imsonshyne mentioned in a recent post the practice of cobbling several poems together into one. “Amalgamated Poetry” — sounds like a multinational concern, eh? But I digress.
We’ve all done this from time to time, but I decided to try something different.
I thought it was an interesting idea to attack my two latest pieces from a fresh angle by simply staggering the stanzas into each other to make a single new “poem”, then editing them into a true new poem with an independent meaning.
I like what I got better than the original versions of either of the other two poems…
Still a draft, but thoughts are welcome.
Braid
The red flat braid
in the pale dust around her head
shakes me whenever
I look at her picture.
She lies on the white road.
She could be asleep, but I know
she isn’t asleep, and I teeter
between the end
of the backward rock of a chair
and the start of the arc of its backward fall
whenever I look
at the picture.
Monday morning
before the light wakes up,
when my sense is bridging the space between
nothing and something – that’s
the only time now I can imagine her smile.
(I know she isn’t asleep. I know I’m
not asleep.) I spin
whenever I look
at the picture where she lies on the
white road, not sleeping,
eyes closed and dusted white, with
the bloodbraids around her head resting
snaky in the dust.
She could have been any young girl anywhere. (But
young girls don’t sleep in the road. ) This is the picture of her
unique, unnamed,
unavoidable, sleeping in the white road’s dust
because
that’s where the mine
bullet bomb RPG caught
her.
It takes a not-inconsiderable patience I do not have
to live in a wholly incomplete way
in this place where we can wake up on a Monday
and have coffee and arguments while
she lies in her bloodbraids there.
I’m spinning around her picture —
the long streaks on my cheeks
writing vapor trails on my skin. I’m safe enough, I guess;
the jets above me
drop nothing on their way into Logan,
and the roads here are black and wet.
Dark Matter 