Poem Palette: Napkin notes from an embryonic poem flash: 1989

Angel-air

Umber stair

Oh how your hair blows about

Gold cascade of cirrus wisp …

Wind and wheat, Pewter heat

Hot old oak, corn and oat

Stuff of twine, stuff of air

Wind and hay

Are blended there.

and what it became…

1990 Prairie Girl:

In Oklahoma, oak trees keep their leaves

(Albeit that they look like mud)

through the stripping winter blast,

even to the time when Red Bud bud.

 

So, when all the leaves that will fall  - fall

Into the bags we’ve placed to catch 'em,

We flee, to a land of wafting umber,

Under the wild sky

Where light, and line, and twine emerge

In a surge of tall grass habitat.

 

Twenty miles west of town,

We round the river bend and then

exit, “S”ing upward

into Prue, through these hills of calico –

Oh! What variety of brown.

 

Down a copper canyon

Up a chocolate hill,

Allemande left to the Cinnamon hill.

Bow to your partner, kiss her cheek,

Park the car and let wind speak!

 

--

The sweep before our eyes is

all staccato, shredded wheat--

the stuff of cereal

ethereal,

with toast...

an undulating ocean

made of wooden grass;

 

The waves go out like weaving rain,

We hear the crash of distant surf --

Or sometimes – with the heavy wind

The sound of padded bamboo clicking,

Every thing is moving but

the stalwart rocks

or blackened remnants of hardwood trees, strewn Bold

like cracks on the sky.

 

The day goes late

With wash of rye, marmalade and gold

 

And Kerry looks o’r the prairie

Her hair washing back

Like these heavenly weeds.

 

Today I think of myself as Adam. What would he look like? For some reason I have always thought of him looking like me – but a whole lot better. Or something like what I will look like in the New WORLD. He, or I – Look like a kind of Robin Hood or Viking Lord. We are muscled and stand tall with rounded chest and washboard abs, and when we laugh the cedars shake. My face is ruddy with sun and my beard big-red. I saunter with hair all over and look like some Viking Lord apart from clothes and wild with sun and sand and salt. I behold my bride. Does she look something like the woman that I should marry? I see her with my minds eye. I don’t see her so much as Anglo. After all, we should in time need to spin out skin as dark as midnight tar, or skin white like porcelain. I see her somewhat olive, eyes leaning brown and hair a redded-black, kinked a bit but flowing. Maybe she has a nose that is sharp and thin like some of the women from India, or maybe it is broad and Polynesian. Maybe she looks like a black Mariah Carey! Her eyes are big like cows eyes – How is that for a description? It reminds me of the time at Booker T. (my Tulsa High School) when we closed out our senior year with a description of the perfect woman. She would parts of all the different popular girls at school… She had Natasha’s nose or Heather’s eyes, or Yo-Yo’s legs. Of course by the time we mixed all the parts, not to mention hues, the thing created would be quite peculiar.

So I consider my Eve. Her breasts are full of life and she has more weight on her than our gaunt models. Her hips are wide … but Dear, I pay my respect to those Victorian vices; Her waist is small—or maybe not. Perhaps her belly pours like a belly dancer or the woman of the Song of Songs, all round like a goblet. It still think those Old World painters and folks in India have something on us. She laughs and grins and looks like she should pull out of the water with dripping …

Oh when, WHEN will I have a bride?

She doesn’t need to look like this thing. That woman has vanished and filtered out. And maybe even faded in her force with the Fall.

On one level I am amazed that we continue on any level to be handsome or beautiful at all. The Fall has marred us, not only in our souls, but I imagine in our genetic profile. Even so, I marvel at Eve – poured out in Irish queens with pale milk skin and red hair and long with freckle … Or I consider skin as dark as night with teeth that shine like the new moon. A shadow waiting to infold me.. So – What will it be? Will I marry a woman who looks like me, or stands against my skin with another kind of loveliness. Will her hair fan up and out like coral, or cascade down like a cataract? Will the grace of her skin and form be fragile and oriental, or will her stature be firm and heavy, even Germanic. What is this thing in me that is continually moved by Beauty? I want to poses it. I don’t always want to live in these dreams of holding. When will I hold real flesh, or feel her curl with her warmth into me.

Dear God… You know this longing of my soul. I so want to be married. I’ve given You so much latitude. HA! Call her from any race or culture. But then, where do I belong? I can’t even figure to what world I belong. So, will my bride where a covering, or will I myself where the jacket and the hat?

Cotton Cathy, cornbread and cream

You would be my life-long dream.

 

(Sorry Cathy for calling you some twenty times in a row one night when you didn’t answer the phone. Who was I to know that you were sick in bed and ignoring me! Boy was I embarrassed.)

Equinox   (Karen H. now Karen B.)/85

Fall entered in

overnight,

to both wind and heart.

 

It came

the passenger

of a great gray motorcade,

A mass

born of equal-night, and artic high.

 

It came with rain

At the beckon of our Lord,

to the trees of our Lord,

and man.

 

It came with chill

etching

dusted leaf

and breath.

 

And though the trees

have yet to flame,

My heart is warmed in anticipation

of

spiced cider, mittens,

wool color, and

and our eyes.

(Thanks Karen for giving me my first taste of requited love. Undoing a heart that had started to graft with yours hurt as much as anything in life. But I would not trade the work God did through you, for me, for anything.)

The eye-man strikes again. – to Dianne W. now Dianne L. /88

Tangerine, ruby, and fire:

A frame for the forest

He poured in your eyes.

(Thanks D. for refusing my kiss, it made friendship that much easier, and I can look your husband in they eye.)

(In honor of Cindy O., now Cindy E.) ‘84

                         Simple                                

Clean,

              gentle luster

       Muted line,

(a model for the master’s brush)

With the firm – fragile of a fine china vase,

Stark attending soft.

Strands of flaxen brown fall

still,

Down,

Delicate on ivory.

(A fresh stirring within.)

She stands lovely

In the force of sculpted line,

Flowing

Taunt,

then eased

In splendid turn.

(I stand a bit enchanted)

Whispers wash

across her neck

Hair in dull illumine, 

THEN,

Treads of fire - Catching

In the setting day.

Her eyes:

A coral sea, ablaze

In Tropicana’s heat

Emerald and aqua

A Dancing spark.

Her eyes:

A Nordic sea,

Silent in the mist,

Forrest with iceberg,

A quiet storm.

Our eyes search – share secrets.

Note: My wife upon review wonders just what secrets our eyes shared. Well … her right eye said to my left eye…Let’s just be friends. But while her right eye was busy her left eye blinked. Which in turn, did look rather like a full affirmation of “our” love.

the note:

(5thGrade) to a Miss Wendy Wayne , whom I gazed at relentlessly for a period spanning three years. She was utterly beautiful, blazingly fast, and did back-handsprings during recess. I joined her. One day, when the ardor became too much, I decided to declare what everyone could see. I would confess my love and seek her response. When everyone was out of the classroom on a break, I snuck back into class to place the “woo-note” in her desk. I’d prepared it the night before, diligently decorating it with many hand-colored flowers. I even brought along a little necklace, pillaged from my sister. After checking to see that all my classmates were gone, I pulled a book from her desk to insure the right place (We had switched desk spaces that same day.) Wendy’s notebook was right on top. I placed the note in the desk and left with a thudding heart.

The next morning, Girls in the hall began to snicker. Outright laugh. Then one girl, who knew me and was kind, came up and queried: Kirk, did you really mean to give that note to Wendy Harnage?

Wendy HARNAGE! Oh dear, . NO OHHHHHHH No…

no owhat a jerk…that note that was for Wendy Wayne .

Dear Wendy

I love you. Do you love me?

Check box yes or no.

Soon after, and against my protests, my protector (who was experienced in the stuff of fifth-grade romance negotiations) declared she would Go to the two Wendy’s and correct all. The incorrect-Wendy took the news well and even granted me the privileged status of “a friend who is a boy but not my boy-friend”

As for the most beautiful girl in-the-word-Wendy, all she said was :

Go to Hell.

In talking with Steve C. the other day I proposed what I thought was a big problem for the model of evolution as advanced through survival of the fittest. According to the model, things mutate at either slow or gargantuan rates. (Remember Stephen Gould and the Hopeful Monster Theory?). Accordingly, the mutation must be beneficial, or at least neutral, so that some differentiation takes place from the parent stock. The mutation must then be isolated, then transferable, to the next round of offspring. Finally, the mutation should render the species more capable of survival. A halfway mutation just won’t do. But these weren’t my thoughts to Steve.

It seems strange to me, I said, that woman should be at the top of the evolutionary pile. Given the model, things with thicker shells, bigger teeth, and tighter muscles should force their way to the top … unless, I guess, you consider the virus or the cockroach the pinnacle creation of a self-made cosmos. Nonetheless, or unless, you think of the cosmos littered with other forms of intelligence … it seems in my mind that woman must be highest thing on the ladder – be she material quest, or breathed into life. But why something so tender? And why the beauty? I might expect Godzilla at the top … or at least something a bit more horrific. Give me a jelly–fish with tendrils that leak radon, or a rock monster that defecates atomic bombs in its wake like an octopus squeezing ink. Give me a universe of lichens with prickers like a man-of war cactus … Give me the lobster man with machine guns for arms -- Or a mouth that’s only a mouth eternally feeding itself in a cast iron loop. Give me something hard and scarred – chunked from the smelter of "eat or be eaten." But after all that clash and kill and competition, why some soft bodied target with children that are all but ripe for the eating?

I threw my idea at Steve. He saw where my thought was going but said I was wrong because I didn’t understand just how dangerous and conniving woman-thought can be. The soft body is just part of the "bait." Something like the snapping turtle tongue that waves like a worm at advancing fish. No other has her entrapment arts or can make a whole species swarm in war and whirl swords or bombs to further her protection. She has the most advanced skills at manipulating minds and matter, often through the brute service and secondary skills of man. Man does not have armored flesh or tearing talons, but given some millions of very precarious years, man has acquired these things on the side. The cosmos took a gamble – like selling below cost … and won in the long run. (But maybe not.) In as much as man does most of what he does in pursuit of the beauty of woman. Beauty, rather than monster brawn is the pinnacle advancing trait of billions and billions of years.

I must admit, I’m not convinced, at least as pertains to evolution. But it is a weird thought.

Do billions and billions billow in her breasts, beauty from the battle of the beasts?

To hold her hand,

would be so grand,

and meant for only a King.

 

But alas...

I am a pauper.