Homage to Hippage

O.K. folks, poem #30 is a rap.
And that's a wrap for National Poetry Month.
© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem In My Pocket

 Poem 29

This is the poem
that can't be
heard.
It will never be 
spoken,
only sung in the body
like a frayed wire, 
scutched and twisted,
humming toward
ungrounded
assumptions.
© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Dancing

(I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity. 
- Gilda Radner)

I may not get

my story

or my leg straight,

but I will always

dance.

Possibly The Best Birthday Ever

Sunday was one of the best days ever! It started out with reading the wonderful Birthday tribute, organized by Leslie. It continued on through the day, with a picnic at a park given by my children, and ended, once more with reading the warm comments from my bloggies. How can I thank you enough?
THANK YOU!!
My family knows me well enough to have given me the perfect gifts: 

Homemade multi-dimensional card from granddaughter, Sandra.
Tickets to a concert by one of my favorite artists, 

Jenny Oaks Baker 

and an artistic handcrafted treasure box made by daughter-in-law, Autumn. It featured cut-outs of operatic pictures and words and was modpodged and waxed. Inside, Kathryn and Sandra had put a collection of little goodies. You can see my expression as I admired all the intricacies. 

Thank you again to everyone who made my day such a happy one!

Cards and printed-out blog gifts and comments.

A Special Borrowed Post For My B. Day

Visit Ramblings From Yet Another Stranger on the Bus.  It's my BIRTHDAY today and this great woman organized a party.

There Is A Place

Look here.
The clouds behind and the sky before
do not reveal your secret shame.
Wherever it is, it is not here.


Your precious, diligent mind
has fulfilled its custody agreement.
Now your skin can taste serenity
and your hair will breathe glory.


Here, in the rich earth
you can begin to grow
the fronds of
your own story.


If you are still enough,
you will see
this place does not know
the landscape of regret.
© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

"I Feels It"

Dial 1-900-EMPATHY (367-2849)
for the muster master.
who can cue cry,
limn the line,
disconnect you
from your sorrow,
tune in to your trauma -
you'll feel felt
(this is not a told-free number).

Rosetta Stoned Poem

(mistranslating a poem from a language I don't know)                  Olav H.Hauge
DU LEIKAR MED PILER                       YOU LIE IN PILES OF GRASS

Lover er sette                                 Settling into
for alt i verdi.                                 your lover's newness,
Og du skal sukka                              you skillfully looted
og luta med herdi.                           her greenhouse

Du smiler. Du kan                            and smiled. You had
dette no:                                        no idea
Gripa pilen i floget                          gripping piles of flowers
og leika med ho.                             made her so happy.

Du veg din lagnad.                           Your body was languid -
Vel har du tap.                                 now it feels retracted
Og sælebot slær                               like a sailboat barely slicing
si dør på gap.                                   through a tiny gap.

Du leikar med piler                           You lie in once green
og lov i ei verd -                               plucked grass,
svik du deg sjølv,                              sick with defeat
er det her.                                       that is not yours.

© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

(If you can find a translation, I'd like to read it. Google word for word translation says it is about you, playing with arrows, where laws are set to everything with value. You smile, grip an arrow in flight and play with it. You are off the mark and have lost your destiny. The betrayal to yourself is here. I think I came relatively, poetically close to the meaning just by guessing. What do you think? Any Norwegians out there?)

The Quarrel

The impact of words:
blunt force trauma.

The heart of the matter:
what you can weigh
against a feather.

Poem 20: Truth Blues (or, "oh no you di'int")

been in trouble all my life

for digging truth,

unearthing reluctant bones.

been driven with other shovelers

to shallow harbors
where thin-lipped 
coloration specialists

quibble over niggling nits.

I'll tell you 

like it isn't.

© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

"...no matter how hard I try to be brutally honest with myself, about myself, I keep changing, morphing, evolving/devolving. I've seen cherished beliefs crash and burn. This business of truly knowing the Truth about oneself is a never-ending challenge.  As for divining the truth about others? It's a matter of faith. "
- Jonas Dikinis

"...we should all aspire to the truth, but we should be realistic when it comes to our abilities. Truths are not cold facts and the simple - okay, not very simple - truth is that everything I do is a consequence of everything I have done before. We're constantly course correcting, a degree here, a degree there. Truth is also and assemblage, something we construct over years. The best we can end up with is something that resembles the truth in just the same way a photograph resembles the sitter, an aspect of the sitter at least, at that point in time. In that respect truth is like memory. There are old truths in fact probably the ony way to identify any truth is after the fact which is why the sculptor or the painter steps back from his work from time to time because when he is involved in it he is too close to the truth to see it for what it is."  - Jim Murdoch


"...and that's the truththththth!" - Lily Tomlin, as Edith Ann

...leaving town now. I appreciate all those who have stuck with me and my very unpoemlike daily offerings. I appreciate all your careful readings and comments. Don't know if poetry is 'my thing,' but connecting with y'all certainly is! Please click on the Jim and Jonas links. You won't be disappointed (that is, if you are interested in The Truth).

Poem 19: Obit Fit

I wander around obituaries

reaping grimaces,
unwaxing eloquencies.
You, Mr. Hospitality -
who loved everyone
unconditionally,
your warm heart
and bright outlook on life
do nothing
for me.
Where did never saying
an unkind word
get you?
Quit staring at me.
Don't you know
 your picture will fade
 silently over time,
be as faithful
 as you were
  to extinction?
I know,
I get it.
Death notices
me.
© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 18: Didion Idiom

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, 

what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. 

What I want and what I fear.  Joan Didion

I'm thinking that men think,

"when in doubt, initiate sex."

I'm looking at a man forever 

in doubt. I see a man 

I've forgiven

again and again

and again.

It means I continually grant
amnesty over boundary disputes.

I want the innocence 

of our legs being loopy together.

I fear I will try to dig up

all the hatchets we buried.
© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Offering 17: POETREE

*

any
poet

can write

 a poem and 
 shape it nicely 
into an acceptable, 
viable form, but it's hard

to imagine a poem cramming 

 itself into a warped idea, a flaming

exaggeration of a concept so bizarre,

so completely out of the ordinary occurrence

of anyone’s most fantasmagorical phenomenology

that nature herself drops her guard and lets us in on the

frivolous, absolutely temporary eternal clandestine flutter of

things tightening and loosening, things intentionally at cross-purpose,

so that when the realization of it hits our psyches, peonies line our sinuses  

and our  most cherished  notions are shoplifted  by gypsies  who tell us that rebellion

is obedience and we no longer wonder,  we no longer have any doubt, that whales fart.

I’m  hoping your

Holiday Season

 is slightly robust 
  & charmingly apt.

 © 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 16:

It Follows

Like the wintering

language of violets,

I make no sound at all.  

You leave.

In the garden, 

rumors of blackbirds praise Beckett

for excusing the pimp 
who stabbed him. 

The bearded dragon lizard sits upright

and cocks its head,

producing rain.

A massive bud appears 

on the green wattle plant,

spreading wild fires.

Lady Gaga performs

in a rotting hall

and termites eat faster.

A Buddhist teacher 
sends himself to hell,

saving your soul.

I sing your blood's song

and the Aurora borealis

shimmers in your organs.

You return.


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 15: A Cleave Poem

In its most basic form a cleave poem is three poems: two parallel 'vertical' poems (left to right)...with a third 'horizontal' poem being the fusion of the vertical poems read together. It was created by Dr. Phuoc-Tan Diep. He says, "One of my aims was to examine how something can be more than the sum of its parts and can be 3 in 1: synergy, fusion, cooperation, dialectics, marriage, interdependence, teamwork and The Trinity."

Cosmic Truth

I am             where I'm going, yet
a star           stares
from            the sky,
a flash         in the distance 
a footstep    torn
to                shreds
death           again.


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Bluebirds Can't See The Color Blue

I die daily to uplifting transgressions of nature,
the blow holes of some errant god
who created disruption, exactitudes of chaos.
My restless eyes demand
infinite fields of privation.
I am fixated on weather's irrational bias,
the forced entry of beauty screaming
from cloud-licked skies.
I relentlessly doubt dogmatic order
and float on rivers that heckle boulders by bending.


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 12: Mother's Words

Hearing the label of obstreperous, 

I didn't conform,

but investigated other potent words.

Dogged by,

"You're so off the beam,"

I looked for balance

and wondered about sunbeams

and how no one can really see light,

just what bumps into it.

Even if, like light, I'm invisible,
a particle or a wave,
I bump into things
that matter,
so I'd say 
Mom's words 
were effective.


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

I realize this is not a poem, but I've hit the wall.

...so may I offer this poem by Lee Upton 

from the New England Review, Volume 27, #1/2006

Undid in the Land of Undone

All the things I wanted to do and didn't

took so long.

It was years of not doing.

You can make an allusion here to Penelope,

if you want.

See her up there in that high room undoing her art?

But enough about what she didn't do -

not doing

was what she did. Plucking out

the thread of intimacy in the frame.

If I got to

know you that would be

- something. So let's make a toast to the long art

of lingering.

We say the cake is done,

but what exactly did the cake do?

The things undid

in the land of undone call to us

in the flames. What I didn't do took

an eternity -

and it wasn't for lack of trying.

Poem 11: Bell Canyon, 1970

Thickets ago,

your silent body

dispensed the residue

of our last dry crackle.

On the slotted ground before us,
our bandied barbs 
lay flat and famished.

Through the dazed clouds,

I saw the gravity of

 comets stalling.



© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 10: At The Airport

The sun hits

just right -

mirror charms

of some dangling participant,

who waits.

© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 9: Rotten Advice

"When I was a boy," my father said,

"they called girls like you sex apples...

                    I was 14...

...those girls with that kind of appeal."

                    and doing my homework.

"Watch out," he said.

                    I never really understood Algebra.

                    English was my best subject.

"You'll have to be careful."

                    Now I watch

                    and I'm careful,

                    but I still want

                    to understand the square root

                    of prepositions.


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 8: Vocal Solo

Unaccompanied as I am
to public clumping,
I sharpen the caw quill
and sing
I Am Lousy With Midnights:


 ♫ My skin is liquid.
It oozes down the drain,
sings from the traps,
rips through couplings,
spreading rusted lilacs.
I wear fish hooks
and slither the sewer
looking for loopholes
where liquid skin
is the architecture of the world. ♫ 



© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Me 'n Mark Strand, Poet Laureate of the U.S., 1990

Perhaps because I defended you and your style of poetry the other day with Jim Murdoch on Elisabeth's blog , I ran into you today at Ruth's Diner. I was doing my usual Shooting Strangers in Restaurants, when I noticed that you were no stranger. I had a poetry workshop from you 25 years ago where I wrote the first draft of Green Lake, a poem I have reworked on and off for years. I was scared to death of you. You gave me an 'A' because your method of grading was to leave it up to us. You seemed pleased when I walked up to you, told you I was a fan and asked the woman you were with to take our picture. Thank you for being so gracious. You don't frighten me anymore. 

To Mark

Oh Marky, Mark Mark -

you're tall and still handsome.

I can't write poetry

on the same day

I ran into you.

Maybe tomorrow.

Poem 7: The Key To Learning My Song

He is the master of

arpeggiated sarcasm,

 practicing demonic scales,

unacceptable parallel fifths*.

His staccato could sever a limb,

but when he plays

dolce, con amore,

poco a poco, ma non troppo,

da capo a fine☢ - 

Bravo, baby,

BRAAAAVO!

© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

( *The P5 is a strong definer of tonality,  tending to give the feeling of being in different keys.

P5s reduce contrapuntal independence and provide bad voice-leading)

(☢ dolce,con amore-sweetly,with love, poco a poco, ma non troppo-little by little, but not too much, da capo a fine-from beginning to end, )

Poem 6: The Meaning Of I Mean

 It's like

not quite

but almost

coming close to

approaching
sort of but

virtually

approximately

similar to

metaphorically

juxtaposing it with

a quasi

semblance

verging

on

vagueness


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 5: Insomnia

In the evening,

the sinister curl of his lips

forms the first of many

smarmy solicitations

to lie with him.

Holding me flush against the sheets,

he presses.

He authors consternated, greedy love-making,

giving up the plot right away,

submitting endless revisions,

bookmarking me for tomorrow.

Gathering courage, I grab his face,

hold it close to mine.

I scream - I am alive,

not carrion -

I suggest there are others

he could plunder.

With hostile indifference

he reveals his promiscuous need

to drive minions

through his slavish sluices.

He taunts me, tells me

wallowing is all I will ever know.

At dawn,

sated by his manic insistence and with

plagiarized grace,

he grants a partial spasmodic respite,

in which I dream intensely

of wakefulness. 


© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem 4: Thoracic Outlet Syndrome

Arm extended,

 eyes diverted,

reaching

for another heart 

in a wary chest.



© 2010 by Kathryn Feigal. All rights reserved. 

Poem #3: The FBI Looks At My Hardrive

Agent Floyd: (in a low tone)

Axial poetics

chaos theory

hybrid air purifiers

rat control

Dim Mak Death Touch

Resonance Science

Agent Lawson: (boredom in his voice)

kundalini awakening

quantum theory

wood restoration

poetry daily

Both: (with disappointment)

Still a suspect, doubt she's the one -

too scattered.

National Poetry Month

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will be writing a poem a day. 

Warning: this will NOT be pretty - 

proceed at your own revulsion/ridicule rate.

It usually takes me months, sometimes a year to write a poem.

April Fool, 

(written on the 1st)

You were the main attraction,

but the film broke.

Now you're a horror flick,

with limited engagement.

Nausea Vu

(April 2)

I've seen you before, 

or someone like you,

or someone like someone like you.