Poems of Prosaic Proportions

I will today share a couple of poems I wrote while taking a Prose Poetry course at the Richard Hugo House here in Seattle. The course was taught by a very talented prose poet, Andrew Michael Roberts, whose efforts have been rewarded by publication in various journals such as The Seattle Review, The Iowa Review, 42opus, Cue, and Sentence among others and the reception of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Here are a couple links to his work:

http://www.versedaily.org/2007/aboutandrewmichaelrobertsbr.shtml

and

http://www.bigtoereview.com/id16.html


And, here is my own:

That Smell

I sat on the windowsill to get a whiff of the neighbor’s papayas that were sleeping in their backyard pastures. The scent was intoxicating. I drowned for a moment in silent reverie, stared at the digital clock, it was sitting where the end table used to be, and wailed outward, toward window or floor I can’t be sure. But now the end table is gone and so is she, that wardrobe full of so much fine scented clothing, which I didn’t really smell until now, until the moment the papayas took hold, like last year, this time, a pale amber stole the room, female adornment all around. Still, the papayas make it better.

Thoughts While Rocking Back and Forth and Staring at the Sky

Place of sky, blue, and building, gray architectures of windows and steel howling at the moon from the diaphragm of their furnaces, those swollen fiery bellies of industry. The tips of the treetops, barely visible, but reaching, are competing … with this world of man, this world of progress, this world we left on the burner too long … competing with these stony, steely, glass and blood fixtures of springtime in civilization, stacked upon so rudely. The tides are turning ever more mechanical, rolling in with words and digits and dot coms galore – and this where the leaves fall on asphalt, on concrete, and cannot find a place wherein to plant a tree, a flower, a thought, a fancy, a romance, cannot build a monument to sun, cannot see past the smog flowering from rooftops for a glance to the mother, the father, those archaic old balloons, cannot. The halo has no face. Leave it be. The moon is no jellyfish. It’s not a squirrel. It’s a mirror for the earth, not you. How vain we are to look starward as looking into a pool of still water.

Have a wonderful day!