Month: July 2010

A poet’s trick for getting unstuck, although it probably applies well enough to other art: Take a stack of index cards cut in half, or blank business cards, or something similar. Write a single word on each one: About 80 to 90 percent concrete nouns, with a handful of verbs and adjectives, maybe a couple abstract nouns. Mix well. Draw three. (Glassine. Ignite. Stamp.)

Got an idea? No? Try again. (Cement. Bile. Plasma.)

I learned it during the CTY poetry workshop I took about fifteen years ago. The instructors called it a personal universe deck. (Rare earth. Extinguish. Bait.)

I’d more or less forgotten about building one since then. But writing more than occasionally requires a bit more effort, and that requires some kickstarting. So I made a new one this week. (Squash. Arsenic. Crutch.)

It’s kind of fun. And sometimes you get poems out of it. (Appendix. Air-filter. Larva).

i. The Epiphyte
Sprouting from folds
of trunk and branch,
it reaches up to sun and down to soil.
The narrow tendrils twist and choke
to gain support.

The scaffold dead, the vines persist upright,
supplant the frame that formed them.

ii. The Brood Parasite
Before she killed her stepsisters,
she’d memorized their mother’s plumage
Her brighter mouth the most insistent,
the others starved to weakness,
she pushed them off the ledge.

Laying now herself, she picks the host
who most evokes the nest that she destroyed.

iii. The Blood Meal
Buried in the skin, swollen
she awaits the males.
Spermatophores with legs,
they exist to mate and die,
and to renege:

They turn their pointless mouths
to her immobile bulk.

iv. The Adelphophage
Each womb’s a feeding ground
where sharp-toothed fry first learn to hunt.
Of eighty young, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed
to bring them up to size.

We know the strong
by how they thrive.

God bless the pretty girls
in skirt-suits and sneakers
office shoes in plastic bags
swaying up the subway stairs.

I stare; they look away.
I follow them up
outdoors up
through the park up
indoors up
among the flickering cubicles —
We’re all alone on this train.