Milk

6 April 2013
 
Why is milk good?
        Gertrude Stein, “Say it with flowers”

First play
So much milk
rivers of milk
my milk runneth over
    you mean your cup

    yes, a cup of milk for your thoughts

Second play
spilt milk
milksop
milk and honey and tea
milky t
milquetoast

don't sour my milk now

Third play
Here comes the milkman!
    Milkman who?
    Milkman Dead.
    He is?
       
Oh mother, we’re out of
milk again.   

Fourth play
Born in a stroke of milk
    mother’s milk
    father’s milk
under the milkweed

    (too rough for fishing today)

Fifth play
Hurry hurry, the sick won't wait
bring your brolly &
milk of magnesia

But I prefer jelly
&
poems.


(Last Act)
I photographed this shelf of cobalt blue bottles last summer in Billy Proctor's Museum on Gilford Island, Echo Bay, BC.  For more on Echo Bay, Billy Proctor and his museum, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/the-sound-of-something-vanishing-billy-procter/

The idea for dividing a poem into discrete exchanges or actions, each of which you might call a play--rather than a stanza--is borrowed from Gertrude Stein's early experiments with writing plays, in which heavy formal titles divide snatches of overheard conversation and wordplay. See for example, her Geography and Plays, first published in 1922.

Milkman Dead is a character in Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon, the boy who won't be weaned, and who then flies away.

The lines "too rough for fishing today" and the idea of visiting the sick with jelly and poems are taken from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's 1953 poem/play about the events of a single spring day in  lives of the coastal villagers of Llareggub, Wales. The piece, which is written as poem, radio play ("a play for voices") and for stage performance,  is filled with dreams and ghosts, inward musings and overheard gossip; it is a more highly structured, evolved, and palatable form of the sorts of play/poems Stein wrote.




(Last last act)
Why is milk good?
Is it?

No Tire Basura/ Don't Toss Your Trash

5 April 2013

Northern cities make you think that
life, best lived, accords with rules.
When will we revolt?

Snapshot: Mexico. Along the roadside.
Miles of mesquite and smoky mountains and
periodic warnings:
No Tire Basura/ Don't
Toss Your Trash.

Piles of detritus mount against
the sign and

nowhere else.    

Notes
This poem is dedicated to my friend and student, Jakub Milcak; he knows why.
Photos were taken on the Halifax Commons, near the skatepark.  
   

Blue Heron Haikus

4 April 2013

Blue wings flap slowly,
great bird shadows the marsh:
spring shyly hungers.

When, if yesterday,
the blue heron returned, will 
frogs begin to sing? 

Notes

I took this picture in BC, while walking on a beach near Montague Harbour, Galiano Island, so this bird isn't an east coast Great Blue Heron. Still, it will do for illustrative purposes.

Thanks are due Marike, who noticed the first returned heron yesterday as we were walking by the marsh. She remarked how quiet and shy the birds are in the spring: "Spring is the season for mating and shyness." We had been recalling and laughing at how noisy the herons can be, particularly in the fall, when they scold us with their awful voices--GRAAAA AACK!--for stepping out of the house. But they are silent in the spring as they coast over ponds and marshes, looking for peepers and other prey. Often, too, they turn their backs to us, as if, when they cannot see us, we cannot see them. We're waiting still, and listening, for the first sign of the frogs.

Too Windy for the Birds

3 April 2013

Backlit clouds of morning blare.
Behind the huddled islands,
it's raining out to sea.

Silver spray flies
over dark and stunted trees--
too windy for the birds.

That rock in the bay looks like a boat again:
a fisherman bound home and

forever missing shore. 

Notes

I took these photos this morning, the view from inside looking out to sea, and then reflections of the clouds and water in the window, seen from the outside looking in.

I am enjoying the exercise of trying to write a (short!) poem each day.  It is a bit like labouring over a puzzle, although, for me--puzzles make me impatient--far more satisfying. For poetry is a habit of thinking, or perhaps of arranging, a way, like drawing, of resting here where I am for a time, and rendering what I see. Such rendering is never, in any medium, a simple act of description; it is always layered with memories and speculations, musing, fantasies, sorrow, bad jokes and snatches of dreams.

Find the poetry in every day: that could be an injunction to meditation or some sort of healing. For when I do this, the anxieties, the lists and preoccupations, the physical pains incurred in daily living drain away. And although I am touched by sorrow--today, meditating on several tales of ships lost at sea (the Miss Ally, for example, and the Bounty, as well as the man who drove off the ferry last week in Cape Breton; he and his car sank immediately, and then were inaccessible under the ice that drifted into the harbour)--I am also utterly joyful.  Here, in the act of making something while looking carefully at what is before me, is an acquaintance with rhythm, with precision, heart's pulse and peace.

Property

2 April 2013 

Sometimes the line
between one thing and another
is so carefully defined.

NOTES
I took both of these photos one afternoon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They are part of a photographic project that tracks how boundaries are visually marked and patrolled.

You Can Call It Spring If You Want To

Nova Scotia 1 April 2013

March blusters,
shoves about its blocks of ice and melt and
sudden drifts of snow.

Now: mud and
seeping colour, blinding light,
rain.

Black ducks sleep at the rim of the pond.
Geese startle and

rise up honking.
Scent of earth, of
rotting kelp.

Fog wraiths
silently
through the trees, slips
cove to cove, as if by stealth.

I hear it coming:

before the stars disappear,
the Beaver Light blares.

NOTES
My photographs span the month of March on the Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia.

It's National Poetry Writing Month in the US, and I'm going to take that as an excuse to post more poems, more often. This one was, in fact, written today, no April foolin'. To join a poem-a-day challenge this month, check out this site: http://www.napowrimo.net/

And for inspiration, try this on: Ellis Avery has written a haiku a day for 14 years! She gives an account of that project, and the history of the form in a beautiful and inspiring article here: http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/21st-century-butterfly-19th-century-net-fourteen-years-in-haiku.html 

When in Another's House

1.  Let sleeping dogs lie.

2.  Resist the urge to rush to the kitchen and pour yourself a bowl of bran buds with milk.

3.  Try to keep the freezer door closed. Do not steal frozen steaks.

4.  As for the broom closet, stay out of it.

5.  Stop refolding the linens.

6.  And measuring out the laundry soap.

7.  If you must peak into cupboards, then go ahead! try on the shoes!

8.  But please ask if you wish to borrow a coat, a scarf, a tie, a pair of gloves.

9.  Try not to leave your own hair tangled in another's brush.

10. And please cease hiding shots of bourbon under the bed.
      Did you think I wouldn't find the glass?