First line from a line in one of Kyle’s poems:

You said to me, “old maps”
and I was at sea again.
Hand me a compass
Give me a fair wind
Blow me east,
for my sails have caught
a tidal spirit.

“On the Building of Boxes” (I may need to change this title)

words: -cucumber, savory, jaunty

And though they don’t have much
in these poor villages,
they manage
to intrigue my nose
with a savory smell – a cucumber
dish that they have spiced up
with cumin,
paprika,
spices of sorts,
and I think about her, again,
the girl who I used
to play with
in my childhood
who walked a jaunty walk
and talked a deliberate talk
in streets that were much too dirty
for me to play in now.

Jumping into poetry…

Words:
-cliff, voice, whir, needle, blackberry, clouds, mother, lick
-include proverb

I am standing
on a cliff
somewhere above the clouds
and the wind,
like the voice of my mother
whirs
and I see her as if
through the eye
of a needle
telling me, softly,
that this, too, shall pass away.

Re-write poem using different style:

I didn’t listen
I obsessed
and when my mother told me
that this, too, shall pass away
I saw the world,
standing on the tip of a needle
stuck
standing
on the tip of a needle
waiting for her to begin
sewing.

In-Class Exercise: Strange Words

5 words:
-slukie
-galiven
-vollow
-slitties
-selukilim

Salt

He’s searching all my cupboards again.

“I told you, I don’t have any.”

“Pepper, ground pepper, cloves…selukilim? You have selukilim and you don’t have salt?”

I smile as he galivenly sniffs the small bottle of selukilim. The kitchen is in a vollow state. Half-chopped onions litter the countertop. Chives, parsley…a whole slukie of vegetables still haven’t been washed.

“What’s this?” He pulls out a half-rotting zucchini from somewhere among the mass of decaying vegetables. He makes a face and tosses it into the slitties.

Braided Essay Exercise: A Cat-like Affair

3 threads:
-cat
-marble
-school teacher

1st sentence is from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

“Married! Married!” Rebecca said, in an agony of tears – her voice choking with emotion, her handkerchief up to her ready eyes, fainting against the mantelpiece – a figure of woe fit to melt the most obdurate heart. Hardly in a steady state of mind myself, I stood up to calm her. “Now, we mustn’t despair, Rebecca,” I consoled her as I sat her down in an armchair. “But a scandal, yes. An affair with her student!”

An affair, in nature, can be likened to a cat. A kitten, perhaps, in its early stages. Playful. Bemused. Curious.

He examined the glass marbles. “A collection?” he asked. “My grandpa’s,” she replied, “Not mine.” He looked fondly down at the ring on her finger. “I love marbles,” he said. Then, for clarification, “The game.”

Curious, it bats at the ball of yarn. Finds the loose end and holds on, somehow. The cat pulls and plays until it becomes entangled in strings – caught before it knows it.

Of course he does, she thought. She crossed the room, rearranging things as she went. He’s still a child. She bent over her coffee table and sifted through the pile of ungraded papers. Somewhere among them, his name flashed up at her.

Rebecca fell into a fresh fit of tears. “And to an American, no less!” She blew her nose loudly into her wet handkerchief. I handed her mine, which had managed to stay reasonably dry, and she took it without much acknowledgement. “He’ll make her stay in that cruel land and I shall never see her again! And a scandal…” She shook her head resignedly. “A mess, Martha. That’s what this is. A great mess.”

The cat, realizing it is entangled, begins to struggle. But it is wound in indifferent yarn.

A clash of breaking glass came from behind her and she wrenched her eyes from his name to turn in the direction of the sound. But marbles don’t shatter, she thought as she stared at the broken fragments littered across the floor.

A History of Glass

I accidentally scrubbed the fishbowl too hard with a Brillo pad (those sponges with steel wool (a tangle of metal fibers) on one side) when I was cleaning it, so that now I can’t see the fish as clearly.

I want to scrub it until it breaks down into what it is made up of, (how does sand become glass anyway?), but that process can’t be reversed, of course, so the glass just gets less and less transparent—arbitrary lines mar its once smooth surface.

I want to stick metal rods in the sand in the middle of a lightning storm and collect the newly-forged glass, and break it into shards, and break the shards into shards, and wear those shards down with a Brillo pad until it becomes sand again.

‘New York School of Poets’ exercise: In A Sunroom On A Wednesday Morning

Why won’t he look at me?
We’re in the sunroom and we’re
dancing, circling
my green dress
billows out as I
spin
from one Picasso painting to
another
It’s Wednesday morning
and he just stepped off
the plane
from London
into my sunroom
and now he’s playing
the piano
of all things
to do on a Wednesday morning
He’s singing
“pretty Miss May won’t you
sing for me today”
and,
dizzy,
I hold onto the back
of a chair
and quietly stumble in place.

Line Poem Response to Mary Oliver’s Once

On the fence
it hung
dogs nearing
me running
until I finally reached
it
the deer with its hoof caught
on the fence
I pressed
against it, smothering
it got away
and the dogs came nearer
and the trees pressed closer
I saw it again,
later,
well and beautiful.