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.
