In honor of National Poetry Month, Escape Into Life is featuring several of my poems about poetry today: How a moth flies into a poem, How to read a poem, This is not a poem, The solace of poetry.
“Inevitably she is driving
when it happens—”
Check out the great art, too –> Escape Into Life
Four years ago I posted about loving this season, so much so that my first website was called November Sky. And then I began publishing Autumn Sky Poetry, and Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY. This year I’m taking a break from publishing and trying to focus on writing and photography. Here are a few of this year’s autumn photos and a poem I wrote in 2005:
Strange Violet Behind Trees
—after Wolf Kahn
The house hides in dusk’s spangled purples.
It’s hard to see such colors, capricious
tones barely there once night has almost
sucked the light from the forest.
And silhouetted trees rear up
as I walk, interrupt the horizon,
their dry leaves muttering imprecations
in the magenta gleam of twilight.
You have gone and I must be careful:
the path has faded to mere shadow
and I can no longer understand
the exuberance of a leaf twisting
in the breeze. How does autumn tangle
everything so elegantly, as when crimson
replaces the decorous sheen of green?
Such willful ambiguity. I walk steadily.
The soft retreat of chlorophyll asks useless
questions. The mother tree sleeps
and misses the violet whoop of fall,
the overlapping dive of it all.
By now night has stolen
twilight’s indescribable glow.
Our house has quietly slid
into an atmospheric blur.
There is nothing more to see.
My darling, the violet has disappeared
and I’m not yet home but I can still feel
the brittle slump of frost behind the trees.
💥ASK THE EDITOR IS COMING THURSDAY!💥
Wondering what’s HOT in publishing romance?
Do you have a manuscript you want to submit to us?
Any burning questions for an editor?
You’re in luck! I’m going to be joining Evernight Publishing’s Facebook party Thursday from 2pm – 3pm Eastern Time!
Join the party here: Evernight’s 7th Birthday Celebration
Here are all the authors chatting Thursday and Friday (all times Eastern/NY Time):
Thursday, 10/26/2017
9:30 – 10:00 AM Ravenna Tate
10:00 – 10:30 AM Sam Crescent
10:30 – 11:00 AM Lynn Burke
11:00 – 11:30 AM Iyana Jenna
1:00 – 2:00 PM ASK THE ARTIST: Jay Aheer
2:00 – 3:00 PM ASK THE EDITOR: Christine Klocek-Lim
3:00 – 3:30 PM Kory Steed
3:30 – 4:00 PM Nicola Cameron
4:00 – 4:30 PM Erin Leaf
4:30 – 5:00 PM Naomi Clark
5:00 – 5:30 PM Jocelyn Dex
5:30 – 6:00 PM Melody Jewell
6:30 – 7:00 PM Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy
7:00 – 7:30 PM Cecile Tellier
7:30 – 8:00 PM L.D. Blakeley
8:00 – 8:30 PM Roe Valentine
8:30 – 9:00 PM J. J. Lore
9:00 – 9:30 PM Angelique Voisen
Friday, 10/27/2017
9:00 – 9:30 AM Lea Bronsen
9:30 – 10:00 AM Katherine Wyvern
10:30 – 11:00 AM Jessie Pinkham
11:00 – 11:30 AM Allyson Young
11:30 – 12:00 PM Peri Elizabeth Scott author
12:00 – 12:30 PM Aletta Thorne
2:00 – 2:30 PM Tanya Jean Russell
2:30 – 3:00 PM Katerina Ross
5:00 – 5:30 PM Elyzabeth M. VaLey
5:30 – 6:00 PM C. E. Vescio / Cara Vescio
6:00 – 6:30 PM ASK THE EDITOR: Diana Stager Thomas
6:30 – 7:00 PM Lorraine Nelson
7:30 – 8:00 PM Megan Morgan
8:00 – 8:30 PM Magali Fréchette
8:30 – 9:00 PM Jean Maxwell
9:00 – 9:30 PM Libby Bishop
10:30 – 11:00 PM April Zyon Author
I wrote this poem in 2008. While writing it, I finally learned that sometimes things that mattered not at all to me often mattered a great deal to someone else. This poem is from Dark Matter, and was one of the poems that won the 2009 Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize.
Mysterious white rock fingers on Mars
Dust blows on every world, I tell her
as we stand at the edge of the cemetery.
She is angered over the deadness where the grass
wore down. While we argue solutions I think
of Mars, how a strange unburial exposed
a crater’s heart so that white rock pointed
into the landscape like the cenotaph
for a whole planet. Here the small, rigid
gravestones mock us, their marble cold
as pointed fingers. My mother insists
that some seed will fix the erosion,
but I can’t help the wind or the crows
that abandon feathers everywhere,
littering the dead with indifferent fluttering.
Nana will never notice, I say and receive
her shoulder turning away from me,
the stiffness more evident than the love
as she walks to the stone. I follow, carefully
avoiding the pansies that have returned again
this April, their tiny petals trembling like wings
against the rocky ground.
September 2015 – Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books
buy link: Amazon
My older son is graduating from college this Friday with a degree in computer engineering. I would like to say oh, how time flies, or what just happened to the last twenty-odd years, so that everyone can nod their heads in understanding, but clichés will be the death of me, so I shall refrain from such indulgences. Instead, here is a poem from my chapbook The book of small treasures (Keystone Finalist — Seven Kitchens Press). I wrote it over ten years ago in anticipation of the moment I’d understand my children are grown. As most of you know, that time has come and gone, and I am trapped in nostalgia, as are all parents at certain moments.
The murder of the self
No one believes it at first. One ordinary morning,
the moon withdraws her fingers from the bed’s edge
and you wake, a single body in a great gathering of women:
veiled, recognizable only in the eye’s reflection. We peer
into each other. The individual soul is in us all, glittering
like the black wings of a crow. But the trick is on us.
The moon knew it would happen, our mothers knew,
too, how the mind would stretch unexpectedly,
and then in an odd moment, ten or twenty years later,
you wake to find grown children scattered
around like seedlings: unnoticed until their first
leaves grew green enough to matter. This disbelief
lingers. For a while, you expect something else:
a recognition, perhaps, that you have done some-
thing exceptional. But it is ordinary, like the night
is ordinary, and the moon’s hovering between
stars is ordinary. Like a tree is ordinary,
until it grows larger than you, drops
its sweet autumn leaves upon your face.
This weekend I’ll be at the Houston Writers Guild Annual Conference, taking pitches for Evernight Publishing!
The pitch sessions are on Saturday, but I’ll also be around Friday afternoon and evening, as well as Saturday night. I’m looking forward to meeting you!
It’s National Poetry Month again, and I have no plans to write a poem a day (NaPoWriMo). However, this one slipped into my head yesterday and today. A gift? Or a curse? Not sure yet.
Skill Set—Poet
Sometimes I speak in verse—
iambic lines, or worse,
trochee. It’s like a curse
I cannot stop. Perverse,
the rhymes infect, transverse,
coerce my brain. “Disperse!”
I shout. “Be still,” my nurse
responds, his voice so terse
I know I’ve gone insane.
He binds my wrists. I strain
against the bed, my brain
awhirl with mad disdain
until the meds constrain
the meter gone profane
and bold: a hurricane
of poems I can’t explain.
“Spondee,” I moan.
“Sestina. Sonnet. Koan
Limerick. Xylophone…”
And then the heavy stone
of anesthetic thrown
from syringe to bone
descends. I wake alone.
No ode, no pain, no throne
composed of metered tones
and stately palindromes
contaminate my words.
I’m sane.
And sad.
My mouth a hearse—
dead letters disperse
against my teeth. The nurse
appears. His smile is vain.
He says, “We’ve fixed your brain.”
I scowl. He frowns. I feign
civility. “My purse?”
I ask. “The universe
awaits.” He shoves it close.
I ease the zipper wide
to show the poems I hide
for rainy days and snide
remarks. Unjustified
restraints cannot divide
my mind for long. I hide
my plans, re-versified
and calm. For now. They tried
to break my muse. I bide
my time until the worst
miasma fades, and Verse
slips back into a poem
or two, or more: a tome!
Oh, poetic loon,
how sweet it feels to croon
aloud the song of moon
and line. Iambic swoons
and dactyl foot balloons
unhinge my afternoon—
a perfect honeymoon
from sane pursuits too soon
applied with syringe or spoon,
a brutal, dulling dose
of anodyne. No verse.
No rhyme. Just prose. A curse
devoid of rhyme. “No pun
for that!” I say. The nurse
returns. I close my purse
and run.
Christine Klocek-Lim, 1 April 2017
