greenmountaineer's thread

[HarryHill]

Which line is it that's causing you dramas?

because the beast was driven from its den.
looks okay standing by itself and you can see him playing with b, d, and e

 

[todski28]

because the beast was driven from its den.
looks okay standing by itself and you can see him playing with b, d, and e

also finishing on a "en" then a clipped "N" Rhyming on an off beat with men and friends from the previous line. Is it too much sonically, or what? maybe we should chat in pm to stop clogging up this thread?

 

[greenmountaineer]

also finishing on a "en" then a clipped "N" Rhyming on an off beat with men and friends from the previous line. Is it too much sonically, or what? maybe we should chat in pm to stop clogging up this thread?

I welcome constructive feedback from you and Harry, so you're not clogging up the thread on my account. I like thinking about different perspectives, whether the poem's mine or someone else's.

 

[AMoveableBeast]

Krah turns the spit for men now friends
because the beast was driven from its den.
On other nights who knows?

Without the protein only the huge
would menace each other's empty stomachs
for one or two shanks not gotten to
after they chased the vultures away.

In his mind he's sipping fruit
Uma ferments from hawthorn berries
gathered below the hole they call home
that has at its entrance a long flat rock,
the envy of his best friend, Oom,

where soon Krah and Uma will celebrate
poetry, such as it is,
with a fire, the moon, maybe the sun,
and the many variations of moan.

This poem makes me believe you wrote "Cruising" in the contest.

 

[legerdemer]

This poem makes me believe you wrote "Cruising" in the contest.

I was willing to bet good money that it's gm's a while ago. I'll really kick myself if I guessed wrong. But I'd be surprised...

 

[HarryHill]

I welcome constructive feedback from you and Harry, so you're not clogging up the thread on my account. I like thinking about different perspectives, whether the poem's mine or someone else's.

We talked about it in pm back n forth several times, todd is actually a better prosodist than i'll ever hope to be. all I was saying is that something makes me stumble when I read the second after the 'strides of the first *zips lips* except try dropping 'because' and substituting 'once'

 

[greenmountaineer]

To Eric

It's not about politics or religion.
It's about who I want to be
in the foxhole fighting next to me

or your daughter four states away
whose husband's in Afghanistan,
coming to visit anyway
when my car broke down on the Interstate.

It's about the red potatoes
in a short Adirondack season
you gave to me from your garden

I ate well into a winter
when my God did or didn't
shine on you like the sun,
my hole in the ground, and your spade.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Hayden Carruth was a poet who spent most of his career in northern Vermont about a half a mile away from where I live. Robert Frost, a more celebrated Vermont poet, could write in the vernacular and somehow do it in iambic pentameter (If you're curious, Google "Death of the Hired Man.")

But Frost was the plain language poet of the first half of American poetry (OK. Maybe William Carlos Williams was too more in an urban way) Carruth, on the other hand, wrote this:

Emergency Haying

Hayden Carruth

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we’ve put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Tonight, Tomorrow

It's like a sponge you suck on
all the way down to your liver,
there on your cross,
the one you made yourself,
but it doesn't really matter,

for tonight it's in vitro veritas
in a long stem glass almost as big
as the goldfish bowl left behind,

a Beaujolais of River Styx
and stones of words
that don't pair well with "frankly, my dear,
I don't give a damn"

spittle until tomorrow
when dry clichés die on your tongue,
once intertwined with another,
and you'll ask in your mind's eye why
why would I ever?,
why would I ever?,

tonight seeing double,
tomorrow vision.

 

[Lyricalli]

for tonight it's in vitro veritas

Is this meant to be "in vitro veritas" vs "in vino veritas"?

 

[HarryHill]

Is this meant to be "in vitro veritas" vs "in vino veritas"?

If so it's a killer line and seems to fit the rest in that respect

 

[greenmountaineer]

Is this meant to be "in vitro veritas" vs "in vino veritas"?

Yes as in word play for Latin "in glass" as in a glass of wine

 

[Lyricalli]

Yes as in word play for Latin "in glass" as in a glass of wine

I'm not well-versed in Latin, and on my first read through, that line stopped me and made me look at it, never having seen "in vitro" used in this kind of context. Vino may have slipped by without much notice, easily digested in the context. I like it. Made me pay more attention.


And, this

a Beaujolais of River Styx
and stones of words

I love. Love the way it sounds; love the way the thoughts bounced around in my head when I read it.

 

[todski28]

It's like a sponge you suck on
all the way down to your liver,
there on your cross,
the one you made yourself,
but it doesn't really matter,

for tonight it's in vitro veritas
in a long stem glass almost as big
as the goldfish bowl left behind,

a Beaujolais of River Styx
and stones of words
that don't pair well with "frankly, my dear,
I don't give a damn"

spittle until tomorrow
when dry clichés die on your tongue,
once intertwined with another,
and you'll ask in your mind's eye why
why would I ever?,
why would I ever?,

tonight seeing double,
tomorrow vision.

dark with a hint of redemption at the end, I can relate

 

[greenmountaineer]

The Life Cycle of a Flea

They wheeled him into Vienna sunshine
as gold and cold as Octoberfest beer
where Helmut swats imaginary fleas
because he forgot they don't have wings.

Shoulders wrapped in a mohair blanket,
another one over his boneyard knees,
he fidgets with his boneyard fingers
cuff links made from Reichspfennig coins

that shined in the pupils of fraülines once
when he waltzed with muscularity
by the Danube, in music Blue,
in fact, as brown as his Brownshirt was.

Helmut knew then it was black upstream
where certainly a Jew was also a man
but a flea was also an animal,
and so it remains in his addled brain,

the sulci of which form perfect ridges
for eggs to hatch as he prays to his Gott
they'll fly out his ears and die on his blankets
that he may hear Strauss play again.

 

[greenmountaineer]

The F Word

The day I went with my father to work
because my baby brother was sick
I didn't know then what it meant,
but I didn't like the sound of the k,
like Jimmy scratching his fingernails
on Mrs. Philbrick's blackboard

or "No, Virginia, there isn't
a Santa Claus coming to town"
that Christmas when I watched my father
punch out his truck at the end of the day

in a warehouse of men who smelled
like liverwurst on Wonderbread
Mother bought before Blue Sunday
markets closed that we all could pray
for dented cans of fuckin' peas
or fuckin' corn or fuckin' waxed beans.

 

[legerdemer]

I like the punchiness of it. To me, the "my" in the second line of the last stanza is unnecessary - to my ear, the line flows better without it. Just my opinion.

Reading it made me think that we should have a thread with a collection of "father" poems - not inappropriate, what with Father's Day coming up and all.

Thank you, gm, for another great start of a day.

 

[greenmountaineer]

I like the punchiness of it. To me, the "my" in the second line of the last stanza is unnecessary - to my ear, the line flows better without it. Just my opinion.

Reading it made me think that we should have a thread with a collection of "father" poems - not inappropriate, what with Father's Day coming up and all.

Thank you, gm, for another great start of a day.

Thanks, good catch. I was just about to edit it anyway because the present tense, in part, didn't work, so I'll change that as well.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Gray

Gray is the color of many things:
cement, pewter, elephants,
cadet uniforms, and detritus,
once the bark on an elm,
fat with insects and sap,
that litters snow in the meadow now.

It's lead in a penciled sumi-e
print of a dormant bamboo
whose charcoal ink and wash stems
embrace a white Tao on rice paper,

or maybe the white is snow instead
beneath which green shoots will break
the topsoil again in early spring
wearing their jackets of hoarfrost at dawn
whose gray crystalline vapor's rich
with moisture to feed the nodes.

Gray is also a porous dark cloud
that shrouds a pockmarked phantom moon
whose yellow man, in fact, is a myth
spinning perhaps haphazardly,
the closest of all the spinning rocks
where there's no question, therefore no answer,
and black is the blackest black there is
perhaps without gray in the matter.

 

[legerdemer]

Gray is the color of many things:
cement, pewter, elephants,
cadet uniforms, and detritus,
once the bark on an elm,
fat with insects and sap,
that litters snow in the meadow now.

It's lead in a penciled sumi-e
print of a dormant bamboo
whose charcoal ink and wash stems
embrace a white Tao on rice paper,

or maybe the white is snow instead
beneath which green shoots will break
the topsoil again in early spring
wearing their jackets of hoarfrost at dawn
whose gray crystalline vapor's rich
with moisture to feed the nodes.

Gray is also a porous dark cloud
that shrouds a pockmarked phantom moon
whose yellow man, in fact, is a myth
spinning perhaps haphazardly,
the closest of all the spinning rocks
where there's no question, therefore no answer,
and black is the blackest black there is
perhaps without gray in the matter.

Such a shift of mood in that last stanza, and a change of pace - spinning harder. There's nothing obvious about this one... I wonder about the significance o f starting with gray, moving to white, back to gray, then black. And finally, gray again. Yes, nothing obvious about this one. Beautiful.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Such a shift of mood in that last stanza, and a change of pace - spinning harder. There's nothing obvious about this one... I wonder about the significance o f starting with gray, moving to white, back to gray, then black. And finally, gray again. Yes, nothing obvious about this one. Beautiful.

Thanks, legerdemer. "Gray" may be an over-reach. I started out with easily identified images in the first stanza. Hoarfrost mentioned in the second stanza is gray in early spring mornings but disappears when the sun melts it. A gray cloud as a shroud was a mistake because that connotes death (I may edit that later if I can find an alternative) when I was trying to suggest something inanimate (man in the moon) as the gateway to infinity where there may be no gray matter, i.e., supreme intelligence.

If that doesn't connect the dots, have at it, although I must say that I went round and on the question whether to make the poem more understandable but then realized that would work against the point I attempted to make: Who the hell knows, really?

On a lighter note: I was trying to come with a shorter more affable way to address you. I plugged in "Legère" and it came up "Sleazy." Merde!

Oh well back to the Google French to English drawing board.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Two Cheshire Cats

You purred as much as Lord Byron did
who sat on your lap at dawn
hearing about his Li'l Friskies
gourmet salmon blend with gravy,
how it was good for his tummy
in your stream of consciousness way,
moving on to your yesterday,
tomorrow's hopes and dreams
about which time I stumbled in,
wondering when the yak yak would start
with my boss at the office again.

So I hid behind the paper to read
Yard Sales, Comics, Help Wanted ads
until one day, turning the page,
I grinned at you; you grinned at me,
and then we faded away.

 

[greenmountaineer]

More Than Back, You Took Me In.

I should have realized then, my Dear,
how important pictures were,

our wedding portrait as an example,
once face down upon the mantel
like a still life, I the apple bitten,
you the peach, emblem of virtue,
in time forgiver of more than hidden
French postcards found in the attic.

So after I make you toast and tea
and seat you in your wingback chair
whereby the view is south southeast,
I tell you the sun will rise again,
knowing my voice is just a sound.

Tonight I'll bathe you in the shower
and dab your beautiful empty brow.

 

[Tzara]

I should have realized then, my Dear,
how important pictures were,

our wedding portrait as an example,
once face down upon the mantel
like a still life, I the apple bitten,
you the peach, emblem of virtue,
in time forgiver of more than hidden
French postcards found in the attic.

So after I make you toast and tea
and seat you in your wingback chair
whereby the view is south southeast,
I tell you the sun will rise again,
knowing my voice is just a sound.

Tonight I'll bathe you in the shower
and dab your beautiful empty brow.

A very, very lovely and loving poem, gm.

The title confuses me, and I would reverse "beautiful empty" in the last line, but overall a wonderful poem.

I am myself dealing with age right now--mother-in-law (95) and mother (86).

Wonderful writing, as I expect from you.

 

[legerdemer]

I should have realized then, my Dear,
how important pictures were,

our wedding portrait as an example,
once face down upon the mantel
like a still life, I the apple bitten,
you the peach, emblem of virtue,
in time forgiver of more than hidden
French postcards found in the attic.

So after I make you toast and tea
and seat you in your wingback chair
whereby the view is south southeast,
I tell you the sun will rise again,
knowing my voice is just a sound.

Tonight I'll bathe you in the shower
and dab your beautiful empty brow.

Just beautiful. In truth, I have no idea how I would improve upon it. It is a quiet masterpiece.

And, like Tzara, it reminds me of my mother (departed a few years now), who spent her last two or three years shuttling between a bed and a wingback chair, not seeing more than shadows. You sure know how to tear our hearts out, gm...