236/365 - 237/365

01.04.11
Surprised with the appearance of a second verse this afternoon. As usual I set off on my daily hour-walk: past the community mailboxes and four times around the pond. The weather of course has returned to warmer climates—so after constructing one haiku, without warning, a second series of sentences walked past, an affirmation of the shift in temperatures: a boy of seventeen with his dog, the boy himself an awkward pony, shaggy hair and slow gait.
•
Invasive clover.
Discarded pack of smokes.
Sky threatens downpours.
•
Without concerns, he
casually walks by, shirtless—
suddenly its spring.

01.05.11
A night of storming
results in a swollen pond
of excess language.
•
As usual, when I make a declaration, within a few days situations change, transform the circumstances into something other. Case in point: I stop one project to begin another and promptly the correct concept appears for the previous idea, without announcing its pending arrival.

Today it was a rush of images stemming from Literature class on the Victorian Period—wait, no, the Romantics—Samuel Taylor Coleridge specifically, with his conversation poem “The Nightingale.” I love the basic scene: castle in ruins, nighttime, a countless multitude of birds everywhere.

And I know a grove
Of large extent, hard by a castle huge,
Which the great lord inhabits not; and so
This grove is wild with tangling underwood,
And the trim walks are broken up, and grass,
Thin grass, and king-cups grow within the paths.
But never elsewhere in one place I knew
So many nightingales; and far and near,
In wood and thicket, over the wide grove,
They answer and provoke each other’s song,
With skirmish and capricious passagings,
And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,
And one low piping sound more sweet than all—
Stirring the air with such a harmony (ll 49-62).

I did not call it out of the past; the memory emerged by itself, on its own volition — yet, building a connection with my stalled project "Learning Spanish," picking up where my metaphor shifted from a countless series of birds which transform to representations of words, phrases. Originally the stanza began with a memory of grackles, hundreds of them roosting heavy on cable lines strung beside the highway heading north to Dallas.

My temporary-ending stanzas read:

When I practice phrases
my phonetics falter, they arch
and unwind the language into nonsensical syllables,
the words transform to awkward birds
settling into evening,

spilling out a chorus of blue-black voices—
the sounds clutter wires along the crossroads,
verbs jostle for placement around wide-eyed nouns,
the misplaced adjectives seek new positions to roost
along the established hierarchy on the cable lines.

And then Sunday or Monday past I put down the phrase:
“Yet, when you speak…”—a simple phrase, an intended bridge from my perspective to the “you,” character —and here the verse paused. There it sat. A broken phrase. A stalk of milkweed snapped off the main branch. A poem with its engine running idle— until the following chaotic notes emerged on a scrap of paper this afternoon:

There are times, rare moments,
when you forget and pour over me
a pitcher-full of indecipherable phrases,
a sudden shock of cold water,
a broken levee of vocabulary,

sensations similar to waking in the middle of the night,
and finding you rocking Brendan in full parental mode,
whispering Spanish lullabies — myself listening,
drunk on lack of sleep, my ears recognizing
only a few isolated words.

Perhaps this means the full verse will be reworked sooner than expected.