READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH CAROLE STANDISH MORA HERE

Talk about writing poems.

It is like a disappearing act

or the magic

of slight-of-hands. It is art,

it is science,

it is none of the above.

A blind person can do it,

even the deaf and dumb.

A kind of intelligence

is needed, but like too much salt,

will ruin the dish.

There can never be too much heart.

Wishing

for a certain outcome invariably

leads to blind alleys.

At the same time, getting lost,

good and lost is

advisable – up a creek even.

If you can put on a cloak and pretend

you’re an ancient eardstapa,

that helps too,

even if you have to

look up a word or two.

Somedays the recipe is very

difficult to follow,

many ingredients are

unknown, or very hard

to find, or way too

expensive.

The hunger is strange and impossible

to appease. 

If the plums appear magically,

eating them immediately

is not advised.

It is best to gather them

into a bowl, a blue or yellow one perhaps,

and set them

on a table near a window.

You might also leave them for a day

or two, practicing remembering their smell,

while in some other room.

While in this other place, take out a deck of cards

and build a card house,

nothing fancy.

You might also blow it down for fun. 

When you’ve run out of games to play,

take down the dulcimer and sit for awhile

playing, even if  you don’t really know how.

Then, as the afternoon light is giving way to twilight,

you might go polish a plum, then

bite into it when you’re ready.

A sweetness will fill your mouth, sometimes

with a touch of sour.

Notice how wet the inside of your mouth feels then. 

And if you keep on like that soon you’ll reach the seed,

which can be thrown away or planted -– I advise the latter.

And, whoever said there is a way out of this mess

was wrong. – there is no way out. The trick is in

reversals – trial and all – it is worth it.  

There’s a trail of sorts, that is made

in the walking. Step by step

a new land. Lost and found,

arriving and leaving.

Or maybe, it is a kind of circle dance with words,

danced to a music only you can hear.

So, become a magician, cook up a storm, wander,

linger, enjoy the changing weather.

Take shelter here.

Made in the Shade

Growing in the gray sunny sidewalk is a green lichen

not like disintegration, though my athletic shoes are

and made in Taiwan, or China, or …

Still moving        captured         born

the news of the day

bites       hardened already        beyond

teeth, white, too polished, broken

fragmented minted running

as fast as it can spilling onto

screens caught as it has always been

within framed

                                           regret

Take Syria, the children there lack cereal choices

(aren’t there too many already?)

Take Iran, the children there sleep under cruel skies.

Take Uganda, the children there hack each others

faces because someone stole their childhood.

The video game skips certain parts – rewind – then replay is no better

Pause

The news of the day       born       captured           moving

still born

run as fast as you can

stop

walk slowly, don’t look back,

children are watching

now wait

the hunger this all points to is

still there

bitter hunger.

The Magnolia Grandiflora, with its seeds like bright, freshly

painted red fingernails, makes me think of Banyan trees.

I’ve never been to India, but some of the manhole covers

around  here are clearly marked as having been made there.

The night blooming Jasmine where I walked today smells like

night blooming – blooming night

Made in the shade –

while I try to remember that the Sun

and Moon are perpetually

dancing.

Nothing is Perfect

Innocence can’t save us and yet

It does compensate for things lost.

The well swept walk echoes with

Sounds of idle thoughts, of sweeping.

Hunched over to hold the hard stick

Of the broom, a quiet settles.

Inside focus shifts to sweeping action.

The mind slows.

Go on, it says, sweep the walk,

Watch leaves scatter, listen to bristle,

Meeting ground, the swift opening

To nothing, a clean path, innocence returned.

For the moment, lost things settle

Into lost places, and no thing

Is really entirely innocent, just young,

Newly accustomed to the imperfect

Idle thought, moving slowly back

And forth, obscuring something found.

Another Day

As we move into the day, yet

another day, we might find beauty

here, even though the land is

wasted in places.

In others when we look closer,

something holds forth,

a fine perfection.

The concrete curbs, drawn

so meticulously, outline our wanderings,

as Cadmus must have imagined obliquely.

The world’s delight is a brief dream,

hold still within this.

Speaking of Rooms

Remember when I spoke of rooms,

The ones Dutch painters fill with light

Where moments fixed and finite dwell

As people work and rest and wait?

I told you how I long to stay

Within those bright cool rooms

And listen to the self-same sounds

Then sit with apples in my lap.

Or light a fire, then by the window

Stand and gaze awhile, in stillness

Until I leave that place behind to

Make my own small picture here.

Yesterday

Just outside my bedroom window my mother dug in the dry earth,

trying to make a place to plant an olive tree sapling. Some days

I watched her from inside my room and examined the lead

that held  the diamond shaped pieces of glass in place,

where a three-paned window lined my blue window seat.

Red quarry tile lined the floors of the long hallway, of the

new house on Golden View Drive, the house where we all

were waiting for the new landscaping to grow in out front.

It was really hot that summer, but the tile floor

was cold  to bare feet most mornings and my new room

all blue, green, bright and cool.

I spent hours memorizing the curves in the headboard of my four poster,

canopied bed. Smooth shapes carved into tall posts and the delicate

turning of  the piece at the foot, surrounded  in Maplewood and white pinafore.

Sometimes I lay on the new blue carpet in my room, and listened

to Yesterday play over and over on my first 45. I wandered the orange groves

playing Indian, drew horses, and kept pet mice that ate their babies

if you  didn’t separate them at birth.

Surveyor 1 landed on the moon.

I worked at that place out back off and on with my mother all summer,

but we just kept hitting bedrock.

And my father was never home somehow – lost

            in the wrong work, when he could have been

                        with us

                                    digging.

* * *

West Coast Eisteddfod Online Poetry Contest - Five Poems (submitted 9/15/14)

Copyright: 2014 Carole Standish Mora