old brown shoes

old brown shoes

  
wonder the eyes that kneel in mud.
wonder the eyes of a moth eatinglight.
or sky and sea as the far albatross
stitches by feather thumbs.
one truth in simple dirt.
one reason for elemental light.
and faith will now including doubt,
climbing into the tree of lies.

notice how light is making you.

illumination, there is dilemma implied.
as much as fingers craft a waterbowl,
misgivings taken as eagerdark.  yet
shadow is mere membrane and dance
is swift passage like a breath.

notice how light implies a choice.

defining membrane is
like boundary acting as partition,
me and other.  it’s the way we define
ourselves.  understanding
is a membrane too.

a convenience of necessity
knowing poison from fruit, and ripe,
if you understand?

said another way, walls are a
requirement for understanding to be.

said another way, no thing is a wall.

consider, there’s a reason why eyes
look outward from the deepbrightnight,
not inwardly.

consider old brown shoes
dusty with truth.
 
 

neil reid © february 2012

 

          commentary
To this particular prompt about global civil rights I had an immediate response actually (no worry that I don’t so much engage in poems civil/political in nature). Great notion I thought, then just as swiftly remembered, oh yea, someone else already wrote that poem – in just the manner I felt my response. Lucille Clifton’s poem “Atlas”, one of the earliest poems that genuinely got my attention and appreciation.
          i am used to the heft of it
          sitting against my rib…

          i have learned to carry it
          the way a poor man learns
          to carry everything.

          Lucille Clifton, from The Book of Light
I used to ride the city bus often in those days. In fact that’s where I read the poem, part of a public literary display on an information banner. I very much felt and identified with that statement. That way also that desert people learn to stand in whatever measure of shadow they can find; where even a few inches is less heat to absorb. Like that too.

Well if you’ve read the prompt as well Donald’s original poem, perhaps you’ll think my response (Lucille’s poem I mean) is already some measure a step aside of words directly to his prompt idea. However, it rings just right and true to me, looks with a different light to the more obvious possibilities.

Long short, then what’s to do for a poem of my own? Here my response, my result, and maybe yea, I’ve taken even one step or two even farther from the obvious but I think I feel there’s a rhythm a hum just inside the linear meanings that comes in its own way to addressing what was asked of us to consider here. (And yes, tangential of me I do suppose. But then sometimes we see best when looking just slightly to the side.)

Written to We Write Poems, prompt #92, Big shoes by Donald Harbour.
Please find the prompt responses of other writers here.

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letter to William Stafford

letter to William Stafford

 
Dear Bill,

How long’s it been?  Sorry I missed you last time around.  Suppose you’re still writing there, just like you always do, granddaughter or not nibbling at your toes, adoring you, eating your attention just like pie.  Funny how she stole herself into the early dawn, you in your writing time, suddenly then less alone.  But you never said stop, dissuading her bloom, but just awoke some earlier yourself to keep coin with your words.  Poetic, one might say, how you hold a hand.  Yea, just like you.

There was this dream, did I tell you Bill, and I was that grandchild you see.  And I drank up every word you ever said to me.  And your hands, your hands, oh I remember them, how they held the very air itself.  Then clear as a feather rings in flight, there you were, shovel in hand and standing right beside where a ditch was waiting to be dug and I knew, no matter at all, if that’s what you did, how you lived your life, that’s the book I wanted to know.  And now everything I read of yours takes its’ sound, reads from that first pantomime.

Quietly, in the middle of dark, things can recognize themselves, can’t they Bill?
Like a sunlit day would never expect.  That night shrouded light in a barn visible by only a solitary traveler, bright inside.  And you’re right, if we’re not listening we can lose our feet, like it was another randomized flock of sheep.  Yet one moment can fill everything without needing to change a thing.

It’s just like you said.

Yours sincerely, my blue pen

PS. You saved someone once.  Maybe me.  But you didn’t know, so it’s not your fault.  Neither the poems now.  Not your fault, no more than the man left standing who missed his train.

Then sometimes seems we’ve missed a life – when it’s only about to arrive.  We’ll call it a nudge rightly imbued.  See, new shoes!  And thanks.

 

neil reid © november 2011

Written for We Write Poems prompt #81  Dear (poem)
Write a letter. Write a poem-letter to be specific. Address it to some historic figure you’d like to send a letter. Formal or personal, that’s your choice; you can be “the best of friends” or “respectful strangers”, howsoever you desire. Read the poem responses of others here.

William Stafford was an American poet (1914-1993). While his poems were not the first I ever read, they were the first I ever cared about, and came into sight just when I first seriously took upon myself this craft of language and expression. And to this day there is no poet whose words so well fit my ear.

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shoes

s h o e s

 

some shoes, like summer feet, those
I don’t want to wear, not close on me.

some shoes, slight more than
whisper feet, gone before even
one lace is pulled.
 
 
some shoes commune with
spider secrets behind closet doors,
 
not knowing how their being is,
ignored or just plain forgot.
 
 
some shoes remember when
I was young, gravity attracted less,
could more easily bend to them.

some shoes filled with sand,
rosetta stones of land and sea,
shaken loose like stories are.

some shoes read shakespeare,
dream of wooden planks.  perhaps
a feather hat, a far far reach.

some shoes idyl themselves
in the gullets of fish.  no jonah,
yet waiting for the hook.

another prodigal shoe, redeemed
by fives & dimes, unreasonably
enduring now.

 

neil reid © july 2011

 

commentary:
Have shoes become some secret theme?

I don’t know.  Perhaps so dedicated to a friend named Sean, who has taken shoes far far from home.  Well done!

I collect jackets, also hats, but shoes?  Mostly only when they’re worn to nubs.
But interesting, elemental, our relationship with shoes (if that’s what I really mean!).  Your guess.

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No poet here

No poet here

I am a man who writes poems.
That’s fair to say, but not much more.
I am a man who wakes, goes to work
four or five days a week. Usually.
Usually Sunday to church. I do chairs.
I eat my dinner at my desk. I like
eating but it don’t much come first.
I sleep Japanese on the floor most
of the time. Nothing political or otherwise,
just a little long habit of choice.
Mostly a good back. You could say that.
I don’t keep house so good alone.
I do everything better when you’re around.
That explains a lot.

Do you know what I did in “the war”?
The one that was mine to do or not.
Or how awkward was that first late kiss,
then everything, then everything lost.
I might say sometime. If you ask.
Or the girl with a grafted patch on her thigh?
I danced brief with Buddha because of her
although she didn’t care. How many
pebbles on the beach? About that much
narrative along the way, and matters
about that much and little,
as they do and don’t say.

Did you know I spent days on skid road
or counted a sea lions whiskers or failed
to see the omens about my marriage?
More often wrong that right side up.
Guessed homeplate by a dancers thighs.
Only fully figured love when the bacon
was long past crisp. Gave it up.
Like one good book says, those who surrender
love will find it again, and finally ripe.

I scribble, I scrawl, write poems maybe
five minutes or two hours a day, maybe
in my car at lunch. Like calm to write
but sometimes no choice. They all see
the light of day but only your eyes once
in a while. Always best when thoughtlessly,
but I do that too anyway. Like foolhardy
companions try vainly to remain.
Sometimes I’m honest enough.

So don’t call me poet please. Too grand for
my shoes, uncomfortable on the tongue and
seems a pretense to suggest that poet is
what I am.

I’m just a man who was asked to write.
And I do. Just a whisper on the lips.

neil reid © july 2010

neil reid © july 2010

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Gardens and knees (napowrimo#04)

read write poem   napowrimo #04

prompt by Nelle Lytle inside out

In our case, writing inside out (or outside in) means setting your physical or metaphorical inner bits out of doors,  to be walked around and looked at from odd angles, as if they were monuments or mailboxes (as an example).  Or it could be transforming your internal organs into flowers or letting a pack of four-year-old’s (human or otherwise) loose in your attic.

(Letting here words stand in front, before even good common sense & the garden view inside inside – not coining phrase.)

Gardens and knees

The weeds are growing on my chin again

One thought such were settled down

Any direction wind insists

Really? Crows resist, their feet tracking

painting posting pen & inking, face forward now

Late afternoon, not yet arrived, even shift

as the wire sags from the heat, like shoulders do

Caws look for nibbly bits, resounding eyes

Likewise imagination dumb faces search

And six feet tall, just like me, seeds prepare

to leap     as southbound wind takes them all

Scatter blow inhale, implants where seams

as lips allow     just like thoughtlessness

And old religions are best

All before language interrupted, you understand

Beastly desires offerings, dusting knees then limbs

thumping sky blue sits and

Takes off shoes

Neil Reid © April 2010

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