Holy mother of god. This thing is huge. It originally began as my response to a contest prompt. It is my attempt to write in the style of my amazing friend's poem "Lay Bridge": http://azizriandaoxrak.deviantart.com/favourites/#/d4po01j.
However, after several hours of working on this piece and pouring my heart and soul into it, I have decided: this piece is for me. You are most welcome to comment on it, but for once I will not be accepting a critique on a piece. There is so much about this poem I want to improve, and perhaps at some later point I will go back and really try to hammer it into something. But for now, this is for me. :)
"Divination as a Means of Finding a Way Back"
1. I SAY NOTHING I AM THINKING.
For twelve years I have wanted
to do exactly this but suddenly
pronouncing my own name calls up
the question of who it belongs to
in the same breath Like
Solomon I was born a singer
but in the wrong key and my
chords will not carry me
hither and thither Will not
summon the wolves to me only
packs of hungry dogs
stupid with domestication
but nearly feral And like
a hungry ghost I have learned
not to speak against those
who will give me food
2.
A SKETCH OF MYSELF.
He
says I must have been born
in the wrong culture, he says. I got a taste of
the crackling heat here, heat to drive you crazy,
and suddenly I open my wide arms for
New Orleans, find myself needing the wind from
the Great Plains. Like a buffalo I have the spirit
of the Sun and I carry it with me. I am a plant
of burnt umber,
brown,
ready and waiting like
sage bushes, like the hill you go to that is best
for collecting juniper sprigs and telling stories.
I
fill myself like a teakettle, dress myself in the
handmade poncho from Guatemala that my
mother hates but
that
I can read with my fingers,
a kind of multicolored Braille, gathered into
sunset, stories that say I don’t really know what
it is I want to do with my life. I told my friend
so,
one night when we’d had too much to drink
of beer named for a line of mountains like
Satan’s spine and I said I can’t remember
what it’s all for,
can’t find my way back and
there’s a side of me living for future generations
and one side living for the ancestors that fill my
soul.
3.
I SPEAK AS A SHAMAN BECAUSE THE SPIRITS LET ME.
An yenow. An yenow th wrst part
sI can’ en remember when I stopd.
When I stopd wanin wateveritwas
in th firsplace. Anislike—Im old,
Aluvasudden. An Im middleaged.
An I really wanna new car, an Im
waitin on the divorce papers, yenow?
An all I really wanna do is tell stories
but slike, there someone tellin me
I can’ do it thaway, thadIm stuck.
4.
I SAY NOTHING I AM THINKING.
It’s just that sometimes I think
it’s psychosomatic Something
I do to myself like yawning or a
headache or the feeling of spider legs
against my skin after I’ve walked
through its web And I am Loki
or Iktomi or Anansi always
bringing it upon myself Like Saynday
I want to be able to dictate
that my stories must only be told
in winter after dark But I am always
fleeing before the forest fires watching
wolves take my nice fat goose feast
away at dusk And I can feel my age
starting to show like Thomas Eliot
once did Can feel the pressure
of childrearing over my head
like a cold front in the
summer mountains Can feel it like
little peaches in my hands
fuzzy little peaches
5.
I SPEAK AS A MEDICINE MAN BECAUSE THE SUN GIVES ME MY WORDS.
They
will all come to me at some point,
I think. I’ve always had an aura for gathering
little chicks
about me, and though I talk some days like coyote
I’m
really Momma Bear.
I
picture my future in many colors. One
in bright blue, pastel like the sky, and in it I
keep everything
separate. One side of my toast is buttered, the other
plain.
throw it up and it lands always, as luck would
have it,
face down. Another is gold and red, the color of
earth
and heaven as I sit among the saguaros and learn
to sing
again. The last has the colors of the earth,
browns and reds
and greens, and in it I choose neither path and
both paths
and I stride beaded and gasping across the Plains.
6.
THINGS I ALWAYS SEEM TO SAY.
I have taught myself most rules.
Poe has guidelines for short stories.
Aristotle has requirements for plays.
They all seem to end up like sauces.
Introduce characters, plot, simmer
until reduced to the proper length.
Add ground sea salt to taste.
Fairytales, too, must always begin—
Once upon a
time, in a land
far, far
away—; conclude:
happily ever
after.
There are better rules for horror films.
The Virgin survives, always.
The slut is always the first to die.
Jocks are never intelligent,
but seem nevertheless to have
a talent for leadership.
He will kill everyone, eventually.
I analyze myself like Faulkner.
I am a rage and a thunderclap
and like his novels the most
terrifying parts of myself are
the chapters I least understand.
But still there is something
horrifying about the chapters
that are written in crisp English.
At twenty-five I will marry.
At thirty I will become pregnant
with my first child.
At thirty-three I will give birth to my second.
Tenure achieved like a magic charm by forty.
Live forever in North Carolina.
Travel for two weeks every summer
in a foreign country.
Keep my camera in my fanny pack.
Fill my house with photographs
of my trips, because I lack the will
to describe them otherwise.
7.
AT LAST, MYSELF, AS A PERFORMANCE.
How my morning dreams always look like giants up
on the mountains and how I’ve felt as they said I
would
the trial starting and the call like a white
wolf’s howl
rising cold and reverberating against the snow
casting the pine dust into my lungs and how I’ve
never told you of all the faces behind my eyes
in the evenings and the ones that rise to greet me
in the mornings just like so many lovers.
8.
I SAY AT LAST WHAT I AM THINKING, WITH TREPIDATION.
Since I moved here, I’ve come to feel this
Southern-ness
not like a single culture that can be boasted by a
flag
but like a psalm. Like that feeling as you drive
the last
thirty miles up the mountain sides and your ears
pop
as you crest the last rise to see the thunderstorm
that’s
been there all afternoon, waiting for you, waiting
to
fill your lungs with heat, and scour them of their
dust and
collected pollen clouds.
God
is here. He is here and he draws
me and my sense of the South westward, and I can
see
it fan out like a map in my head. I think of all
the money
it would take to get me to Phoenix, get me to the
Grand Canyon again, and its beautiful red dust
that
runs in my blood and calls to me across the
distance,
get me there alone.
And
out of the horizon my in my mind
comes the memory of how I began this poem thinking
of
my fear of childbirth, of the nightmare I had when
I was
sixteen about telling some future-husband I wanted
a divorce.
And how I began this whole poem to say I’d rather
write
like Isaac Asimov, and how I wish I didn’t write
so
damned much like Wordsworth.
