The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 3/17/08

[BlueIris]

"Spirals"

When I was a child I dreamt my mother died.
Afterward I couldn't watch television.
To sit in front of that wooden box

Where anything could happen brought back the dream.
"The Twilight Zone" was especially awful,
the way a child could run away fast down

A dark street and still fall into another world.
Sometimes I amused myself with my mother's stockings,
a fur coat and handkerchiefs that belonged to my grandmothers,

Old cloisonné compacts and lipsticks, all family
Treasures I'd found before, like the books I read
Again and again, familiar yet surprising plots.

But always I forgot where not to look and found
The earrings lying in the pink plush of her jewelry box,
Two black onyx tear drops surrounded by silver spirals

That made me sick to my stomach, like spinning around
Too long looking at the sky, then falling down
With my gut spiraling into my eyes. It was Vertigo

Jimmy Stewart at San Juan Bautista looking down
The tower stairwell which rushed toward him
And away, the curl spiraling at the back of Kim Novak's head

As she looked at the painting of the curl spiraling
At the back of a dead woman's head.
So in my dark closet and wrapped in blankets I sat

With my head against my knees thinking the universe
Had to end, but beyond any ending I could imagine
Was more space, another universe. I couldn't stop

Thinking about the universe which was so large
It blacked out the world. Here is my model
For everything I don't understand, for insomnia,

For my grandfather folding his coat, taking off his hat,
Sailing from a rooftop to the cement of Colorado Springs,
For my uncle taking pills, having lunch with his daughter,

Then laying down to die. Here are the far away lovers.
All of them. Here are two black tears surrounded
By silver spirals which I took from my mother's box

Without asking—I knew she wouldn't mind. I would say
They bring me close to her. They don't. They are tokens—
Beautiful and well-made—of my fear. They could be

Stupid postcards that say, "Wish you were here,"
And they swing from my ears almost painfully,
Heavy silver and stone.

—Aliki Barnstone

[BlueIris]

1. Kick.

[BlueIris]

2. Kick.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear BlueIris...

It's lovely how all the metaphors and descriptions fit into one another...

Just the way the spirals do...

Thank you!

:hug:

[BlueIris]

4. Yes, that's it exactly!

C-Peg is awesome!

[ThomCat]

5. Hmmm....

Parts of this seem to be about what she thought as a kid, and parts seem to be how she reinterpretted it as an adult.

On the plus side, that gives this a great feel of history and life. On the negative side, it sort of detracts from the poem to hear an adult perspective supposedly being attributed to a kid.
:shrug:

It seems like this could be an excellent synopis for a book. Can you imagine her fleshed out as a protagonist in a novel?

[BlueIris]

6. It's interesting you would bring that up.

I spent the whole weekend thinking about the relationship between poetry and prose, specifically novels. Did you know that Joyce Carol Oates once admitted that her first several novels were "really prose poems" she developed into novels? Her editors refused to allow her to publicize that because of the alleged fear of poetry that was making it basically unmarketable. I'm still kind of trying to wrap my brain around that—Joyce Carol Oates' first novels were prose poems? That's mind-boggling to me (although it explains a lot).

[ThomCat]

7. That's very cool.

I like her writing, and I have several of her books. I'll have to check to see what her oldest books are.