Two Blackbirds

I don't know how I think "blackbirds" connects to this project but I like the idea and sound of it as a title. Anyway I have written two of my forty poems. I am okay with the fact--and I think it's a fact--that I am not going to reach forty by Easter. It's amazing that I am writing at all.

This is a hard form. It's actually really difficult to say anything in forty words. It involves a lot of cutting and the finding of just the right word. These two poems took longer than I thought they would. I am not totally happy with them yet, but I thought I'd share them to keep myself going on this project.

Below are the poems I read and then the poems I wrote in response--the titles, if you recall, are four words from the poems I read. You might notice a theme in the poems I wrote.


Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
the western day through what you called
the loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
and my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
or heard or felt came not but from myself;
and there I found myself more truly and more strange.

--Wallace Stevens



Sea whose tide swept

What was it like?
you asked before it
happened. Can’t be answered.
If when little you
ventured, wave through wave,
until one towered,
crashed into your body,
your self not self,
all water and push—
it was like that.


Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
--Margaret Atwood


sun & three moons

--nine full moons before
the baby comes, said
my great-grandmother: one
moon, questions, two moons,
queasy, three, four and
the rest, the ninth
the night before you
come, that afternoon, the sunshine
on the yellow, dancing
leaves, the waiting underneath--