There are rooms filled with shelves
filled with paper books just like this
all over this small floating planet.
Is there a grimoire among these books?
I could use a spell to expand each day
by an hour, one for reading poems.
Three hundred and sixty-five hours
in a year, three hundred and sixty-six
this leap year. Pleasure or punishment?
There are rooms filled with shelves
filled with paper books just like this
all over this small floating planet.
There are two of them in our house.
I sneak into the ceiling high storehouse
my husband has built to pillage fiction.
I love the word purloin, soft as a cat
happy to be in my lap, a movement
by a knitting needle, a nacreous gem.
There are rooms filled with shelves
filled with paper books just like this
all over this small floating planet.
We are guilty of continuing to add to them.
Who will take on the task of disbanding
these monuments to intellects run amuck?
Much of my writing has been done in the morning since I retired. During the years I worked on my MFA, I wrote at night, after work and nighttime classes. Since the Stafford Challenge https://staffordchallenge.com began, I’ve learned that the time of day matters far less than my own state of receptivity.
One morning I chose a sunny expedition to the opening day of Farmers Marker over my keyboard. I started A Hoard of Books in late afternoon while listening to a poetry reading on Zoom. LIT BALM at https://litbalm.org/ . I sat down with a few lines to begin with. But those were quickly set aside. The poem of the day was triggered by the bookshelves behind each of the poets who appeared. All those tempting volumes: Out of reach, whose titles I couldn’t read, some tidily aligned with their neighbors, some that appeared to be randomly stuffed into overcrowded spaces.
As the poets read, I snatched words out of the air as they filtered into my ears and up into conscious listening. Grimoire and storehouse were two of the words. I suspect pillage was another. Monuments was the last. Each time I purloined one, it gave my poem a new turn, taking it into new territory. In the first case, it took me to the world magicians. In the second it took me into the world of thieves.
Regarding form: Repeating a three line stanza as a chorus can be risky. Come on, girl, aren’t they just filler? I can hear readers mutter. I claim the emotional resonance changes enough in the intervening stanzas to justify the repetitions.
Comentários