Covered Porch, Downtown

This poem, "Covered Porch, Downtown," is one that in some ways eludes me. I'm not necessarily sure what I was trying to get at when I wrote it. What I did know was that I liked the details, and I liked the sort of hopefulness of the woman, smiling as she pushes her shopping cart down the sidewalk, despite the odds against her - her age (and the weakness that would probably come with that), the rain, the cracks in the sidewalk. I would imagine that the cart wheels do not roll especially smoothly. Despite all of this she still manages to carry out her quotidian routine. The stoicism of the woman conveys to the narrator a sense of hope. This hopefulness inspires the narrator with a similar hope, even a stoicism towards his own surroundings, and brings him to the James Wright-ish statement, "I am making peace with God." Through this the rain in a way becomes a baptism, the speaker being washed cleaned in this moment of renewal.

COVERED PORCH, DOWNTOWN

Sitting on the covered porch downtown
in the summer, afternoon,
I listen to the husky whisper
of rain padding on the shingles
and aluminum drainpipes,
gathering in puddles on the concrete.

A woman, likely in her eighties,
pushes a cart over the cracks
in the sidewalk, through the enveloping fog.
Her face is withered, sad.
She flashes me a smile as her
left-front wheel catches on the pavement.

I am making peace with God.

Meditation on Calligraphy

This next poem, "Meditation on Calligraphy," is one inspired by a class I took over the summer on Zen Bhuddism and its relation to poetry. One of the things we covered in that class was the art of Zen calligraphy. The beauty of this form is its existential nature. The calligrapher focuses only on the present, planning out his movements with precision, blocking out all else - other thoughts, worries, obligations, etc. It is through this process of meditation that he prepares his action, and then, in one solitary movement he puts the brush to the page. He performs the action on which he has meditated, and then he is finished, left alone to comtemplate his actions. The last line of the poem is borrowed from another poem by a friend of mine. It happened to fit quite well with the poem I was writing, and as T. S. Eliot said, great poets do not borrow, but steal. Thanks, Corey.

MEDITATION ON CALLIGRAPHY

The hand meditates
over canvas,
contemplating the brush,
the page, nothingness -
every flicker of
the horsehair tip,
before setting ink
to paper.

In suddenness,
the moment,
aware,
the hand strikes -
one quick motion -
thoughtless and full
of thought.

Finished - the line,
thick, and black
on the page.
Brush at his side,
he is still, content.
Sitting just to sit.

II.

This is another piece of the larger, narrative work I am putting together. There is, of course, much more work to be done. This piece alone is a work in progress, but I figure I'd post some here and see what people think. Originally, I played around with the structure of words on the page a bit. I don't know how to do that with this blog, so the poem is just flushed left.

II.

By the sea we ran in circles,
two boys in the California sun,
our shoulders browned from the heat
and our eyes stinging at the corners
from wiped away ocean water
and the backs of sand-stuck hands.

In the water I let my body go,
subject to ebb and tide,
constancy of Pacific pull,
before wading back to
the coast.

I wrote his name,
Michael,
Brother,
on the shore –
entry to ephemeral castles,
marking kingdoms
of a world moved west.

Just For Fun...

A bit of E. E. Cummings inspired poetry (we are reading a book of his as we wrap up my American Modernism class).

CITY FROM ACROSS THE RIVER, DECEMBER

s(wh
ite w
intr
y dus
t set
tling
on bu
ildi
ng to
ps)n
ow.

Tony Crunk, poems

Recently, I checked several books out of the Bellarmine University library, mostly contemporary poetry. Among these included workks by Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, and Joseph Brodsky, but more importantly, the book 'Living in the Resurrection' by Kentucky poet, Tony Crunk. The book won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1994, and most certainly deserves the title. I've been reading through it slowly all week, and continue, over and over again, from poem to poem, to be enchanted and impressed. This poem, "February," is among my favorites, though not necessarily the best one in the collection. I suggest that anyone who bothers to read this post - better yet, anyone who can read, period - go out and find a copy of Crunk's book. You can thank me later.

FEBRUARY

The copperhead and moccasin
are sleeping
vein deep in the blood of winter.

Magnolias
rub their swelling hands together
attempting to discover fire.

Blue shirts
my traveling clothes
once so carefully mended

now shredding
on scarecrows we forgot to bring in
in November.

I walk among them
now, in the dusting snow and moonlight
my arms stretched out -

my shadow
the cross
that one day will bear me away.

T. Crunk

Fields of Blue-tipped Grass

Growing up, most of the land around where my family lived was farm land. Few neighborhoods existed in that area, and the ones that did were small to medium in size. More recently a lot of development has been going on in this part of town. It has become much more industrialized. One afternoon this past summer, visiting my mother's home in one of these neighborhoods, my brother and I walked beyond the boundary of this subdivision to find, just past a wooded area, a great field that stretched almost as far as the eye could see. There was an old barn, withered, and falling apart from years of neglect, and a creek, quiet in this forest sanctuary; grass almost two feet high. This area used to be nothing but acres upon acres of open land, just like this. With the development that has taken place lately, it was strange that we had come across an area that remained untouched. We spent several hours walking, just walking through this field and these woods, talking of this recent industrialization; of how rare this piece of land now was, and how soon even it would be developed. This poem was written after that walk.

FIELDS OF BLUE-TIPPED GRASS
for Michael James

Step away from the blacktop, Michael,
we are not far away. Just over the
barbed wire fence, crimson and rusted,
is a field with blue-tipped grass
and rolling hills; where the only boundary
to be seen runs along the creek-side.

Angels

Every once and a while I'll come across a poem that allows my mind to wander; my imagination run free. Billy Collins writes a lot of these types of poems. He will often begin with a very ordinary moment in time, and let his mind wander - let the speaker take the reader to an imaginary world - and often end up in a very meditative state, always leaving the reader with a point to consider. It is always fun for a poet to take a line from one of his poems and let his or her own mind wander (or maybe just let the pen wander on the page), and see what happens. This poem is a result of one of those wanderings, maybe a little too much wandering, but nonetheless ended in a short poem of imaginitive and even fantastic nature.

ANGELS

I sometimes wonder how many angels
can dance on the head of a pin. Three,
maybe four at most, their feet moving
with divine precision, contemplating
each step before it falls. The answer,
I think, is closer to one - balanced dip,
arms outspread, she would have only
enough room to bend with the altering
rhythm of an antique gramophone.

Moving to Kentucky

It's always nice when, flipping through the poems you've set aside for a rainy day, you come across one that when written you didn't quite care for, but upon rereading, find that you actually like. Such is the case with this poem. I wrote it several weeks ago, and it is a piece of a series of semi-autobiographical poems (hence the title "IV"). It is about moving to Kentucky from California, and consists mainly of fragmentary memories of visiting with my grandparents before and after the actual move. It is subtitled "Moving to Kentucky."

IV.

Our first taste of snow came in April.
We'd never seen snow like this before,
and I gazed at the cover of white
wondering how it fell
to lie about, settled just so
on the Kentucky plain.
My cousin, Scott, rolled a ball
from the flakes that had gathered
on the windshield
of Grandma's Chevrolet.

The cows with their bells
grazed about the pasture,
chiming along the fence
and chewing dried grass
near the barbed-wire posts.

That summer, with the snow cleared,
we tied a rope to hang above the river
down the road, and swung from a rock
into the water. Fishing from beneath
the bridge, we drank Coca-cola and root
beer, catching rainbow trout,
and saving them for dinner.

As we wound back up the street,
we passed the Amish goat farm,
commenting on the way it smelled
and the lack of electricity.

In Grandma's kitchen we drank lemonade,
waiting for cartoons to come on the television.
Outside, we dug our feet into the sandbox,
and built an Indian fortress of dirt-red clay.

City Elm

This is a poem I've been working on recently. It was written after flipping through a few poems of Thomas Merton's and other Merton-inspired poetry. I like the contemplative nature of it, the man pacing the corner studying the bus, the narrator himself contemplating the tree's roots. Searching for a way to finish the poem, I imagined the roots, long settled underground, pushing their way toward the sun for nourishment, leaving cracks in the concrete. The image that came to mind was a sort of personification of the roots, sightless, feeling their way about the pavement. I thought of a child, unable to hold its eyes open, feeling its way about a crib, and how different this environment must be from the dark and the warmth of his mother's womb. Later on, I asked a friend to look over the poem. He pointed out a juxtaposition of old age and youth; the roots, likely as old as the city itself; the tree having lived at least since the concrete sidewalk was first set. And the newborn child, brand new to the earth, breathing on its own for the first time. Such are the roots in this poem, new to daylight and city air.

CITY ELM

On the corner of Fourth
and Oak, a man, contemplative
in a navy-blue cap, paces
the concrete, studying the bus
as it pulls to the curb and
stops. I wonder if he notices
the roots of the city elm
protruding from the earth?
Roots that after years of
silence, lying beneath the soil,
push toward the light
like a newborn, fingering
blindly the blankets
of an unfamiliar crib.

Much Older Poem

Aside from the quirky moments in life which inspire one to write a poem, I often feel inspired to write seasonal poetry - poems that focus on the speaker's surroundings, and how that changes from season to season. To reference a previous post, the poem "The Days Are Shorter Now" was written in that vain. Since I seem to be on sort of an Autumn kick here, I'm posting another short, seasonally inspired poem. This one was published last year in 'The Ariel.'

WALTZ OF THE LEAVES

Leaves falling in a rhythmic waltz
from the branches of a dead-grey tree,
one two three, one two three,
one two three

Two Slightly Older Poems

The first, "Hart County," is a poem I wrote a month or so ago, sitting at the kitchen table of a friend's apartment, talking about the power of the human sense of smell to trigger memory. Playing on this idea, I thought of an old wooden pipe I inherited from my grandfather. He used to smoke pipe tobacco all of the time, and his house smelled of it - not in a bad way, though. It was always a pleasant smell. It was a smell I always associated with his house and his presence. Now, even though he died of cancer from that very smoke, I think of him every time I smell pipe tobacco.

HART COUNTY

Sitting at the kitchen table, smoking
Parliaments and playing Charles Mingus LPs,
I think of my grandfather’s mahogany pipe –
the one that after seven years still
carries the scent of unseasoned tobacco.
I am reminded of his hands, long and calloused,
and his teeth, blackened from the smoke.
I spent many nights on his farm in Hart County,
lying in a bed with red blankets, listening
to the howl of timber wolves in the distance
echoing mournfully at the corners of my window pane.


I've always loved short poems, and this next one, "The Days Are Shorter Now," is one I edited down from a much longer version. Originally it was something like twelve lines long. I sent it to my creative writing teacher, and he cut it down to something like six or seven. I looked at his marks and realized how little I really needed. To be as economical as possible, which is essential in writing short poetry, I cut out anything that was not necessary to the poem as a whole, leaving a short, sweet, four-line poem. One you could whisper under your breath if you wanted.

THE DAYS ARE SHORTER NOW

The bells of St. Francis ring seven times.
It seems the days are shorter now.
Already, dried husks of corn are tied to lamp posts,
and the porches are being lined with bright-colored squash.

A Poem

Throughout my life there seem to be many recurring symbols, all of which I believe to be of some sort of significance. One of these symbols that tends to appear over and over again is that of a deer, specifically, a buck. Thinking back to my earliest encounters with this symbol, I am reminded of the White Stag in the last chapter of C. S. Lewis' 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.' This is one of the books I grew up on, and one of the earliest I read on my own. Ever before I could read, my mother read it to me. Though I've read the passage over and over, the White Stag, uncatchable and unattainable, never fails to enchant my imagination, leading the now-adult characters deep into the woods, past the forgotten lamp post, and once again into the wardrobe of their youth.

Growing up, I remember how exciting it was when I first moved to Kentucky to see deer grazing in fields by the side of the road. In California we didn't have deer. In my high school years I lived on something of a farm with my family where every morning before school we would see a group of deer, mostly does and fawns, moving about in the smoke-gray morning fog. Even then, it was unusual to see a buck.

Most recently, I was reading a passage from Faulkner's "The Bear" about Sam Fathers, the half-negro, half-indian man of the wildrness teaching young Isaac McCaslin how to shoot a rifle. Faulkner's description of the deer, moving about in the morning light just before Ike pulls the trigger, is among the most beautiful and most precisely executed passages in Modern literature. It inspired me to put this mysterious recurring symbol into verse, something I've been wanting to do for some time.

HART

Watching from my bedroom window this morning,
I saw, elongated, in a blur of silver smoke,
passing between the trunks of reddening trees,
in the clean gray of dawn, a buck,
who vanished against the sun,
clearing the planks of a white-board fence.

This poem is among the best I've written. Not simply for its brevity or its precision, but for its dynamic. So much is going on in this one, rather long sentence. The speaker watching from the window, the sun rising, the deer moving through the trees and disappearing against the rising sun. All of this takes place in just a few short seconds. I did everything I could to slow the moment down. Commas, line breaks, the descriptive build up before the subjet, "a buck," all of this is done to suspend the reader in this one, ephemeral moment in time. And just as the deer vanishes against the sun, the moment is gone.

First Post

Friends,

For those of you who don't know me, my name is John James, and I am a writer and student living in Louisille, Kentucky. I will be posting my work here from time to time, trying to get my name out there. Critique and other general feedback is always welcome, as long as it is done constructively. Most of what I write, and almost all of what I will be posting is poetry, so you can look forward to that.

Thanks for reading,
John