When you are old and grey
I have eaten the plums
and full of sleep
that were in the icebox

and nodding by the fire
and that you were probably
take down this book
saving for breakfast

and slowly read
forgive me
and dream of the soft look
they were delicious

your eyes had once
so sweet and so cold

Poem on Re-Reading The Fighting Spirit of the Walnut

I circle the numbers of the poems that hold my attention. I want to go back to them later. The first circle is faint. The ballpoint pen is dry.

The second circle is darker. The friction of drawing the first, faint circle has awakened the pen. The third circle is faint again. I have waited too long. The fourth will be darker again, or lighter, depending on the time elapsed and amount of heat and friction awakening the ballpoint.

This poem is one in a series of poems about applying liquids or semi-liquid substances to surfaces. Imagine a poem about basting an uncooked piece of meat with a barbecue brush. Another about... well, use your imagination for that.

The book of poetry I was reading was astonishing, yet what seemed to interest me was the response of the pen. A triviality. This is not quite accurate, since this poem imitates (badly) the tone of what I was reading. What was interesting was that this extraordinary poetry allowed me to perceive the triviality of the pen's response (or failed response) as an occasion for my own writing.

Sonnet

Mi voz de antaño dándome decretos
al revelar el don de mis fatigas.
Yo soy así: disfraz de los secretos
ocultos en maléficas ortigas.

¡Ya no hay más que decir! Los esqueletos
redundan en retoños y amigas
mientras bailan con centenarios retos
los pobres inventarios de mis ligas.

Me niego a contemplar las ataduras
que amarran sin causarme daño alguno.
Flor de heridas. Imperios rotos. Duras

penas sin artificio. Candelabros
de misérrimo pájaro... Luego uno
se despierta tarde entre descalabros.

Ok. That's pretty bad, but I wrote it fast. Metrically, it was not a problem. Rhyming is easy too, in Spanish. I didn't even go for the easy rhymes like -ido / -ado. Parts of it are non-sensical. I guess what I was trying to do was capture that rhetoric of the sonnet, the way that rhetoric conditions what you want to say. There is no way I could have said this without using the sonnet form. There is no previously existent mental state that this poem translates, though you might think it says something about me anyway. I let words pop into my head without intention, that turned out to be pretty good words, like "retoños." The argumentive structure follows almost naturally from the form: a narrative emerges with statement of the theme, the moment of crisis, the second try, the second crisis, and the aftermath.

If I wrote a sonnet a day I could get quite good. I think I improved already just by doing more daring stuff in the last tercet. It makes me respect Spanish poetry a little more... and a little less. What I mean is a bad sonnet, even a mediocre one, is really easy. If you reach for some baroque language it is even easier, because you have more lexical choices. I see how Borges could toss them off blindly, once he got the knack. He recycled a lot of lines. Neruda wrote good sonnets and bad. What's hard is to do one like Guillén "Muerte a lo lejos."

What people think is hard in poetry is not. Like, writing a sonnet. Any idiot can rhyme candelabros with descalabros. (Well, that's one I'm proud of, but it's a meager pride.) What's hard is what people think of as easy, like writing "This is just to say." Everyone thinks they could write that, but they can't.

It's even harder to write a sonnet that sounds like "This is just to say."

It's kind of an open secret that many famous poets can't necessarily write a poem. We all agree, though we all can't agree on which ones can and which ones can't. There's a solidarity effect, so that nobody will say so even if everyone knows. The same with once good poets who stop writing well.

[My ancient voice gives me decrees as it reveals the gift of my tribulations. That's what I'm like, a mask of the secrets hidden in malignant nettles. Nothing left to be said. Skeletons echo in offshoots and {female} friends while the poor inventories of my leagues dance with centenary challenges. I refuse to contemplate the ties that tie me without causing me harm. Flower of wounds. Broken empires. Hard pains without artficice. Candelabras of miserable bird... Then one wakes up late amid ruins.]

Generative Device

I am more interested in writing poems that are ideas for poems,and that could have come out differently. Some are variations on a theme, or a them without variations. In some cases, I begin the poem and include instructions for the reader to finish it: "repeat, with variations." The poem should have its implicit set of rules of instructions, or these can be implicit. Either way works.

So the instructions might say: start with a poem you remember the beginning of, write that down, then once you start forgetting, fill in your own substitute lines.

Poetry in Transit

When will the grown-ups come home?
The flesh is tired and I've read all the books,
Fleeing, rushing down--how steady the gait of the mule down the abyss!
And who, if I screamed, could hear me from those angelic
orders? At five o'clock in the afternoon.
At five o'clock on the dot in the afternoon?

The sound of water... Sing, muse, the wrath--
Hypocrite reader, among twenty snowy mountains.
I will go to Santiago de Cuba,
With "Romeo y Julieta,"
with ashes, with self-populating seas,
At five in the afternoon.

From rivers north of intention,
In the middle of the the road of my life,
I will go to Santiago--
Exhausted by talk / of the only happy life.
This hill was always so dear to me
At five in the afternoon.

I never winked back at fireflies,
Drinking with disgust the water of prostitution.
The barbarians are due here today.
You must change your life.
I will go to Santiago!
At five in the afternoon.

Faux PN

Among unraked leaves, with attic dust,
in the inchoate, from great heaves of entrails,
or else something also unsafe, mulled wine, a damsel's distress,
I muck out this sexual nightfall, with an astronomer's rusted tools, with salt.
Underneath there are bells, redundantly declaiming, prophecies of phlegm.
Escaping arrows, in truth, we enter the piranha's cave,
the fry-pan's maleficent redemption, among other things...

Wordmoss

Sockworm
necksalt
handmoss

ankleberry
barkweb
peatpepper

wallleaf
dirttwig
worddirge

beardwound
stubblefish
themebait

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking

Out of steel apothecary jars sealed against the cold;
out of razor blades (I must go to the drugstore to get some);
out of the capacious digestive systems of ants, the remorse of wasps;
out of the tiny hairs of large men; the thick, remorseless stubble;
out of milk;

out of salted wounds, the fireman's carry;
out of candle-wax and walking bass-lines, the brittles of yule; imperious clicks;
never mind Quevedo's itch: out of bad surrealism and the other kind; out of bombast and bile;
out of arks and arches, arms, arrows, and horrors; out of all this;
out of what has not been mentioned: the sparrow's supercilious escape--
comes this new day...

This is part of my series "popular songs." The idea is to come up with generative devices and give examples of what they might look like. Here, obviously, the device is to improvise on the pattern of Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking." I was trying to remember it when I was still in bed:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, out of the mocking-bird's song, the musical shuttle;
out of the ninth-month moonlight...

That's as far as I got, and even that is probably wrong, so I just continued the poem in my own poetic voice. I got through the phrase "tiny hairs" by the time I was in the shower. I was thinking of the surprisingly small hairs of elephants, but that seemed off so I changed it.

Then I wrote it down just now and added another stanza. What I like about the form (not necessarily my use of it here, though I try) is the ability to improvise rhythmically. You can repeat any rhythmic pattern you want, like "the fireman's carry" has the same pattern as "the musical shuttle." But you don't have to. Lines can be any length. You can use polysyndeton or asyndeton as you like. Whitman's peculiar mixture of bombast and down-to-earthness provides ample material for parodic play.