Fresh To Death

Away We Go

I realized tonight, or perhaps merely re-remembered,

That I would live anywhere with you.

This city-stricken heart,

The one that aches for art-deco buildings 

And coffee shops and baguette stands and street performers

On every corner—

Would hang up clothes lines

To dry our fresh laundry—

In a remote place 

We might call home.

I would cut our lawn once a week

And throw on some boat shoes 

To traipse to the neighbors to borrow sugar when you run out.

I would start reading books—again.

I would sacrifice our over-chlorinated—over fluoridated water,

To drive 3 miles to fetch you Spring.

I would raise for you some chickens,

Just so that your compost pile has more egg shells,

But also because I’ll need more for all the pancakes,

I’ll be scraping together for you in the mornings,

Alongside my coffee

And in between your juice.

We would sit on that porch—whiskey and love in hand,

And finally breathe a breath called home.

I would go anywhere for you,

Except for Wichita.

But for you, maybe even there.

-M. Case

I would make you my wife and soak you in that sea of kisses

With sea gulls hovering about to witness this salty wonder.

The telephone poles poking through the crested horizon dial out

One last time

To tell of this news.

Your name is Mer.  Like the sea.

And I will forever open my sails to journey with you

As long as your winds beckon my voyage.

…and perhaps even when they shudder at the thought.

For these waters are uncharted,

And this wandering heart begs for your adventure.

Your name is light, like the rise over these waters,

Trickling into the dark and haunted places

Piercing shadows with the sight of your tide.

Washing over this parcel of luggage,

And dragging the weight back into you.

Make this shored up soul of mine,

To be weathered with your calming presence.

Your name is Mer, like the sea.

And oh how I ache to journey with thee.

-M. Case

Sheets

Am I to wake and find that the crater has also taken over the location where you used to lay? Those empty sheets tattered and torn from the claw marks racing down your back—grasping at any holding to keep you, here. Lightly tracing neck freckles to should freckles to Southern soaked freckles resting in the honeysuckle shade. Holding here, to keep you.

Here.

Next to me.

To keep you, holding here.

Next to books stacked on top of water glasses staining the wood.

Here, holding to you. Keep. Here.

Pages tucked in to keep our corners safe

And sheets untucked to air out our doubt.

Tandem hearts rustling about in fear and abandon,

Rolling around to find our way.

-M. Case

Early Spring

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees. 

-Rainer

Your voice reminds me of Spring.

Eyes

Look me in the eyes at least,

When you pass me by,

On the Street,

Whether or not

You answer my plea for money:

My eyes

Are the poorest of me–

Require only your two cents

When we meet–

And are far more in dire need of these

Than your feet.

My poor eyes!

How they have spent the rent

Trying to buy a pleasant remembrance

To throw up on my mind’s screen

When I finally tire of going

Ungreeted,

Unseen.

I tell you what I want–what

I feel

When you shuffle by behind your paper

Trying to be discreet,

Sweating slightly

Under your shirt collar and looking down,

Always down,

As if I was your sin…

Be absolved of the guilt trip!

Look at me!

Make me a mint!

Shower me with riches!

Give me a long look, and drown me

In it!

Dignity outlasts

Dollars

//Ellen Palmer // 1990’s edition of Streetwise

*Streetwise is a newspaper publication by individuals in Chicago that are homeless
*We had Street Sheets in San Francisco. I wish more cities took on this brilliant idea to amplify the voices of those that are homeless

Coffee

I tried making you coffee seven different ways

One for each day of your personality

And for each day of that time we spent together

Rustling about with grinds scattered across the counter

And drip rings laminating our books together

As if we, too, could be bound.

-M. Case

Blossom.

And like a geisha’s sweet wrists sliding from underneath that silk robe, the blossoms have graced this world with their seductive beauty.

They have charmed the Sun and convinced him to stay for a while

To sit and smoke his pipe in this time of reflection

And savor a sip of whiskey to cool his fiery tongue

This season has come

And hopefully our hearts will too

That they be left behind, longing to remain in seasons of old

Is understandable but hopeless

For there is no season but this

The one marked with fire ants, ice cream, baseball, long walks, tender hearts,

And the longing to love.

Let us live this season with reckless abandon,

Drinking in this season’s blossoms as if this year were all she had to offer.

-M. Case

“The Average Fourth Grader Is A Better Poet Than You, (And Me Too),” Hannah Gamble

commovente:

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.

When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:

“The life of my heart is crimson.”

[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]

“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”

 

“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”

“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”

 

[Writing about a terminal illness:]

“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”

“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”

[Writing about life as a movie:]

“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”

 
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”

“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

 Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
 

“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”

“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”

“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”

“Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

(source)

This is simply brilliant. “The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.” Love this.

Soil

I’ve never stepped foot on Florida soil

Unless you count nine-hour layovers in the smoking-only lounge

Overgrown with imported palm trees

Zoo-ed in with glass elevators

Ash-trays

And tongues from every soil of this sea-salted world

This is the only Florida soil I know

The terra that cannot be pinpointed

The dirt that both muddies the water and nourishes the trees

Those sweet trees sagging heavy with their summer children

Orange and water logged

Soaked from their days of incubation in that wet womb

The one that splits this universe and reality from the other

The one bathed in water and light

And perhaps the one we will return

Should we find our way through this soil.

-M. Case