NaPoWriMo day 22: OMIGOD A LONG POEM? NOWAI!
I feel like there are pieces of this poem in other poems. I've
directly lifted my "poem" from yesterday. I thought it needed a place
in a larger piece.
I'd love to hear any and all comments, but I
am especially interested in how the piece flows, and in how well you
think the three sections work.
"Puzzle Child"
i. Childhood Memory
As a child, I took my world in
through my palms, took in monkey bar splinters
and made myself for the first time as a weed beside
Walden Pond, as a clump of tenacious leaves fearing anthills.
My philosophy began as a collection of wood posts
marking the limits of a man's life at a time in mine
when names were simply the sounds that belonged
to people, not the other way 'round, when the stories
didn't yet blossom from my head, were still
daisy buds or infant Athenas. But I have always been
a mottled creature, a moss growth of
corresponding shapes. As a third-grader, I
marked these shapes on a world map with
brightly-colored pins, without understanding their names.
ii. Blood Memory
In my mind, Eastern Europe is
a black forest drowned in mist.
It stretches across the Atlantic
to the mining towns of Pennsylvania
where my great-grandfather filled his lungs
with black dust. It is the bodies of my great-aunts,
those earth mothers with their cliff bodies and witch laughs
and I am sure they all must polka in their graves.
Sicily is the bone-deep nourishment,
the roots of tomato vines and basil plants
tangled in my veins, crawling into my chest
through the recipes we only know through our blood.
Ireland's softness—its songs and its stories
have crept their delicate way into my breast,
but I see them only as a coastal village—
a stone church on cliffs overlooking the sea
and the raised voices of my family members
as we sing our laments with pressed palms
and say an Ave for those who are already gone:
We sleep no more in Ireland's sunshine or shadows.
iii. Earth Memory
Virginia is always tinted with red clay.
I was a deer, then, flashing frightened through
the wooded stretches of paths to avoid the demons
that waited for me. October brought piercing cold,
mackintosh apples and a harvest fair when I
buried myself face-first into a haystack labyrinth.
I fashioned myself as an elf-child, sang of
fifteen birds in five fir trees and gathered
sprigs of holly in winter to hang at my doors
and windows, to ward off the evil faces in the dark.
North Carolina came as a shock, a wave of stifling heat
and humidity that broke against me, swept me up
in its arms and dragged its feet in my wake.
I waded through its eddies and swirls
and coughed up whole trees of yellow dust
in August, waited for its thunderstorms in
hurricane season, the balm to soothe our
collective parched throats that rarely came.
Ultimately, I took in my home through my palms,
through sawdust and not doing handstands so I could
avoid the red ants' nests. I have given up trying to
sculpt myself, have let my many selves run riot,
let even my sweat run like rampant animals,
clear and quiet, burrowing into my armpit hairs.
I feel most at home in the summer,
when the years-long drought possesses the land
like a herd of horses, when even the rain that comes
flashes over my land too fast to do anything
but run with the dry brown horses
away to the sea, when the clouds
gather their electricity, slowly,
like a crown over my head.
Always, it is the thunder that heralds my homecoming,
the thunder that calls me homeward.
