You Began Talking and I Lost My Place While Making Love

[Bernie01]

The light dim
as two sunburned
tomatoes.

Mirzam, Cassiopeia
and Pollux shut-down.

You are naked
except for sunglasses.

I resemble
a Tour de France
bike rider in my
watertight scuba suit.

Waist deep
in a municipal pool.
I listen to your talking.

2

Mirzam, Cassiopeia
and Pollux glimmer
and shut-down.

In my watertight
scuba suit
I am colorful
as a Tour-de-France
bicycle rider winsome
as the Prince of Wales.

A crumpled kiss,
third-class voyager
wading waist deep
like a boy
in a municipal pool.

You speak.
Words round and fly by,
love and desire
visit the little archipelago
that I am.

3

Except for a red rose
open like a parasol
you are naked.

The sunglasses
make it difficult
to recognize me
or to avoid
asking my name.

Drifting to sleep
in my face mask,
the snorkel alert
as a border guard,

I listen to you,
each word
a frozen strawberry

gift wrapped
for my sojourn.

[FrankDire]

A pleasure to read.

[Kenneth2816]

Yes beautiful.Im a bit stumped as to the slighlty varied repitition, but then, I just learned from MV what a cinqa whatever was last month.

[FrankDire]

Yes, the repetition has to be a form.

[Bernie01]

Thanks, guys.

not a fan of forms, no matter who does it... rhythms, sometime...but not my cup of hot spice tea. I repeat here to give a second take on the action....

a favorite poet who one posted in these forums, is sara jane sloat. i love many of her images. she is married to a German and lives there. maybe Spain now.

she has done a long series of found poems based on Stephen King's novel, Misery.---printing the original page and highlighting the poem she has picked out.


Into the long pink string
of his mouth, the pill,
like a sack slung over a stone wall,
astonished him
in flowers.


Citation: King, Stephen. Misery. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.


she writes:


So far I've done about 40 Misery poems, half of which are worth submitting. Five of those have already been accepted somewhere...



here is a fascinating stat from her:

I had success with the Misery poems last year, with 35 published in 13 different journals. Including Misery 31, published at the tail-end of 2016 in concis, that makes 36. Below is a catalog with assorted links.

For 2018, seven more Misery poems have been accepted by Diagram, Passages North, Poetry Northwest and Tinderbox. I have others submitted. My semi-move to Spain this past summer ate a lot of time and continues to do so, but it was a good move, and enriching.

Sixth Finch: The Wreck
Diagram: The Republic

A Bad Penny: Champagne, Hot Temper, Night Flowers, My Ship, Empty Talk
One Sentence Poems: In Flowers

The Journal: Infant Taint, Frostbite, I’m going up ace
Escape into Life: The Far Woods, Very Grave/Very Reasonable, All the World, Impossible Flowers




the issue, for me, is putting a blasting cap under my word processor, giving up the several years of what becomes the predicable. this is Sarah talking:

posted in ----

Very Grave/Very Reasonable

These poems belong to a series I began last fall when I participated in ‘The Poeming,’ a project in which poets were assigned a Stephen King book as a source text. Mine was Misery, the story of a gravely injured writer taken prisoner by a psychotic fan. It was good fodder.

I’d written found poetry before, mostly with the resulting poem dusted off and placed on the page like a fresh new thing — citing the source text, of course. With Misery, I decided to locate each poem on a single, separate page. I also decided to preserve each poem on its page, which I would embellish somehow visually.

I did black-outs and white-outs. I used correction tape, colored pencils, and confetti. I cut pictures from magazines. I plundered a book of old maps I found in a bargain bin. I hoarded printed images that looked useful wherever I found them. The poem “Very Grave/Very Reasonable,” for example, uses a paper bag from the soap store Lush as a backdrop. A number of the poems are stitched. I pasted each finished poem to a blank page from a sketch book, or to the inside cover of a “repurposed” hardbound book.

Misery is set in Colorado. It’s not highbrow writing, which was a plus. Starting with a book that’s gorgeously written to me almost feels like cheating. The setting features plentiful snow. The main props are pills and a typewriter. There’s a crazy woman who used to be a nurse, and a man in serious pain. My poems stand back from the story, but of course the themes and props and their vocabulary come through.

I didn’t find a poem on every page. Not every poem found was a success. Sometimes the collage was lame. Sometimes the visual outshone the poem. Occasionally I felt stymied by my chosen ‘form.’ But it was a thrill to marry word and image. More than 30 Misery poems have landed at publications like Thrush, Sixth Finch, and Permafrost. I’m hoping, too, that the chapbook manuscript finds a home.

–Sarah J. Sloat



in my current poem---not yet posted here---i have the children finding teaching jobs in Colorado---a state S. King and Sarah highlight.

[Bernie01]

I called for HEE-MAN imagery---even when light as new snow...here is fresh imagery from a woman---wish i had written this.






repetition i like in Virginia Woolf:

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves.
The sea will drum in my ears.
The white petals will be darkened with sea water.
They will float for a moment and then sink.
Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under.
Everything falls in a tremendous shower,
dissolving me.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Waves


the novel's opening lines:



The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.



in that tone---i encounter Bob's poem:

yellow fields, trees flagged
in vermilion, a citron sky.

and Gauguin's scolding silences,
my nerves were like waves sensing
an approaching storm,


bernie

[BobBradshaw]

Interesting risk taking...quite a few lines stand out... I love the image of the snorkel as a guard

[BobBradshaw]

Thx, Bernie, for quoting my lines...I’m touched...Bob