A new poem from Esalen

 Looking down from the road

I spent five days last week writing poems at Esalen, a beautiful site high on a cliff in Big Sur CA.

I go to this particular workshop almost every summer. Led by poets Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar, I always learn some lessons about writing poems, I hear excellent poems read by my fellow poets taking the workshop with me, and I never lack for something to write my poems about.

This year I wrote six poems using prompts given at the end of each day’s craft talks on: 1) a coming into consciousness poem, 2) a poem with sentiment and no sentimentality, and 3) a poem using various line break and syntax techniques. We also beg our leaders to give us a list of ten words and an assigned phrase with which to create a poem. Once in a while we’re asked to include our pick of a body part, season of the year, or time of day.

Writing to a list of words is like solving a puzzle. But sometimes the poems turn out just plain silly. This year I wrote a couple of silly poems and a diatribe focusing on the word “junk.” I couldn’t resist writing a rant about how junk food connects to our current childhood obesity epidemic.

Here’s one without any of that silliness. The assigned words were: effluent, cauterize, jowls, flange, egg, phobic, chew, skunk, floor, gels

And the phrase was: “What falls away”

(By the way, it’s always okay to use any form of the given words.)

                                         The bathhouse built into the cliff

Now for the poem:

Progression

I have my mother’s jowls.

Deep furrows from

my lips to the sides of my chin

create flanged sacks

wanting to reach

toward the floor.

I also have her deep lines

just above my eyebrows.

Every time I look up,

she haunts me

years after her death,

leaving me phobic

that the ravage

to my once egg-smooth visage

will go on.

Your face has character

they chide.

But I know it as the first signs

of what falls away,

of what becomes skunk-like effluent.

There is no way

to cauterize the progression.

Only what’s left is

to chew and swallow it down,

to gel with it and accept

what’s yet to come.