Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

The Threshold, for dVerse Poets

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Out on a Liminal

img_9671The jolly crew over lunch yesterday. Happiest when the jefe is not in sight. He probably knows this and this is why the two older men eat in front of the house, the younger men on my patio in the back.

Liminal—I admit that I looked the word up, and I’m glad I did.  I have always thought that since subliminal meant below the threshold of conscious thought, that liminal must refer to conscious thought. Wrong.

Liminal: of or relating to a sensory threshold. 2 : barely perceptible. 3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional

So, is my house in a liminal state between completion and constant repair and construction?  If so, what is the state after liminal?  Perhaps subliminal is the ultimate state rather than the one under liminal. Perhaps it is that state in which everything just goes along smoothly without having to think about it. Water flows, floors stay crack and salitre-free, lightbulbs stay perpetually lit.

Perhaps I’d better look up subliminal as well:

Subliminal: (of a stimulus or mental process) below the threshold of sensation or consciousness; perceived by or affecting someone’s mind without their being aware of it.

One out of two. It means exactly what I thought it did.

Today is the fourth day of construction at my house and the last day of the work week.  Thankfully, only six men showed up instead of the usual nine, because that is how many beers I have in the fridge and I didn’t want to have to leave to buy more to treat them at the end of this short work day.  The jefe and his assistant seem to have stayed home to leave the other younger men to complete tiling the kitchen and hammer-and-chiseling out the built-in large bathtub to transform it into a shower and construct a small wall to serve in lieu of shower curtain.

At first I was worried that the jefe hadn’t shown up because last night as I surveyed the day’s work, I noticed two problems.  One was that the tiles on the front porch were not centered.  I can understand that he was lining up the main tile with the tile in the inside of the house, but in fact the porch is more often viewed with the door shut, so as nice a it would have been if they’d taken this into account at the beginning, they didn’t, and so having the line under the door misaligned seems a smaller problem than having the entire porch off-center.

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The second problem was that the bottom step in the hall leading down to my bedroom was 1/2 inch deeper on one side than the other.  Now, these are the steps that have tripped me up three times in the past year, twice sending me careening headfirst into an edge where two walls meet and rendering me unconscious for a few seconds. So, I don’t need a further contributing factor to my own clumsiness.  I do not need one slightly diagonal stair leading up to a square one!

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At any rate, I was dreading pointing this out to the grumpy foreman, but the young man I reported it to was very pleasant and equally helpful when I tripped over one of their damn line up wires for positioning the tiles (heavy fishing line strung between two nails pounded into the cracks between the tiles.)  This is about the fifth time I’ve tripped over the dangerous things, but this one was tangled but still connected to the two nails even though the tile had long been set, so it would not release, and sent me careening down the front stairs, head-first down onto the terrace.

In all, I probably traveled seven feet horizontally and about a foot from house floor level down to terrace level.  If it had been an Olympic event, I might have placed, but as is I just said a few very vile swear words–in English, not Spanish, so perhaps they didn’t have the same effect on listening ears.  At any rate, the nice young man who had heard earlier complaints came running to take my camera out of my hands, (Yes, I was going to photograph the misaligned porch tiles.)  to help me up and then to remove that damn fishing line that should have been removed two days ago.

So, all in all, I’d say my day so far has been anything but subliminal.  But although my entire state for the past week as we moved everything out of the house and then dealt with four days of noise, dust and constant activity has certainly been transitional, it is certainly not been barely perceptible. And in spite of the fact that my stumble and fall over my literal threshold was totally sensory, still, taking the full definition of both terms into account, I seem to be in a state neither liminal nor subliminal.

I’m just lucky that after that nasty spill that my state isn’t terminal!!!! And I can safely say, I think, that my bone density is excellent. This entire discourse, of course, simply acts as an introduction, to The Verse!!!!!

The Threshold

I must say that it’s criminal
how I must deal with liminal
aspects of  this threshold wire
that seem to signal I’ll expire
if they do not complete forthwith
this entryway. It seems a myth
that I will ever pass it freely
without tripping. Will I? Reallly?
I fear my life’s conditional
on it being transitional.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub: Liminal Spaces

Connections for Lens Artists Challenge.

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Click on Photos to Enlarge

I always thought that at some point I would have children, but by the time I finally found the man I wanted have them with, I was thirty-eight, and he already had eight living children. Four of these children were under the age of eight when we met. When I married their dad, I married them, too. This poem was written at a time when, as inept as I was at entertaining small children in an L.A. condo, I still believed in a sort of magic wherein stepfamilies could connect to become become real families.

Connections

Your daughter breaks her arm and something breaks with it.
She becomes manageable.
Her laugh, softer now sometimes.
She loves writing with her other hand.
Her broken one grows fingernails for the first time
which we manicure once a week.

Sometimes, I drive home slower
on the nights I know we’re going to have the kids,
hoarding a few more minutes alone.
My key in the lock brings them, wanting games at once.
You, exhausted, irritable on the sofa,
wanting them yet wanting them gone.

In a movie, Mary Tyler Moore saying
she can’t love the son who needs her love too much.
Can’t love on demand?
Dirty fingernails, torn knees on Levis—
Our rag-a-muffins,
driven down to our city life
where they demand the mall.

Not the way I pictured it.

They call me Mom immediately after the wedding.
I scrub their fingernails,
put medicine on cold sores,
tell Jodie not to wear those torn-out pants to school anymore.
The other kids, I say, will talk—
what my mother would have said to me.

When I tell them at the office
about the homemade Easter decorations
hung on our refrigerator,
about the one that reads “to Mom,”
Jim says he prefers Elliott’s stories.
When I tell them that the littlest grabbed my knees
and hugged and said, “I just love you,”
the clever crowd around the copier groans.
I’m not a mother, they all understand,
and once a week, I barely get good practice in.

But when your daughter breaks her arm,
I try to find a spell to stick us all together—
paper, scissors, colored pens.
I say, “Try to keep the glue off the dining room table.”
I say, “Try not to drop the magic markers on the floor.”
“Take off your shoes when walking on the white sofa.”

For Lens Artists Challenge: Connections

Misnomer, For The Sunday Whirl, June 9, 2024

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Misnomer

Red dragon of my garden, ascending walls and rocks,
seeking out a birth chamber on your extensive walks.
Your strategy is lethal, for the shelter you find best
proves you as an enemy—a thief of life and nest
of bee or wasp or other insect where you’ll lay
your eggs where larvae of your host will become the prey

of your eggs when they have hatched into larvae too,
long after you have left to resume adventures new.
Wingless wasp, you never soar aloft in air,
but your vivid color hints at the despair
of any who receive your sting, so painful that you’ve earned
the title of “Cow Killer Ant” as victims have soon learned.

Cool water will not stem the pain, nor will anything
soothe the throbbing torture of your defensive sting,
but unlike your insect victims, humans will not face
a fate more dire than pain that is extensive as you race,
channeling your power into a new direction,
tunneling into the ground to escape detection.

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 658 are: strategy enemy thieves red dragon air hint water rock nest face channel

Although commonly referred to as the cow killer ant or red velvet ant, this insect is actually a wasp. They get the “velvet” part of their name from the fuzziness of the females, which are wingless and often brightly colored, appearing like a red and black ant. The powerful red velvet ant sting is what has led them to be nicknamed “cow killers”. The female will enter the ground nest of a host species, typically a wasp or bee species, and lay her eggs near the host’s larvae. As D. occidentalis’ larvae develop, the species’ true parasitoid nature is shown. The larvae grow and develop by feeding on and killing the larvae of the host species. [13] Velvet ant larvae will continue to feed until they enter the pupal stage. In this stage, larvae continue to grow into adults. Pupation typically takes 23 days, and most velvet ants are mature and ready to reproduce themselves after this. [15] Velvet ants have an interesting mating style compared to other Hymenopteran species. The male has no parental care responsibilities and the female leaves as soon as she lays her eggs. This is not out of the ordinary for a Hymenopteran species, but velvet ants are though to be monogamous and semelparous. This means females mate just once in their lifetime with only one male. Many entomological organizations suspect velvet ants to mate only once in their lifetime.[16]

(Thanks, Wikipedia, for furnishing research on these insects. I think I’ve seen three in the past 23 years and did an earlier post on the orange and black variety I discovered on my wall many years ago. This one I found near my kitchen door just a few years ago.)

Old Feelings

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Old Feelings

Our prairie  town  stood
in an unending stretch of South Dakota plain
that rolled on for as far
as any eye could see
with not one tree.

Here I dreamed
in the crouched shade of rabbit nests
and killdeer flight,
in the shade of the feigned broken wings of mother birds,
in the shade of tractor blades and haystacks.

This was where  I  would sunburn  and sand stick and deer fly scratch.
Where the ticks waited for me on the wood of the thickets.
Where no dangerous animals lurked
since the gray wolves were ghosts
and the brown bears memories.

Here the Sioux were sequestered in the bars and the reservations.
The horses were safe behind fences,
the cattle wore the tattoos of their owners,
and  feral  cats  were the only descendants left
in the decaying houses  of the homesteaders
of half a century before.

The  floorboards of my Grandmother’s  homestead
sagged  to the dry dirt,
and the roof and timbers
fell  to blanket them.

The ribs of  plows  rusted
in the spring  rainstorms.
Prairie fires burned away  rust
and  snow peeled away ashes
to the muscle of iron
which it picked at like scabs—
iron to rust to ashes to iron to rust.

Kicking the hard clods with my feet,
I knew that under me were arrowheads
and flint strikers
and white stone buttons
in the shape of thunderbirds—
All the rich Indian treasures
buried under the soil
to be turned up some day  by the plow of my dad .

Curled up into the furthest corner of the couch,
I listened to the stories traded between my dad and his friends.
Tales of gray wolves
and children lost in snowstorms,
Indian wanderers and recluse homesteaders
to be lifted out of my dad
like he lifted the Indian relics from the soft soil.

And I feel a part of the prairie dogs and the wild kittens,
the rabbits and the killdeer in their nests.
I feel both threatened and protected by the land––
like a child given asylum under the shadow of trees.
Like myself sheltered in the arms of  the child  I’ve grown from.
That child who, wanting to grow up and feel  less,
Comforts its  grownup self,  who wants the feeling back.

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

“Words” for dVerse Poets

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                                                       Artist: Catrin Welz-Stein.

Words

By their adjustment,
I change their drift,
but when I alter their lilt,
I am as transformed by them
as they are by me.

I am inebriated by words.
I reel in their power
as they call my bluff.

They reflect the changes in me
I would otherwise not know.
I can float in their buoyant comfort
or shoot the rapids of emotion.

Words are my river and my raft,
my cushion and that daredevil conveyance
into a new stream of thought

from which I never return
to the exact same world
I left from

for dVerse Poets
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

Pre-Textos Del Solsticio

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This is an international show, this year occurring in Tabasco, Mexico. Poets are asked to send two poems and the poems are given to artists who paint a canvas inspired by them. Very anxious to see what my poems yield. Links to the poems I submitted are below. A poem inspired by a painting is called an ekphrastic poem. I don’t know what the reverse is called!

 

The Place

 

NaPoWriMo 2017, Day 16: What I Do with Love Letters

 

Within, for MVB Prompt “Unnoticed,” June 3, 2024

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Within

External episodes are thrilling
but may not be half so chilling
as other splendors that reside
within ourselves—so deep inside
that they may be unmapable
because they are not palpable
to anyone except ourselves.
They’re mysteries that science delves
by means of psychotherapy.
They seek the treasures that may be
hidden in us, but so deep
we think they’re secrets that we keep.
It’s where we go in poetry—
exploring places we can’t see
unless we voice them lingually.

Prompt words are splendour, episode, chilling, palpable and external.

For MVB Prompt: unnoticed

Words and Music for dVerse Poets, June 2, 2024

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Words and Music

I like words that sizzle. I like words that pop.
When it comes to words I find that I can never stop.
Words that bubble are a gas. They float like a balloon.
Some rat-a-tat like snare drums. Others hum like a bassoon.
Onomatopoeia makes a lyric rich.
It hums along the melody, itching every itch.
The clanging of the cymbals, the clinking of a bell
assure us that the verbs they’re given suit them very well.

for dVerse Poets

Image by Simon Ormsby on Unsplash

 

4 A.M. for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 26

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full moon morning, jdbphoto 2017

4 A.M.

It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.

for NaPoWriMo we are commanded to write a poem making use of alliteration, assonance and consonance.

Comb vs. Hair: For NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 22

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Comb vs. Hair 

Every day, the great debate
as I attempt to set it straight.
Yet despite how hard I try,
it continues to go awry.
The straight and narrow is not its schtick.
It’s stubborn, willful, obtusely thick.

It wanders from my planned-out way.
Down former paths it prefers to stray.
Daily, I attempt to guide,
while it goes against the tide.
Unruly tangles and snarls abide
while I would choose to smoothly slide

down tresses lovely, shiny, straight,
instead, alas, it is its fate
to wander this way and then that.
(Perhaps it’s best to wear a hat
when wandering away from home?)
This hair will never succumb to comb!!!

The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a poem in which two things have a fight.