When the sap levels are low
and the shoots are free of leaves
there comes the rare occasion
when they each disagree.
Usually this falling out stems
from winter or if winter arrived
at its proper checkmark, the calendar
maybe a day or so behind.
What the saps fails to recognize
is its lack of ability to weave
itself like fingers, until a cup forms
and gives to others the hollows
of industry. Somewhere in the past,
shoots stretched like constellations,
a bud-a star, a perched bird-a meteor,
all basic ingredients for harvest.
The moon spells out a language that falls
into the hammocks of leaves
with seasonal torrents, and so blisters
of water dot the undersides of sills
that overlook the Willow groves.
There are only certain types of Willow
that are good for weaving. Winter
being the ideal time for collection,
if possible. Odd how the tree so resembles
fingers as if the fingers were a cage,
caging a monument a disagreement.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Free Entry 1, Week 8
What is stillness? What is more still than last
frayed dandelion holding onto its white bones?
It gives with wind, each sway equals a bending
towards forgiveness of itself, to the last girl who claimed
to feast upon leaves. Imagine this: a fist, knuckles
jeweled like the glint of a new balloon,
as it swaps a pocket for a face, yellowing an eye.
A still bruise below a blood shot iris now a clutter
with the blooming redness of anger. What is more
still than an empty bed, where the absent bodies
press harder than bones of the real? What is more
still than the ice breaking the pain of the fist’s cut,
arriving and departing at the bone? Imagine that
same fist grinding the dough of language, shaping
fire of mouths-spitting jewels that case names
and oxygen-the gift of failure that all must breathe.
frayed dandelion holding onto its white bones?
It gives with wind, each sway equals a bending
towards forgiveness of itself, to the last girl who claimed
to feast upon leaves. Imagine this: a fist, knuckles
jeweled like the glint of a new balloon,
as it swaps a pocket for a face, yellowing an eye.
A still bruise below a blood shot iris now a clutter
with the blooming redness of anger. What is more
still than an empty bed, where the absent bodies
press harder than bones of the real? What is more
still than the ice breaking the pain of the fist’s cut,
arriving and departing at the bone? Imagine that
same fist grinding the dough of language, shaping
fire of mouths-spitting jewels that case names
and oxygen-the gift of failure that all must breathe.
Stratgey Response, Week 8
What I found interesting in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is the underlying current of travel that remains implied with memory, history, and even a parent’s death. The whole collection situates itself as a visitation, even the book’s opening epigraph from Charles Wright implies a nostalgic voyage: “Memory is a cemetery / I’ve visited once or twice, white / ubiquitous and the set-aside /Everywhere under foot…” What also becomes doubly fascinating is the content of which Trethewey writes, death, is in fact everywhere literally underfoot in the collection. History is behind us, death is under us, and memory is located in a long mental plane that must be sought out and arrived at. The speakers of the collection are constantly mobile: “my mother is boarding a train,” “the old Crescent makes its last run” (The Southern Crescent”), “when I turned to walk away” (Graveyard Blues), “Every spring- / Pilgrimage-the living come to mingle” (Pilgrimage), “We leave Gulfport at noon” (Elegy for the Native Guards), and etc. What this collection seems to present is not just a memorial to the dead, but an overwhelming sense of displacement or a dissatisfaction of remaining stationary for the speakers within. Arguably, Trethewey uses the tropes of history, memory, and death as venues to explore personal issues of a bi-racial upbringing. It would make sense that the collection and its speakers experience tension with stationary existence because inhabiting a bi-racial identity entails lifelong transition. I think Trethewey really taps into this particular exploration in "Southern Gothic." Not only does to bring in the language of mixed race: peckerwood, nigger lover, half-breed, zebra; but she also the idea of an unfixed identity. In "Southern Gothic" the speaker comments on how her family "huddled on the tiny island of bed, quiet / in language of blood: the house, unsteady / on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper / into the much of ancestry (lines 15-18). The house, which typical represents foundation, is unsteady; the house itself is not the typical safe haven of identity. Even the ancestry itself is mucked and unclear in its lineage. All this leads me to question what really is meant by "native" in this text? Does "native" even exist in the sense of sole owner or rightful inhabitant?
Friday, February 26, 2010
Improv 2, Week 8
Elegy For the Native Guards
Natasha Trethewey
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat-streamers, noisy fanfare-
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee-
half reminder of the men who served there-
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance-
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards-
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones-
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements-wind, rain-God's deliberate eye.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The boys left the fountain around dusk, I watched
as they mulled away from the town square, down
the hill to where the sidewalk met the creek,
and crumbled into the sand and glass of the water’s
edge. The fountain churned up bubbles like an overloaded
washing machine, the Indian in the center was dressed
in layers of of black and gold crate paper: school colors
of the Blackriver Pirates. From the window of the pizzaria
I noticed the Indian was more then cemented to the water,
but to monumuent that he didn’t realize was himself.
Robins fluttered the paper, one perched atop the headdress
while the storefronts dimmed causing a smolder
of tangled light on the bubbles that cascaded over the lip
of stone circling the base. Last week, we learned in school
that Iroquois means People of the Longhouse. In the winter
they made fishing holes in the ice, sometimes catching nothing
for weeks. Boys in the tribe were made to dive into the water
if they can’t produce fish for their families: for those who waited
in the longhouse. I wonder if the Indian welcomes those boys
with their soap. Does he tell them, when they are all alone,
they must dive into the creek where the sidewalk crumbles,
to clean off after the hunt, that everything water touches is legacy.
Natasha Trethewey
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat-streamers, noisy fanfare-
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee-
half reminder of the men who served there-
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance-
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards-
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones-
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements-wind, rain-God's deliberate eye.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The boys left the fountain around dusk, I watched
as they mulled away from the town square, down
the hill to where the sidewalk met the creek,
and crumbled into the sand and glass of the water’s
edge. The fountain churned up bubbles like an overloaded
washing machine, the Indian in the center was dressed
in layers of of black and gold crate paper: school colors
of the Blackriver Pirates. From the window of the pizzaria
I noticed the Indian was more then cemented to the water,
but to monumuent that he didn’t realize was himself.
Robins fluttered the paper, one perched atop the headdress
while the storefronts dimmed causing a smolder
of tangled light on the bubbles that cascaded over the lip
of stone circling the base. Last week, we learned in school
that Iroquois means People of the Longhouse. In the winter
they made fishing holes in the ice, sometimes catching nothing
for weeks. Boys in the tribe were made to dive into the water
if they can’t produce fish for their families: for those who waited
in the longhouse. I wonder if the Indian welcomes those boys
with their soap. Does he tell them, when they are all alone,
they must dive into the creek where the sidewalk crumbles,
to clean off after the hunt, that everything water touches is legacy.
Junkyard quotes 1-5, Week 8
"Edit your Consciousness"
-title of photograph
"Spray to forget, Shake well."
-text inside same photograph
"So we must dig and delve unceasingly."
-Claude Monet
"The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road."
"On the rare occasion when they disagree about something..."
-article in The New Yorker
"Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me…"
“A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight."
-Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
"There are only certain types of Willow that are good for weaving and they need to be collected in the winter if possible, when the sap levels are low and the shoots are free of leaves."
-instructions for basic basket weaving
-title of photograph
"Spray to forget, Shake well."
-text inside same photograph
"So we must dig and delve unceasingly."
-Claude Monet
"The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road."
"On the rare occasion when they disagree about something..."
-article in The New Yorker
"Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me…"
“A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight."
-Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
"There are only certain types of Willow that are good for weaving and they need to be collected in the winter if possible, when the sap levels are low and the shoots are free of leaves."
-instructions for basic basket weaving
Improv 1, Week 8
At Dusk
Natasha Trethewey
"It's as if she can't decide
whether to leap over the low hedge,
the neat rows of flowers, and bound
onto the porch, into the steady cirlce
of light, or stay where she is: luminous
possibility-all that would keep her
away from home-flitting before her" (lines 13-19).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s as if she can’t decide whether to wear stockings
wrapped around her head or silk ascot with a pewter pin.
The stockings fur up with gray cat hair, so she decides
to go for the knee-length kimono, which really is the best
costume for the day. We have reached four days of warm,
she says, but the cards call for the start of anatomy to bloom
again. History be told, she knows little of independence,
even in July there weighs a bold sense of porch swings
never left or barely deserted. Today it’s a lime-colored blouse
that drapes the curves of her neck, pressing to the folds
of her ears. The tweet of crickets envelopes her childhood
home, which she stands in now, both old as the rust
that crawls over the brass doorknobs. Yesterday
was only dress rehearsal, costume changes with drawers
full of scarves, brooches, minks, all waiting for her,
the one to bring sitting into standing and silence to parade.
Natasha Trethewey
"It's as if she can't decide
whether to leap over the low hedge,
the neat rows of flowers, and bound
onto the porch, into the steady cirlce
of light, or stay where she is: luminous
possibility-all that would keep her
away from home-flitting before her" (lines 13-19).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s as if she can’t decide whether to wear stockings
wrapped around her head or silk ascot with a pewter pin.
The stockings fur up with gray cat hair, so she decides
to go for the knee-length kimono, which really is the best
costume for the day. We have reached four days of warm,
she says, but the cards call for the start of anatomy to bloom
again. History be told, she knows little of independence,
even in July there weighs a bold sense of porch swings
never left or barely deserted. Today it’s a lime-colored blouse
that drapes the curves of her neck, pressing to the folds
of her ears. The tweet of crickets envelopes her childhood
home, which she stands in now, both old as the rust
that crawls over the brass doorknobs. Yesterday
was only dress rehearsal, costume changes with drawers
full of scarves, brooches, minks, all waiting for her,
the one to bring sitting into standing and silence to parade.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Free Entry 2, Week 7
You rise thick as fog and I knew
nothing of that secret you held in your hand.
My father said it was a tin cup
but I have my doubts about its origins.
Once during harvest time
when the room smelt crisp with apples
and it was time for me to say goodbye.
I, full of the most childish aplomb, lept
to your cheek for a kiss. A smile
overtook your face as red came
to mine for the act which I realized
I had never attempted before,
a kiss for you, my grandfather.
nothing of that secret you held in your hand.
My father said it was a tin cup
but I have my doubts about its origins.
Once during harvest time
when the room smelt crisp with apples
and it was time for me to say goodbye.
I, full of the most childish aplomb, lept
to your cheek for a kiss. A smile
overtook your face as red came
to mine for the act which I realized
I had never attempted before,
a kiss for you, my grandfather.
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