My Poetry Practicum

For my one poetry credit (150 lines), I have decided to write ten 16 line poems about . . . the noxious, the anomalous . . . the odd things of life, and discreetly sublimate them as part of the marvelous. So far I have three poems (below). In addition to these, I want to do one on seaweed, a piggybank, and a hankerchief. I would like to end the cycle with a poem about an inkbottle. While this final one would be more explicitly about the power of writing, I view all these poems as analogies to writing. Right now, I was thinking of calling the entire cycle "The Mushrooms."

The metric scheme is what I call 4x4x4: four feet per line, four lines per stanza, four stanzas per poem. I like to use spondees.

SO, what do you think (a) in general, (b) about the specific poems, and (c) what other "objects" should a use for my other poems? Thanks. These are only rough drafts, so please make suggestions! :0)



The Mushrooms

Under a tree with black branches
and a red lily drooping earthward,
like the last drop of dew in the desert,
sits a punk clump of auburn mushrooms.

This year they wait in prayer in the shade
like a prophet spreading his legs outward
from the trunk to the continents. Next
year, they will reappear in the drawer

of some widowed mother's cupboard,
and she will let them over-ferment
and mince them a day before they rot
and stir in broth like a witchdoctor.

The children and grandchildren that eat them
shall grow pale with delirious visions
and thirst for water to speed the season
to hide the shadow of the shriveled bloom.


The Skunk

He lives beside a patch of moss-bawn
under the spongy redwood log
and circles around a ritual path
in shadowy thickets of scented herbs.

The patch above his shaggy brow
has balded like a friar's tonsure;
he observes a monkish silence
as he shuffles his way beneath the ferns.

Then, his tail lifts and sounds a fiery
silent prayer that sails o'er the moss field,
a slow and steady corrosive bomb,
a spiritual force: fronds bow their heads.

His honest divination floats down
into the valley to burns the throats
and eyes of men who pause and think:
The skunk is omen-making again.


The Patch

When a suit has rubbed and thinned
by daily ferine abrasion and stretch
down to threaded lining and beyond
into vacancy and nothingness,

her needle fastens on the fringe
with a freshly-tanned leathern scrap,
and seals the hole stitch by stitch
hemming a penultimate of death.

So, a patch can save a coat.
A little bargain: a mark of age
that buys another year. It leaves,
not a tattered rag-of-a-man,

just a skid-guard on the elbow,
a great big scab tacked on a ledge,
rough and ready for foreign friction--
bridge-bracing, adoption, mend.