Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2009
Tragedy
Posted a short blog at The MFA Chronicles tonight about a Penn State student who disappeared over the weekend and was found dead tonight. It appears to be an accident, rather than foul play, but it's really sad; and I know I'm going to have to talk about it with my students on Wednesday, and I don't really know what to say to them.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Review of "At Night, the Dead" by Lisa Ciccarello
Stop #3 on the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. I know the admin folks at RWP are on Pacific time, so to them this might appear three hours early, but it's September 3rd here. Trust me ;)
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Lisa Ciccarello's chapbook At Night, the Dead haunts the mind of the reader just as the dead haunt the poems in the collection. There is a tight, almost claustrophobic quality to many of the poems; the reader is located immediately within, inside, while the dead seem to hover just outside. The first poem establishes this enclosure at the outset: “You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead. You salt the sills from the inside. You are going to dream.” The dead will appear in your dreams, regardless of the precautions you take.
The dead move slowly inside as the poems move forward. By the end of the collection “you” have disappeared and the dead have taken up residence. “The dead set up the house they remember, but it is not as they remember,” and even more disturbing, in the very last stanza, the first person has now joined the dead: “We reach for salt in the empty salt box. Missing from the kitchen what could keep us from the house…Our mouths draw close. The flame does not flicker.” All the salt, all the locks, have not kept the dead away.
The poems in this chapbook are short, some only a line or two long. Although I confess to not making much literal sense of the collection, the images are distinct and evocative. Unsettled dichotomies and conflicts of darkness and light, water and salt, dirt and diamonds, heat and home and love and paper and fruit fill the pages, but ultimately fail to make a concerted whole. This may have been the poet’s conscious intention; the mood is certainly constant throughout, but there is no recognizable narrative. Some other choices are hard to explain, such as the use of “yr” instead of “your” in some (but not all) of the poems. Another choice the author makes is that each poem is titled “At night, the dead” or some variation thereof. While this functions very well in terms of reinforcing a mood and a set of images, it makes it difficult to identify particular poems for commentary.
Overall, the chapbook is moody, dark, and haunting; the language is lovely and redolent with images (my favorites are “the sky smells like tea, the sky smells like timber and steam” and “the dark is a black bag where the eyes are kept”).* If you are looking for straightforward narrative poetry, you won’t find it here, but if you’re looking for a unique point of view and a quirky, creepy, set of poems, you will enjoy this chapbook immensely.
Get your handmade copy of At Night, the Dead
* from the second poem “At night, inside the house, the dead:” and the poem on page 16 called “At night, the dead:”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lisa Ciccarello's chapbook At Night, the Dead haunts the mind of the reader just as the dead haunt the poems in the collection. There is a tight, almost claustrophobic quality to many of the poems; the reader is located immediately within, inside, while the dead seem to hover just outside. The first poem establishes this enclosure at the outset: “You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead. You salt the sills from the inside. You are going to dream.” The dead will appear in your dreams, regardless of the precautions you take.
The dead move slowly inside as the poems move forward. By the end of the collection “you” have disappeared and the dead have taken up residence. “The dead set up the house they remember, but it is not as they remember,” and even more disturbing, in the very last stanza, the first person has now joined the dead: “We reach for salt in the empty salt box. Missing from the kitchen what could keep us from the house…Our mouths draw close. The flame does not flicker.” All the salt, all the locks, have not kept the dead away.
The poems in this chapbook are short, some only a line or two long. Although I confess to not making much literal sense of the collection, the images are distinct and evocative. Unsettled dichotomies and conflicts of darkness and light, water and salt, dirt and diamonds, heat and home and love and paper and fruit fill the pages, but ultimately fail to make a concerted whole. This may have been the poet’s conscious intention; the mood is certainly constant throughout, but there is no recognizable narrative. Some other choices are hard to explain, such as the use of “yr” instead of “your” in some (but not all) of the poems. Another choice the author makes is that each poem is titled “At night, the dead” or some variation thereof. While this functions very well in terms of reinforcing a mood and a set of images, it makes it difficult to identify particular poems for commentary.
Overall, the chapbook is moody, dark, and haunting; the language is lovely and redolent with images (my favorites are “the sky smells like tea, the sky smells like timber and steam” and “the dark is a black bag where the eyes are kept”).* If you are looking for straightforward narrative poetry, you won’t find it here, but if you’re looking for a unique point of view and a quirky, creepy, set of poems, you will enjoy this chapbook immensely.
Get your handmade copy of At Night, the Dead
* from the second poem “At night, inside the house, the dead:” and the poem on page 16 called “At night, the dead:”
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Regret
no time to talk about this right now, but wanted to post it.....
Regret: A Ghazal for Agha Shahid Ali
The poet approached his death without regret.
His loves, his words, all pure and true. No regret.
Sunshine in April warms the panes of windows
composed of broken sand. Does the ocean regret?
The room is brilliant and empty, bed made,
window open, curtains billowing in gusts of regret.
Lovers frolic in the new grass, hands hot and waiting.
Their eyes meet. Everything is possible but regret.
I met the poet the year before he died. We talked
of everything but death. I still carry that regret.
Regret: A Ghazal for Agha Shahid Ali
The poet approached his death without regret.
His loves, his words, all pure and true. No regret.
Sunshine in April warms the panes of windows
composed of broken sand. Does the ocean regret?
The room is brilliant and empty, bed made,
window open, curtains billowing in gusts of regret.
Lovers frolic in the new grass, hands hot and waiting.
Their eyes meet. Everything is possible but regret.
I met the poet the year before he died. We talked
of everything but death. I still carry that regret.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The waiting game begins
Today, after work, I mailed the very last piece of the very last grad school application. Throughout this process, I've spent $140 to take the GRE, $451 on application fees, roughly $20 in postage, almost $10 in printing (I did most of it for free at work), plus a package of manilla envelopes, some whiteout, a package of paperclips, and a ridiculous amount of time and energy. But now it is all out of my hands; my fate is out there in the hands of the universe and its infinite wisdom. I believe that it will give me the options I need to make a good decision.
And, because I haven't posted any poems recently, here is a very new first draft I scribbled out last night during the Open Mic. ETA: after reading this again a few times, I think it's really awful, and am deleting most of it. I'll leave the beginning and end, as a reminder to myself what it was about.
Hold On As Long As You Can (tentative title)
Ten years ago if my wishes had been granted
there would have been three: her,
California, grad school. I dreamed
last night that they’d all come true.
(removed stanzas)
... She was dying.
We both knew it. I walked outside
in the dream. It was snowing. Is this
still California, or have I gone back
in time to Ohio? I didn’t cry.
I’d gotten all I ever wanted and held
her all these years.
I wake and reach for her, who’s never been
in this apartment or this bed. Years have slipped
over me since the last time I thought of the life
we could have had. Tears fall suddenly as I grasp
the human truth. Even if I’d gotten everything
I wished for, I would still have lost her someday.
It's from a dream I had a week or so ago, which was truly creepy and sad and strange.
And, because I haven't posted any poems recently, here is a very new first draft I scribbled out last night during the Open Mic. ETA: after reading this again a few times, I think it's really awful, and am deleting most of it. I'll leave the beginning and end, as a reminder to myself what it was about.
Hold On As Long As You Can (tentative title)
Ten years ago if my wishes had been granted
there would have been three: her,
California, grad school. I dreamed
last night that they’d all come true.
(removed stanzas)
... She was dying.
We both knew it. I walked outside
in the dream. It was snowing. Is this
still California, or have I gone back
in time to Ohio? I didn’t cry.
I’d gotten all I ever wanted and held
her all these years.
I wake and reach for her, who’s never been
in this apartment or this bed. Years have slipped
over me since the last time I thought of the life
we could have had. Tears fall suddenly as I grasp
the human truth. Even if I’d gotten everything
I wished for, I would still have lost her someday.
It's from a dream I had a week or so ago, which was truly creepy and sad and strange.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Running
And something very new. A prose poem. Obviously. I may have posted the beginning of this here earlier, because the initial image popped into my head back in August, one day while I was out running.
Running
The weeds along the riverside path where you run in late August smell of pollen, of dust and exhaustion, a tired heavy sweetness like the lace on your grandmother’s wedding gown that crumbled in your hands when you cleaned out the attic after she died last year. Your heart was raw and stinging from a breakup then; when you cried at the funeral you were crying for them both, for your grandmother who’d spent 85 years giving herself to her family and for your ex-girlfriend who’d spent a year trying to give you what you claimed to want.
When you heard the story your aunt told, that your grandmother said the happiest times of her life were between moving to the city and getting married, and then the years after her husband died, the only times she’d been free, when you heard that story, you cried for yourself too, and you thought maybe that’s where you got it, that desire to be free above all else, the way you always run away from love.
Running
The weeds along the riverside path where you run in late August smell of pollen, of dust and exhaustion, a tired heavy sweetness like the lace on your grandmother’s wedding gown that crumbled in your hands when you cleaned out the attic after she died last year. Your heart was raw and stinging from a breakup then; when you cried at the funeral you were crying for them both, for your grandmother who’d spent 85 years giving herself to her family and for your ex-girlfriend who’d spent a year trying to give you what you claimed to want.
When you heard the story your aunt told, that your grandmother said the happiest times of her life were between moving to the city and getting married, and then the years after her husband died, the only times she’d been free, when you heard that story, you cried for yourself too, and you thought maybe that’s where you got it, that desire to be free above all else, the way you always run away from love.
"There Are No Bad Fridays"
Another oldie... Originally workshopped that same semester, but it started the semester before, fall of 1999, when Shannon died. She wasn't my cousin, or even an extremely close friend. She was just this girl I'd known since 2nd grade through church and private school. Her brother was one of my "boyfriends" in second grade; he and Brian used to fight over me on the playground. Brian died in a car accident when we were seniors in high school. I didn't go to his funeral. It's more complicated than that, but when Shannon died four years later, it through my world for a loop. I scribbled a few lines of this the weekend of the funeral, didn't complete it till months later, then added/changed a lot during that workshop the next semester. When I dusted it off again recently, I made some more drastic changes.
“There Are No Bad Fridays”
the man on the radio says, but I disagree
today as I drive through sheets of rain
toward my cousin’s funeral. She was nineteen,
her boyfriend was behind the wheel. He lies
in a hospital bed, stable, in pain. I was almost
afraid this morning to get in the car.
The radio plays on, a constant drone
of scripted words and recycled songs
blurring into a noise as nearly white
as the sky. I should be remembering her,
at holidays and parties, as a child
and a teenager, and a woman just starting
to grown into her beauty, but the radio
recalls last night’s conversations,
and the later kisses, and thoughts
flow through my mind as quickly,
as pointlessly, as the sound. I shake
my head to clear it and focus
instead on the rain.
This is a bad Friday, I think,
annoyed with the voice which said
everything is fine, and I glare
at the spray flung onto the windshield
by the truck in front of me. I realize
I am tense, that I keep tightening
until I am squeezing the wheel
with both hands, hunched over,
an old woman at twenty-six, straining
to see. I make an effort to relax,
uncoiling, pressing shoulders back
against the seat, and I try to look
beyond the tail lights in front of me.
Rain falls in waves, rolling down
the glass, splashing off. We are,
all of us, back in the womb on this highway,
securely wrapped in glimmering cars
while water holds us separate
from the outside world.
All I can see is the color of rain,
the pale grey fabric of clouds unbroken
by sky, and I know the weather won’t change
today. I feel the truth of the falling sky
as I navigate the slick pavement
that glows in my headlights. The truth
is that the radio tells lies, the leaves
change color and die, the rain
always falls downward, and all
we can hope for is to grow old someday.
“There Are No Bad Fridays”
the man on the radio says, but I disagree
today as I drive through sheets of rain
toward my cousin’s funeral. She was nineteen,
her boyfriend was behind the wheel. He lies
in a hospital bed, stable, in pain. I was almost
afraid this morning to get in the car.
The radio plays on, a constant drone
of scripted words and recycled songs
blurring into a noise as nearly white
as the sky. I should be remembering her,
at holidays and parties, as a child
and a teenager, and a woman just starting
to grown into her beauty, but the radio
recalls last night’s conversations,
and the later kisses, and thoughts
flow through my mind as quickly,
as pointlessly, as the sound. I shake
my head to clear it and focus
instead on the rain.
This is a bad Friday, I think,
annoyed with the voice which said
everything is fine, and I glare
at the spray flung onto the windshield
by the truck in front of me. I realize
I am tense, that I keep tightening
until I am squeezing the wheel
with both hands, hunched over,
an old woman at twenty-six, straining
to see. I make an effort to relax,
uncoiling, pressing shoulders back
against the seat, and I try to look
beyond the tail lights in front of me.
Rain falls in waves, rolling down
the glass, splashing off. We are,
all of us, back in the womb on this highway,
securely wrapped in glimmering cars
while water holds us separate
from the outside world.
All I can see is the color of rain,
the pale grey fabric of clouds unbroken
by sky, and I know the weather won’t change
today. I feel the truth of the falling sky
as I navigate the slick pavement
that glows in my headlights. The truth
is that the radio tells lies, the leaves
change color and die, the rain
always falls downward, and all
we can hope for is to grow old someday.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Faces of the Dead
S sent me this link earlier this week: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20061228_3000FACES_TAB1.html It's a photo collage with portraits of all the soldiers who've been killed in Iraq, where each little photo is a block of a larger one and they reconfigure themselves as you click on individual squares. Kind of hard to explain, but go look at it if you want. I wrote this little paragraph that day because I couldn't come up with a poem immediately, but wanted to put some thoughts down right away.
Faces of the Dead
They are not really black and white anymore, just shades upon shades of grey, all equal in the past. Their names blur, their ranks, their states of origins, the dates of their deaths, each one just a part of the whole. They are overwhelmingly young. I see fear in the serious eyes in their photographs, but maybe I'm projecting. I want their stories. I want to know why they did it. My friend is coming home from the Air Force today, on leave before deploying; I want to ask her why, beg some explanation, find some sense beyond some 4,000 deaths, some 4,000 grey faces, shading away into nothing.
Faces of the Dead
They are not really black and white anymore, just shades upon shades of grey, all equal in the past. Their names blur, their ranks, their states of origins, the dates of their deaths, each one just a part of the whole. They are overwhelmingly young. I see fear in the serious eyes in their photographs, but maybe I'm projecting. I want their stories. I want to know why they did it. My friend is coming home from the Air Force today, on leave before deploying; I want to ask her why, beg some explanation, find some sense beyond some 4,000 deaths, some 4,000 grey faces, shading away into nothing.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
I'll Be the Purple Lilies
The first poem I read at Larry's this winter, and one I'd been thinking of writing for months before I did it. I'll actually post the whole poem from which I took the epigraph too. The translation of the epigraph is "Up the grey staircase of the living roots/ I will rise to watch you in the purple lilies." (or "I'll be the purple lilies")
Por la parda escalera de las raíces vivas
Yo subiré a mirarte en los lirios morados!
- Juana de Ibarbourou, “Vida-garfio” 1919
I’ll Be the Purple Lilies
If I die, love, I want to be cremated.
Burn me up, let my body dissolve
Into the flames. It won’t hurt,
I don’t think.
If I die, my love, dress me yourself
In the long blue dress you bought me.
Braid my hair, brush my lips
With the pink gloss that tastes
Like candy canes. Kiss me goodbye.
You love the way it tastes on me.
If I die, my only love, please
Let them see me – my friends and family –
Let them say goodbye, but don’t
Don’t let them bury me.
It is you, my love,
I will trust with my death
As I trust in my life.
You who understand heat and fire and connection.
I want the flames to obliterate my past,
To make ash of the form I can no longer inhabit.
Scatter my ashes, love, wherever you want.
Where you’d like your own to join them.
Don’t let them bury me, love.
Don’t let them pray over my body and lie
And say that I’m with God, that I’ll be raised
Again to heaven forever.
If they put my body in the ground,
Swaddled in satin, secured in polished wood
And metal handles, if the earth hits the coffin
Above my face, I will rot. The coffin will not
Hold off decay forever.
I don’t want to rot, my love, alone
And isolated, with the velvet falling over my eyes
The damp seeping through the joints of the wood.
I would rather burn once, right away,
Rather feel the fire, even if it hurts, than endure
The slow dissolution in a closed room.
If I die, my dearest love, let me go
Into the furnace like your ancestors went
So unwillingly. I will go like a lamb, docile and ready,
Welcoming the fire’s disintegration. I will be ash
Poured into your hands. You can streak me on your forehead,
Keep some bits in a jar on your mantle – that orange glass jar
With the elephants would do nicely – but I want the bulk
To be scattered.
Let me join with the wind, travel slowly
Caressing the trees, finding the earth again.
I will dissolve into the water, the streams carry me
To the ocean, then soil carry me down
And then up through the roots. I will smell spring again,
I will be part of the world you love.
Por la parda escalera de las raíces vivas
Yo subiré a mirarte en los lirios morados!
- Juana de Ibarbourou, “Vida-garfio” 1919
I’ll Be the Purple Lilies
If I die, love, I want to be cremated.
Burn me up, let my body dissolve
Into the flames. It won’t hurt,
I don’t think.
If I die, my love, dress me yourself
In the long blue dress you bought me.
Braid my hair, brush my lips
With the pink gloss that tastes
Like candy canes. Kiss me goodbye.
You love the way it tastes on me.
If I die, my only love, please
Let them see me – my friends and family –
Let them say goodbye, but don’t
Don’t let them bury me.
It is you, my love,
I will trust with my death
As I trust in my life.
You who understand heat and fire and connection.
I want the flames to obliterate my past,
To make ash of the form I can no longer inhabit.
Scatter my ashes, love, wherever you want.
Where you’d like your own to join them.
Don’t let them bury me, love.
Don’t let them pray over my body and lie
And say that I’m with God, that I’ll be raised
Again to heaven forever.
If they put my body in the ground,
Swaddled in satin, secured in polished wood
And metal handles, if the earth hits the coffin
Above my face, I will rot. The coffin will not
Hold off decay forever.
I don’t want to rot, my love, alone
And isolated, with the velvet falling over my eyes
The damp seeping through the joints of the wood.
I would rather burn once, right away,
Rather feel the fire, even if it hurts, than endure
The slow dissolution in a closed room.
If I die, my dearest love, let me go
Into the furnace like your ancestors went
So unwillingly. I will go like a lamb, docile and ready,
Welcoming the fire’s disintegration. I will be ash
Poured into your hands. You can streak me on your forehead,
Keep some bits in a jar on your mantle – that orange glass jar
With the elephants would do nicely – but I want the bulk
To be scattered.
Let me join with the wind, travel slowly
Caressing the trees, finding the earth again.
I will dissolve into the water, the streams carry me
To the ocean, then soil carry me down
And then up through the roots. I will smell spring again,
I will be part of the world you love.
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