
Hope confuses me always.
It's not that hope confuses me,
it's that it leads to other confusing things.
Hope in a right thing leads to dissatisfaction:
everyone else tries to convince you
your hope in a right thing
is really all wrong.
You can try to be strong if you like.
It doesn't matter:
one day when you're tired of sleeping,
bored by the weather and finished with your books,
your hope in a right thing will turn into
hope in a wrong thing.
It's not that hope in a right thing
turns into hope in a wrong thing,
it's that hope is a habit
as hard to break and useless
as remembering the phone number
of the house you lived in as a child,
it's not even that hope is a habit,
it's that hope is a garment
that fits you and fits you
until you awaken one morning
thinner and shorter
and suddenly dressed in despair.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (6)
April 20, 2006
Victory
As you might have surmised from my somewhat briefer-than-usual posts this past week, I'm horrifically busy. It's the end of the semester and I'm swamped. Two weeks from tomorrow it will all be over; grades will be submitted and I'll be free!--to start working on a bunch of conference papers, finally do something about my lawn, go shopping for something to replace my hideously ugly couch.
So--in lieu of a more timely and topical post, you get a poem, published a couple of years ago and written a few years before that.
We all got down behind the barricade.
We crossed that bridge when we came to it, and
50 million times after that. On a small
clean triangle of dirt someone had planted
hyacinths, which seemed to offer as much
promise as an engagement ring, though who
was betrothed to whom we could never figure out.
The enemy had a pulse and a vigorous
sense of outrage. Also an excellent
profile, handiwork of one of New York's
finest plastic surgeons. But no one likes
someone who foists, who forces something on
another by manipulation or schemes,
and once he lost his contact lenses and
everyone saw how awful he looked in
glasses, even the women with bobbed hair
who had formed the bulk of his volunteers
were no longer vulnerable to his charms.
Ours was a hollow victory. He was not,
after all, the acclaimed supremo of
robbery and slapstick, merely someone
with a sporty car and a long line of
credit. For all the legends of his
loathsomeness circulating among us,
for all the predictions of doom based on
scrupulous readings of venerable scrolls,
there should have been more of a fight. God knows,
once you haul out the heavy artillery,
you need something to shoot at. When the
vicissitudes of battle left us not just
skittish but downright cowardly we began
to see how chaos sets you up for a sudden
jumping of regimes. We took down the barricade,
armed ourselves with simple common
eccentricities and marched off, looking
for another target, a fragment of
an angel, the head of a king, a dragon passant.
Posted by Holly at 8:52 PM | Comments (2)
March 23, 2006
A Body That Expands
Another Thursday, another mild hangover. Yesterday was a friend's birthday and we went out to celebrate. I only had two beers but they were Belgian beers brewed by Trappist Monks, and we all know how completely loaded those guys like to get. Plus, as sometimes (but not always) happens when I drink, I then couldn't sleep, and took some sort of pill to help the process. All of which made for a crappy next morning.
The good thing about drinking during the week is that it frees my weekend up for extended sobriety. The bad thing about drinking during the week is, well, all the stuff I mentioned above, plus the fact that it means I don't really feel like blogging. And I even have a couple of things I want to write about! I may just have to write the entry today and post it tomorrow. Anyway, I'm going to do the cheater thing and post another poem. This one was written years ago, about my little sister.
My sister sings Puccini in the shower.
A fever ripped the muscle of her heart
when she was five but now she is almost
twenty-one and lovely. She leaves music
open like an invitation at the
piano in her bedroom; she can't manage
money and loves to examine the map
of the world hanging on my bedroom wall.
She studies music: she sings soprano.
She told me, "I play the saxophone
but my main instrument is my body."
Perhaps you already knew that. I had thought
only of vocal cords, not a whole body
that expands with air and vibrates.
The first time you heard someone produce
a series of expansive, varied tones
travelling effortlessly around you,
did it seem like a miracle or just
the only sensible way for ears, throat
and lungs to work together? Pardon me
if I seem bewildered. My sister loves
microwave egg rolls and owns fifty pair
of shoes. She is lovely but silly though
she doesn't look frail; she doesn't know
that I leave my room in the apartment
we share to listen to her practicing,
singing Puccini in the shower because
steam makes the arias easier.
The rhythm of her heart is thump whoosh whoosh;
her blood is never sure where it is going.
Posted by Holly at 10:11 AM | Comments (5)
March 16, 2006
Chen Yo Jir in a Mexican Restaurant
So, the Ides of March turned out to be weird rather than awful, though the weirdness was extreme enough that it just might take a while for the awfulness to kick in--you never know. Let's just say I consumed more alcohol last night than I've recently been wont to do. While the hangover I've got right now isn't all that bad, I'm nonetheless having trouble thinking of anything to say, so I'm posting a poem, published several years ago and written a good while before that.
Chen Yo Jir in a Mexican Restaurant
This depiction wants to be
more than declarative,
wants to comment on the
human condition, so the subject
is not a rooster, an almond
or a groove of bamboo.
The subject's name is Chen Yo Jir
which is ancient and means
"telling stories, has desire."
Chen Yo Jir hasn't noticed
the orange and fuschia flowers
stapled to trellises and on the walls
of the dim Mexican restaurant
where he is eating tortilla chips and salsa,
salt grains scattering
off chips onto the table.
He is impervious as well to mariachi music
piped in from somewhere and so
sitting at the table, he begins to
cry think swear hate
hum. Chen Yo Jir begins to hum.
He knows he's humming off key.
He hums the verses and sings
the chorus because he forgot
to bring a newspaper and still
has not noticed the walls
thick with many flowers.
Right now his name, some old word
meaning "Telling stories, has desire"
seems as much a part of him
as the salt grains falling
from the chips are a part
of the table. He has let us
construct this image around him
and now he is bored
by our attempts to give
his life more meaning than he
ever did, he thinks we
should go to the movies
and leave him alone.
Posted by Holly at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2006
The Source of Each Day
written in the 80s, published in the 90s. One of the poems I wrote about religious despair that almost no one got. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and may write about it soon: the way pretty much no one understood how utterly bereft I was after my mission. What I went through wasn't just depression; it was despair, and it nearly killed me. And still, a great many people assumed that because I was so young--only 23--and white and middle-class, I couldn't possibly know much of anything about real suffering. Some of them even told me that. At the time I just felt misunderstood and frustrated that I couldn't adequately explain what had happened, but now, it sorta pisses me of.
The source of each day is a narrow point
of darkness in the east, not beautiful
but a little less heavy in the way
it hangs forlornly from the sky. Last night
I danced to thrashy music till my blouse
was salty with sweat. Pleasure's important
but still the day's random facts interest me
more because they have no shame. Someone told me
that sacrifice brings forth blessings of heaven:
perhaps the simplest blessing is loss, one
thing less to own, one thing less to clutter
the vision of an almost frantic soul.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)
February 8, 2006
Social Realism
This just came to me one day in 1994 while I was waiting for the bus. It was published in 1998.
In the twelfth century people needed both their hands
and not just for counting.
Prayer had already been invented; plague had too.
A grouchy, grungy potter fashioned
a terra cotta drum for a terra cotta soldier to bang
in the revolt against oppression,
but the drum came out of the kiln etched with what
the potter knew immediately
were the two faces of God, so he sold it
to a traveling merchant for
seven bags of gold and a very healthy milk cow,
and that was the end of that.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
The Invisible Woman
I'm tired. It's been a long and crappy week, so I'm going to take the easy route of posting a poem today. It's old--I wrote it in 1990, and it was published in 94. It's also a feminist revenge fantasy featuring a big ol' act of vandalism, so it fits in nicely with recent themes.
The invisible woman is angry.
Boy is she mad.
She took her books to the library last night
and last night she burned the library down.
She hates all her stories and
nobody else wants to read them
either. They go like this:
I don't want to be here.
There's not any place in this world I want to be.
Someone should tell her howling
is the wrong thing to do at the moon,
the moon's just a flashy advertisement
above the fire engines saying
STAY TUNED FOR TOMORROW'S EPISODE OF THE SUNRISE!
Still, the man in the moon, if there is one,
had the very best view
when the burning roof smashed flat
all the shelves of burning books,
the firemen gesturing with
grim authority and their hoses
to anyone wanting to gasp in amazement
at the light and the noise, up close.
No one thought about the invisible woman
when the engines were called in;
no one thought about her when the engines drove away.
She doesn't know this.
The invisible woman dreams of
Death by Public Hanging
until she realizes all clues linking her
to the library fire are invisible too.
She thinks of an old man crying,
probably the man in the moon.
The invisible woman is happy.
The invisible woman's relieved.
Posted by Holly at 8:54 AM | Comments (1)
September 29, 2005
Making Tea
I'm too tired to write a new entry, so today you get an old poem.
Making Tea
for Jon Anderson
Some things, you know they won't turn out
but still you think, "What the hell,
I'll use it over anyway,"
like tea bags. Throw something away
and you admit defeat; repeat it
and you find meaning in life:
the line "So wonderfully wonderfully
wonderfully wonderfully pretty,"
the way all my boyfriends like zen.
Some things, you know they're just gone: I
asked my mom why she never makes
bread anymore and I know she
likes it, likes the kneading, likes the
rising, likes the smell, likes eating
fresh bread with honey and peaches.
Some things, you know they aren't generous,
aren't nice, and still, they're the kind
of thing you ask yourself when you're
watching water in a saucepan
not boiling, but about to:
could I kill a postman?
Not worrying who'd bring you letters
tomorrow, or after.
Posted by Holly at 7:13 AM | Comments (1)