Second Draft: Lost Poems

I help run the Fireside Reading Series (which I keep forgetting to promote here), and I have a standing rule that I will not read at the open mic unless I have written a new poem. I quite forgot that there was a reading tonight until I noticed it on Molly Lynn Watt's Facebook page, and of course, I hadn't written a new poem. I thought about this, fuming, all the way home from work, and about all the poems I'd had ideas for but never gotten the chance to write.

And that gave me an idea. So during dinner, I wrote the first draft of this poem on the back of an envelope and read it at the reading tonight. Here it is in its second draft.


Lost Poems

Where do they go,
those poems that whisper
in your ear
while you're driving
or working
or hip-deep in laundry?
Willful as soap bubbles,
they pop into existence,
then drift away, out of reach,
lost to cooking or taxes
or the mere lack of a pencil.

My lost poems
must be stashed
alongside single socks
and gloves, loosened buttons,
in a mislaid pocket of reality:
that verse about Abuela's tortillas,
a pair of shoes in the road,
pumpkins in a tree,
and countless more
too fleeting to form words,
ephemeral and real
as the scent of baking bread,
words, feelings, cadences
that wandered by
and left.

If there is a Heaven,
I want it to be a place
where I can gather my lost poems
like snowflakes on my tongue

Finished Poem: Dark Water

About a month ago, I promised a friend that I'd post this. He'd had this sort of a day. Sorry, John. It seems rather appropriate today, with all the rain. This was originally written in June 2002.

Dark Water

On Boston Harbor, in twenty-knot wind,
I learn to spot the footprints of the wind on the water,
Dark patches, tight-packed with tiny ripples,
what sailors call cats’ paws.
These presage a coming gust, creeping up behind us,
to catch at our sails and beat us off course.

We were warned to stay close to the harbor,
but in the rush of wind, the mad tipping of the boat,
we quickly skate past Logan, and the passage of aircraft
hardly ruffles us, so strong and fierce is the wind behind us.
Dark footprints come more and more often, until,
at last, the ocean is evenly dark, sharp-peaked, foam-clawed.

Free of the harbor, we jibe
for the small boats channel, and as we turn, we spot
the dark line of clouds and crack of distant lightning.
A squall is coming,
and it will catch us already wet and wind-weary.

We turn back to the harbor, beating hard against the wind.
Dark water surrounds us, vicious and clever.
At each hard-earned boatlength, the water turns darker.
We ride the mad wind on the side of the tiny boat.
I stand on the nigh horizontal mast, and when
the rudder pulls free of the water,
sending us out of control, straight for a pier,
I cannot loose the jib sheet and must kick it from its cleat
to let it fly.

At once, the jib deafens us with its flapping,
and the boat drops safely back into the water.
But the vengeful wind has torn our jib to pieces,
the price of our escape. Dark water has won,
and we must be towed home.

Work in Progress: Rare Breed

This is a long, rambling, maudlin poem, but I'm hoping that if I type it out here, it will tighten up a bit, maybe find a little meter.
--------
Rare Breed

for my grandfather, one year later

Flipping through the Field Guide to Cattle,
I find, unexpectedly, my grandfather's cows,
a cow and a heifer mugging for the camera.
listed as "Hays Converter," page 72.
This surprises the hell out of me
because they're Canadian, bred out of Calgary,
a hybrid of Holstein crossed with Hereford
and American Brown Swiss with Hereford again.
They're dairy cows that we raised as beef,
though my grandfather bred them
with Angus and Longhorn.
Our family recounts legendary tales
of the mean-tempered white Longhorn bull
and how my grandfather played toreador
that day a hot air balloon landed in his field.

The Field Guide to Cattle
describes Hays Converter
as increasingly rare.
This brings tears to my eyes
because, of course, we sold them all
when my grandfather grew too old
- 90 years! - to lift bales of alfalfa
to feed them. Rare, too, are the bales,
the very last alfalfa harvest
mown down last weekend, baled up today,
and sold. The fields now will be
put out to pasture, a wide and lovely
low maintenance, utterly pointless
expanse of grasses. Rarer still,
the farm itself, just five acres left
of the original eighty-eight
in a pocket of anachronism
one mile from downtown Albuquerque,
perfect for subdivision.
But, then
what would happen to the heirloom apples -
banana, transparent manzanos del sol -
and the sugar pears, lincoln pears, cherries and quince?
None of which we have the time to harvest.
And I have no right to use the plural "we."
I live in Massachusetts, my sister in Iowa,
which leaves my widowed grandmother,
my parents in their sixties, my mother barely walking,
and my brother, just my brother, able and willing,
working full time machining parts for cars and planes,
then working the farm and still somehow trying
to have time for his art, a life for himself.
How long can that last? How long should it?

Which makes Abuelo the rarest of breeds:
hispanic gentleman urban farmer,
quite possibly extinct,
as of one year ago.

Work in Progress: False Chanterelle

False Chanterelle
July 15, 2009

There.
Just in the corner of my eye
as I drive past, a flash of orange.
Driving back, more slowly now,
I spy, nestled amidst the moss
on a steep embankment held
in the grasping roots of a spreading oak
a field of tiny, curl-lipped trumpets.
I return a few days later
on a weekend when no one is likely
to mind or to witness me.
I stop the car under the oak.
The bank is a mycological wonder:
two large, ominous black puffballs,
a cluster of yellow hats fit for gnomes,
a bolete I might have found at Whole Foods,
small white flutes stained sickly pink on top.
Most of all, dozens of pumpkin-colored 'shrooms
that I am sure are chanterelles.
I gather five of the largest, no more
than three inches tall, half that across,
and take them home, despite their lack
of signature apricot perfume.

At my desk, site after site,
many similar-not-identical photos,
gradually convince me that I am correct.
And so I take one hopeful nibble.
For one anticlimactic moment,
I taste nothing. No fruit, just flesh.
Then the mushroom bites me back.
Its strong, peppery flavor sizzles
on my tongue, and so I sprint
for the kitchen sink to rinse it all out.
I never swallowed.

Was my pick a Jack-o-Lantern,
poisonous? No, too small and fails
to glow in the dark at all.
A more thorough search reveals
the dainty false chanterelle,
distinguishable from the red chanterelle
only by a stem lacking gills.
Not truly poisonous, some think it edible
if you can stand the gastric upset.
Later, sheepish and chagrined,
I stop to wonder - does the chanterelle
imitate its less edible cousin?
Perhaps it is the panworthy variety
who's truly false.

Work in Progress: Declaim from the Mountaintop

My husband recently went walkabout in the mountains of Vermont. He asked friends and family to provide poetry that he could read from the mountaintop. So I wrote him this.

Declaim from the Mountaintop

for Alex
5/21/2009

Why do we do
things we don't want to do?
Work, wash, whisper, wake,
why? Obligation, politesse,
politics, necessity?
We all do it,
those small things we dislike,
make us weary or worrisome,
because we think we must.

Do not let this,
your declaimation upon a mountaintop
be one of them.
Step outside convention,
ignore obligation,
punt propriety.
Breathe.

Now stand upon your mountaintop,
not master of all you survey
but, just for these few moments,
blissful master of nothing,
and ask:

Why do I do what I do?
Why do I?

And now let go even
of the need
to ask.

- with love, Jenise

First Draft: Summer in April

Summer in April

Spring heat
ninety-four
record high
at Logan
kale bolting
in glorious sun.
Break out the shorts.
Walden Pond
with no shade
trees still bare
with just the hint
of bud
bright water
sandalled,
sand-coated
feet.
Tomorrow, sixty-eight degrees
but now, today,
summer in April.

The Economic Realities of Modern Poetry

Let's face it: poetry does not pay.

If you're a working poet, you'll quickly find that the vast majority of poetry markets pay absolutely nothing. Diddly. Squat. Really, they're doing you a favor by putting your work in print. Maybe they'll deign to give you a free copy of their publication.

Yes, there are paying markets out there. I have, in fact, sold one poem to the now defunct Terra Incognita magazine for $25. But finding paying markets and successfully competing against all the other struggling poets out there is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. I've given up sending out poetry. The reward is just too small.

But I still write poetry. I still like reading my poetry to audiences. I founded and still help run a successful poetry series in Cambridge, and I have set for myself a goal of bringing a new poem to read at the open mike each month. If I enjoy writing poetry, and I enjoy sharing poetry, and I expect no more remuneration than the pleasure of others, then really, the Internet is the perfect medium for my poetry.

Henceforth and forthwith (What great words! Why do we never use them, except sarcastically?), I'm going to publish my poems on this blog for whoever cares to read them. If you'd like to print them in your magazine, journal, chapbook, or just email them around to your friends, please note that I retain copyright on all my work. I will try to post a poem every week, most of which will be works in progress, and I'll try to post a finished work about once/month. This means I have at least three or four years before I burn through my backlog.

I hope you enjoy my poetry. Feel free to send me email directly if you don't wish to comment publicly on my work.

EDIT 8/20/2009: I've now made this poetry available under Creative Commons license:

Therefore Iamb by Jenise Aminoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.