Old Age

Old age is like being totally confused most of the time

except when a synapse in your brain fires a tune 

to which you once lindy hopped back in the fifties,

and you smile and dance by yourself in your chair,

catching the eye of whatever stranger is near,

laughing together as if she were there, too.

First published in Bear Creek Haiku. June 2013.  Print and online.

http://bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com/2013/04/grace-uncertain-dignitypoet-caroline-n.html

The Modigliani Daughter

Modigliani painted my portrait the century before
my mother hung the poster on her college dorm room wall.

Daydreaming, she stared at my effigy:
tall slender neck, head slightly askew,
straight brown hair tied loosely in a bun,
long skinny nose. She stared for hours

in between studying to become the biologist she did,
imagining herself to be the wife and mother she would,

but never dreaming
she'd absorbed Modigliani's crooked ratios
and years later would conjure me up,
the Modigliani daughter,
graceful and severe.




First published in Children, Church & Daddies.  Nov./Dec. 2013. Vol. 245. Print and online.
http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/works_e.pl?/home/users/web/b929/us.scars/perl/text-writings/g4619.txt

Noted American Painter Andrew Wyeth, 91, Dies

He was born here, lived here.

Three generations of Wyeths,
limited in scale yet rich in associations,
in spite of the scenery:

aging people and brown, dead plants.

Alone for hours, he tramped across the countryside
collecting the hidden melancholy of the pastures:

timelessness of rocks and hills.

“There’s a lot of cornball in that state!” but here

we have scandals hidden in brushstrokes,
hidden in Master Bedrooms
Around the Corner.

Her face tantalizingly unseen,
Christina rested her weight on one Long Limb.
Stray hairs blew towards the very thing which she leaned:

a dilapidated farmhouse, gray and shadowed
alone in the far right corner of a large yellow field

alone against the walls of a dimly lit museum.

When he chafed under criticism, Christina’s World
died in his sleep at his home.

Grass grows thick over tracks to a farmhouse with no lights on.

All the people who have lived here no longer give interviews;
Everything they have to say is on the walls.

You feel the bone structure in this landscape,
because the whole story doesn’t show.





Source: "Noted American Painter Andrew Wyeth, 91, Dies." The Times. Trenton, NJ.  Saturday, January 17, 2009. 

First published in Children, Church & Daddies. Sept./Oct. 2013.  Vol. 245.  Print and online.
http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/works_e.pl?/home/users/web/b929/us.scars/perl/text-writings/g4618.txt

Autumn, Parts I and II

Autumn, Part I


The trees whisper, and Autumn awakens my heart,
her ice fingers wrapping around my breaths.
I welcome her into my swell, and she reminds me:
The first bite may rip through warm down feathers,
but my skin will explode in ten thousand joys. The wind blows.
My ancestors’ voices assure me; their whispers echo
through the vale of quaking aspen, and I am released.

Autumn, Part II

The sky closes, and Autumn rains into my heart,
pouring her stakes into seemingly soft smiles.
I did not welcome her, yet she reminds me still:
A heart’s affections mask and unmask until even Heaven
shrugs and steps down to the andante of old thoughts chanting
upon endless grey pavement. This weather will ruin me
unless I swim skyward, and place Heaven back on her shrine.



First published in Bear Creek Haiku.  June 2013.  Print and online.
http://bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com/2013/04/grace-uncertain-dignitypoet-caroline-n.html



Postlogue: I have no doubt my recent love affair with John Keats' "Ode on a Nightingale" has crept into this poem. I also recently came across this Orhan Velli poem in my translation project (an endeavor to improve my Turkish): Güzel Havalar ("Beautiful Weather"). The verb, mahvetmek, which means "to ruin," makes this poem. My translation of Velli's poem follows:

This beautiful weather ruined me,
In weather like this I resigned from my civil service job.
I made a habit of tobacco in weather like this,
I fell in love in weather like this;
In weather like this I even forgot to bring home bread and salt.
My poetry writing sickness always relapsed in weather like this;
This beautiful weather ruined me.

Pulitzer Remix: Taking Part in a Found Poetry Project

During National Poetry Month (April), I took part in a Found Poetry Project put on by the literary magazine, The Found Poetry Review.  A total of 84 poets each took on a work of fiction which won the Pulitzer Prize, and each day of the month produced one new found poem - one for each day in April - to post on the project's website.  When the project was completed, there were 2,500 new works of found poetry completed.  

Found poetry is the art of excerpting words and phrases from any written source and combining them in new ways to form a poem.  The work I applied for and was granted was Tinkers by Paul Harding which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. 

To learn more about this National Poetry Month initiative, check out their website: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/.  It was a great exercise to be "forced" to write a poem a day.  It's always a good thing to change the pace, style, pressure, and inspiration of one's writing for a spell.  Shakes things up.

Several of my found poems from this project are due to be be published in Unpredictable Change Quarterly in October 2013.  The editor of The Found Poetry Review is also submitting a collection of the best poems from this project to publishers.  This Fall, I will also take part in readings (hopefully more than one) in greater Seattle with Remix poets who live in northwest Washington.

Superstition in Waiting

This week, my students have been producing poetography, an art form which combines photography and short poetry (like a zen tanka or haiku), and I am feeling inspired by the poetry inherent in an image. So I dug up this old shot that I always pause on when looking through old photos of my first year living in Turkey.

I'll tell you its story.

I shot this photograph in 2008 in a small town in the Black Sea region of northeastern Turkey. Senyuva is a rural town situated at the base of the Kackar Mountains, rugged terrain which remains covered in snow most of the year.

Every June and every September, the Turks living in this area migrate between base towns like Senyuva and summer villages in the mountains (called yaylas). Each trip is cumbersome- they pack up all their belongings and walk with their livestock up or down winding dirt roads.

I was first introduced to this lifestyle when I volunteered (WWOOFed) on a goat farm in the Alps of northern Italy in the summer of 2005. I was lucky enough to have participated in the walking of the entire goatherd up to the farmer's summer home, where it was cooler and the goats would happily produce more milk than if they had stayed in their muggy, hot Winter home at a lower elevation.

This movement of people and livestock, up and down mountains, with the seasons, actually has a name. It is called transhumance.

On my visit to the Kackar Mountains of Turkey in early September of 2008, I was once again lucky enough to be in a summer yayla when the first big snow storm of the Autumn fell, commencing the transhumance of the Turkish animal-farmers. Though we didn't walk down with the livestock, we did sit in an overcrowded mini bus and "crawled" down the mountain road with the farmers and livestock walking beside us. I was reminded of Italy.

But this photo was taken the day before I arrived at the yayla, the day before the snow storm.

I stopped in the base town of Senyuva on my way up to the yayla. The town was abandoned, but I spotted this Turkish eye hanging in someone's yard. Turkish eyes are a superstition meant to ward off evil spirits in the form of jealousy or ill thoughts.

This blue eye waited in cobwebs for its owner's return.

On a Sunny December Afternoon in Spain

I thought I heard a call to prayer
through poorly paned glass
echoing in the yard below
from children's play
afar, ago.



Barcelona, Spain
December 15, 2011