Poem 9 -Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a great couple of holidays.
Because I am extra sentimental after a night of drinks, I'm posting now. There's no telling what kind of treacle you'd have to swallow if I blogged tomorrow.
I started this poem a while back (2004), but since I just finished Stumbling On Happiness, an anti-self-help kind of book by Daniel Gilbert, I wanted to revisit this poem.
This poem has a title.


Poem for Grandma

I'll bet you anything there are houses on streets
where cast shadows of horse chestnuts,
larches, oaks fall against naked paint.
Between door and window,
stand walls forgetting the shadows
of boys and girls-
building houses of forget.
I am starched out there,
stiffening against the days,
in a fifteen-year-old photograph,
like tulip bulb in November dirt.
I know years before I sat on the stool,
smiling with my mouth closed,
before the gloss flattened
me into a frame
and more between taking and looking.
But now I steal glow from young cheeks
to light cells in gray matter.
Where in me is that boy?
And you will say the eyes, the eyes
and if we could hear him laugh...
and I say, the boy never grinned;
we made him today
with Kodak paper and sun,
drying rain on glass.

Poem 8

This poem goes out to anyone who ever waited for a cab outside of the 3B in Bellingham after an 80s night. It's been nearly a year since the place closed, but I still miss her. As a bar she was good to us.
I have no idea where the first two lines came from.

Our names shouted in Russian,
our names spoken in Gaelic:
the twin choirs,
wind and rain,
exchange harmony over
the newspapers sheltering our heads.
We steal glances down the block
and scuttle for a cab.
We are drunk.
We are drunk and hoping for a ride.
We are drunk and singing Journey as loud as rain.
Running for the cab,
we are laughing, and steam
from the tailpipe warms faces.

December happened; we weren’t looking
or else we ignored the scatter of days over months,
and here we stand,
the yellow door propped
among each raindrop,
(There are so many raindrops I could swim.)
soaks up and scatters with our bodies:
Each one a plan from God, and we ruin it.
Drops delivered to the backseats of cabs,
delivered to my hair and pillow,
your head on my pillow.

Poem 7

It's been at least a week since we had a city-crippling few inches of snow here in King County, so I feel justified in posting this poem and not motivated by nostalgia brought on by weather. I promise it will be the only Christmas poem (to be fair I never use that word) that I post this year.
I've got the bad feeling that Thomas Kincaid, painter of light that he is, would somehow approve of this one.

To see green yellow red blue
lights on the snow,
I might walk through calf-deep struggle
on the sides of the streets
and hear the shuffle of tires
in snow, the lines they draw.
You could string light
around trees in spirals-
ponderosa bark clinging to wire-
or tack it within windows,
the nimbus of color against blinds
curtains, drapes, black glass,
or framing a living room:
the adoration of chairs
over a coffee table manger.
I am here now, my collar up
the ladder creaking against the eaves
cramming light into tiny packets,
portioned out so that it is
strings of waiting.
Each staple marks a day spent
in months without a twenty-fifth.
But we could find waiting tonight
with the wind,
with the sound-hungry snow,
with the lights,
and the sky pink
with a city’s patience.

Poem 6 -Five Unrelated Non-Haiku

I successfully avoided the temptation to issue a Christmas poem, but will undoubtedly post one soon.
Here are five poems that should be in haiku form, but I don't like to write in iambic pentameter or use end rhyme, so I think it's only fair that I piss on another culture's arbitrary conventions by not counting syllables.
I had fun punctuating these.

a. Fourteen horses: murmured sleekness, brown grace on the earth. b. The moon knows no grass, yet grass shines back; here is breath. c. A four year old, knowing her raincoat is yellow,glows in the downpour. d. Rain dragging down the gray: we wash the streets; we wash apple blossoms e. The sun on a soccer field, students with bare feet – they are deciding.