North Carolina

I realized I keep kinda writing these little haikus about my home state. I went ahead and just...combined them all. An ode to North Carolina :)

I would eagerly accept any comments. Please be aware I have gone with the "real" definition of haikus - that is, the 5-7-5 format is simply a "guideline." None of the lines will exceed 5-7-5, but some will have fewer syllables. The point of a haiku, after all, is simplicity, and adding a word just to fit in an extra syllable or two seems to defeat the purpose, haha.

"Haikus for North Carolina"

Thunder rolls--a dark,
heaving August dragon crawls
flaming toward sunset.


Last night's rain drifts
Heavenward, an old ghost
from the asphalt.


A ceiling of milk
tempts and teases, but
curdles, and sours.


A drop of water
seduces but leaves earth
parched as paper.


Moments before dusk:
silence fills the hollows
along the Blue Ridge.


We spend a summer
on edge--translating breezes
into hurricanes.


By night, the anger
of wet branches; by morning
just drizzles and wind.


A line of thick thieves,
rain-laden and steaming, lurks
into the rising night.

Thought

Oh, the process of writing. What joy, what fun.

How do you feel about the phrasing in the second stanza? Do the sentence fragments work?
Does the third stanza make any sort of sense? I worry it just sort of hangs there....comments appreciated.
How do you feel about imagery overall?
What section is the strongest/weakest? Why?

"Meditation on Thought"

Begin the quiet storm of fidgeting,
metronome-pen beating—
a drum, a drum:

Tempestuous—tearing
fingers through hair,
black eyes
crawling along
the insides of my lids.

My mind grows scrublands.
"What do you mean?" and,
"What do I mean?"

I tend slowly toward the abstract.
Pine trees sprout from my hair,
a forest of church steeples.
Whippoorwill am I,
chestnut-child Evangeline,
and my fingers stretch
architectonic
to build me bridges of stone,
a whole cathedral of bone archways.
My Michelangelo eyes sit restless
in a face of white and green marble.

The smallest drop of rain
against the window
and my thoughts collapse—
I must begin again.

There is a secret
fingernail-screeching
as the drops of water
roll down the glass. 

Equinox

This one was...interesting. I hope you like it. More funny business to do with identity, but it kinda ended up getting split into two people.

I'd love the usual comments on:
imagery - how well it flows, how strange it is, etc
sentence structure - I fear the presence of run-on sentences
phrasing - I've really gotten stuck in this "I am/we are" rut and it's starting to annoy me :( Thoughts?

"Equinox Lovers"

We come into being twice a year—
a balance of shadow and fire,
a half-lit moon face
pale blue and reflecting a still sun.

Sunflower faces follow me
westward, an ember
dying in a flame of thunderclouds.
Resonant and careful I am,
my molecules built on changing shapes.

You say to me,
"You're too young to be so shy,"
so I stand up and take your hand.

I am a glacier quivering atop cliffs
overlooking the North Atlantic,
but you exhale and
set me to smoking—

blowing candle flames free
like dandelion seeds.
We've learned to keep our breath
cool and slow,
draw it out steady to catch the wish
with a last puff.

We are a pair of Arctic winds
howling down Norwegian coasts,
flopping like fish into open hands.

I am a freshwater salmon—
cook me gentle, peel back my scales
and pull away my pink flesh
with a fork.

I've sought loves like evergreens,
whole forests of pine sap
at the midpoint of summer and winter,
at the crash of seasons
like waves on cliffs.

You are my old woman
speaking
to a silent theater
of all the Adams and Eves
and all their countless generations,
palm against creased palm,

a paragon of quiet
and falling evening—
the measured equilibrium
from my wrist to my thigh.

"Hush, now,"
you say to me,
"you're much too young to be so shy,"
so I take your outstretched hand
and close my eyes.

With a whisper I send
the night's first eleven stars
into the sky.

Thunderbird

This was an attempt at translating this photograph into words:

I really loved the colors of the bricks; it made me think of a desert, and then I started reminiscing about the time my family went out hiking at a national park in Arizona, got lost, and had to hitchhike our way back to our car. I hope the memory aspects of the poem helped translate the image itself.

All comments appreciated!

"Brick"


We forget the four wooden walls
that pressed their shape into rust-red clay—
the color of the dust on our shoes
from when we walked quartz crystals into the Arizona desert
and burned them clean beneath a ceiling of sun
so we could hear their voices:

a Thunderbird call,
sweet and high like the pounding of blood in our veins.

In the clarity of dried and smoking sage bundles,
a small image of you and me
gives itself over to the cactus plants
sprouting through the cracks that form
at right angles to each other.
We were told about the way we made our crystals part of the desert.

We got lost in the labyrinth of saguaros—lightning rods
in a sea of dust and stone.
In a moment of truth we held brush twigs in our hands:
baby thunderbirds
crackling against their cages,
whose mother's call guided us back to the highway.

The pattern beneath my feet is a stairway,
a bolt of lightning.
We sweep thunder under our wings and in our wake.

Quietness

There's this barn that I always pass any time I travel from my home in North Carolina to visit friends and family on the east coast. There's a little farm in a field beside the highway. It's just lovely :)

As usual, all comments appreciated :)

"Storm Quiet"

You spread yourself like Anansi-spider

across the border between Virginia and North Carolina,

all red and dry—

you ought to be a desert.

Land spirit,

the voice of your tin roof has fallen silent.

Heat storms crackle their lightning earthward,

treacherous and tempting,

but you can’t summon the rains for your fields anymore

and the grass roots

can’t draw the humidity into their whistling stalks—

their sound, too, has stilled

with a brownness beneath a scathing sun.

You wait for one more autumn

and its offering of apples.

When your children finally arrive

red and slippery as foals

you may go down to die

and perhaps the patient pre-storm silence

will break.

Thunderstorms

This one is sort of...semi-autobiographical. There are images and specific experiences taken from this summer that I've included, but the story itself is fictional (Obviously, since August 22 hasn't happened yet, lol).

Any and all comments appreciated.

Do you get a sense of grief or loss from this piece?
How do you feel about the length? Are there too many vignettes? Do you think some of them should be combined?
Imagery: are there any places where I need to trim it down?
Tone - what do you think? Consistent? Inconsistent? Weird?

Sorry about the length! I seem to be writing a lot of long pieces lately.

"Thunderstorm Physics"

June 21st

This morning I woke up and
wiggled my toes, as usual,
listening to the drumming sound inside my head.
By lunch I was thinking—
Good Lord, where have all the thunderstorms got to?
—normally, I could pluck them out of the air like
apples on strings.

Isaac would have been proud of me.
When cold air and hot air meet…
But no. That's thermodynamics, isn't it?

June 27th

Today Mom shattered
the vase she'd been arranging sunflowers in,
and I watched the glass pieces skitter across the floor
like rain—
it's been so long since it rained
—before I ran to put shoes on and get the vacuum.
The clouds today are wispy,
cotton not yet spun for dresses.

Gases act differently in a vacuum.
All the equations become easy,
yellow and buttery like sunshine.

July 4th

In the mountains for the Fourth.
Wood shavings scatter over my hands
smelling of cedar.
I was making
something, until the wood cracked and splintered
in my hands.
I have a shard of it trapped under my fingernail.
The thunder rumbled like war drums
but there was nothing to put out the fire
when one of the fireworks went all wrong
and I had to go get a bucket.

All systems tend toward a state of equilibrium.
The drought is bound to break sometime.

July 6th

Driving home,
I could see the grisly, thick clouds
sitting low over the peaks.
Lightning crackled in there somewhere like brainwaves but
the stretch of road we drove down was lined with gold fields
yellowing and wallowing in the sun's heat.
I could smell the sickly-sweet grass, the swan-song of
something in its death throes,
like lilies beside a hospital bed.
The storm was a vulture clawing at the mountainsides.

Time moves faster the closer you are to the ground,
and objects moving away from you always
seem to be running.

July 15th

This afternoon I
shredded the pages of the book I was reading
on the floor of my room.
I couldn't even remember the title anymore,
and the order of words lying on the floor
made the way things happened make some kind of sense.
The clouds passed overhead like towers ready for a siege
but did not quiver once.

Really big objects drag space and time along with them.
No wonder each breath feels like an eternity.

August 1st

The August air is an ocean.
Mom's door stays closed most of the time, and I
go for long walks, drowning myself in the pollen and the humidity,
carrying an umbrella in hopes that
a passing cloud might find a reason to stay.
But like a magic charm, the umbrella keeps the rain
from touching our shriveled grass, brown as dried leaves.
The small patch of earth in the backyard where we used to grow tomatoes
stands empty.

An object moves at a constant speed unless acted upon
by something else.
I am waiting for the equal and opposing reaction.

August 22nd

I was sitting on the porch swing today when
Mom came out of her room.
She sat down next to me and held my hand,
like we did when I was little and we waited
for Dad to come home from work.
My lungs shook in my chest and I didn't have to breathe steadily anymore.
The sky broke open like a glass vase shattered against the floor,
and the rain washed the tide of yellow pollen from the porch,
washed the little tomato plot clean.
The thunder
held the sky open for us, for us alone.

And for a moment we betrayed quantum physics and knew
exactly where we were
and how to pick ourselves up and set ourselves going again.

Pulchritude

Not terribly sure about how clear this one is, but I like it.
All comments appreciated.

I'd love to hear thoughts on the little italicized parts - good/bad/neither?
Also, as usual: imagery? flow? I'm not satisfied with the second line, any thoughts on it?

enjoy

"Labyrinth Children"

I rebel against the boiling
Icarus-blood in my veins,
but still fill the labyrinth walls Daedalus builds around me.

Fire in the sky

We turn our bare bellies toward the sun and
are told we have to be pretty,
have to sweep away the light dusting of hair on our arms.
The early sting of hot wax
scalds like sunburns and redemption,
residual heat softening our skin
baby-new.

We pull feathers from our skin like scraps of time.

Our father builds splints and wooded frameworks,
and we turn our faces to burn them in blazing skies.
We wish only to sprout branches and grow ourselves sunward,
green needles flashing.
Daedalus looks for us, gleaming sunspots as we are —
a sound sharp and sticky like pine cones.

We are leaves, and a flick of their hands
sends us spiraling into the wind.