My Poetry Practicum Finished

I divided my nine credits of Directed Research and Writing into eight critical and one creative. The one creative credit is a series of ten poems written in what I call a "quadracube" or a 4-cube. Each poem consists of four stanzas of four lines each (quatrains), each line containing four feet (tetrameter). It takes a long time to revise and tinker and tinker and tinker with poetry. Mary Oliver says her poems go through fifty drafts. These came close. I finished the last one today and have shipped it off to Dr. Tobin for review and grading.

the mushrooms

The Mushrooms

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

This year they wait in prayer in the shade
like a prophet spreading out his legs
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.

Children and grandchildren who 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 garden of moss
under the spongy redwood logs
and circles around a ritual path
in shadowy thickness of scented herbs.

The patch above his shaggy brow
has balded like a friar’s tonsure.
Observing a monkish vow of silence,
he shuffles under the swaying ferns.

Then, his tail lifts. It sounds a fiery
silent prayer that sails above meadows,
a slow and steady acidic bomb,
a mystic force—fronds bow their heads.

His tactless divination floats down
into the valley to burn the nostrils
and throats 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 the threaded lining and beyond
into vacancy and nothingness,

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

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

but a skid-guard on the elbow,
a gargantuan scab tacked on a ledge,
rough and ready for foreign friction:
Bridge-bracing. Adoption. Mend.



The Pipe

Sometimes I hold Grandpa’s pipe
in the crook of my thumb and, rocking
in his chair, recall the old myth—how
Prometheus stole fire from heaven

by sneaking embers into a cupped shell
and scuttling back down to terra firma,
keeping the ash hot by drawing the flame
through a reed cut from the hedge.

Using his god-given breath of life,
he squinted like a caveman in sunlight
and spit out sparks and smoke and fauna
into fields of brush, and thus spread

the stolen secret. Silly folklore.
But how can I scrutinize the yarn
of all the wrinkled, smiling patriarchs
puffing away on their planked porches?



The Seaweed

Like the curly beard-locks shaved
and wiped from Poseidon’s dripping chin
with sea-foam settled at a bowl’s rim,
the floating weeds cluster and congeal,

forging a scraggly nest for mites
and rank surface scum of the deep.
Wiry fullness, salty jungle
baking in the sunlight and wave-breath,

a refuge, a sponge that holds on through
Olympus’ livid tempests, sifting
and soaking in fixity and flux,
as stalwart as a weathered captain.

And as a lifeboat of shipwrecked sailors
paddles aimless on the marginless
sea, a ragged weed-clump floats by,
a marker of highways, an astrolabe.



The Handkerchief

The callow suitor emerges feebly
among the circus-ring of chat
and appearance, but the handkerchief
reassures the timorous player.

The providence of having it there,
pocket-dweller, ready to be whipped
forth to staunch the flow of earth—
dignifier, old debonaire.

The countess slips her silky kerchief
under the table to the suitor,
who clasps it in between his feelers,
and as he fondles the winking token,

he blushes, swallows, sighs and shoots
a skyward glance, a prayer of thanks
and ecstasy. For snot-stoppers
can lift our souls to celestial trance.



The Puddle

Puddle, you are blacker than the black
asphalt girding you and laid out
like a ruthless adulterous bed-sheet
for steering wheelers packing off goods

and bads in heels and boots. (Let’s just
define natural beauty out of
existence.) But for all that: life
flitting, bathing, coming, going,

birds in the font. How did Progress
with its merciless homogeny
miss or crack you into residence?
Was there some blunder that spared you,

making rainwater drain to your womb?
Or are you a primal spring bursting
in the under-bowels of fetal earth,
and trickling up as a forfeiting breast?



The Navel

A sunken circle, shy scar on a plain
of virgin flesh, it stands in, a tough-
twisted center for tribal warriors.
It is the rubber knot of a balloon

that children blow to fill its bowels
with air. One can nearly imagine
a thorny finger untying it
and letting the life filibrate out.

The navel is the knob and window
that keeps the demons peaking in
and all of earth's wares peaking out.
It holds together all things—it is

the nail in the mast—the spike driven
into the bottom of the sea, insuring
that all the fish will go on swimming
in their set migration patterns.



The Ink

Potent extract, poison-flow,
the stain of Indian night flooding
blanched, open space. The ruckus caused
when one stray stroke or blotchy patch

gets brushed onto a field of signs:
curse and crumple, reset and reprint—
by hand or machine, the ink must fall
precise or mankind throws a fit,

goes berserk, stands on its head.
That is why the calligrapher’s nub
tapers to the finest, finest point;
the gate of life and death cannot afford

misfire. This power, this delicate
constraint of sin is scored by a scribe
jabbing his tongue into his lip,
wide-eyed and squeezing out each line.



The Chisel

To take the hammer and chisel up
with warm hands, and with warm eyes
to scan the stone where salvation
must be etched. To cut through, both

like a termite gnawing on wood and
an old painter brushing lush water-
colors. To feel out grains and patterns
within the rock's dense mass, yet hold

to a spirit of airiness and angel’s breath.
To etch heaven and hell on earth
with chisel and hammer. To carve the poem
letter by letter, chip by crumb,

while the pebbles gather at your feet.
To work the tools like a dying poet,
eeking and straining for a gaze
so cold and fiery it kisses and burns you.