Hospital Bracelets/Ambulance Haiku

I had to go to the hospital in an ambulance earlier in the year. I keep trying and failing to articulate this poetically. This is the first thing I wrote, a few days after the incident, in the hopes (since abandoned) of rewriting it into a poem:

The back of an ambulance feels less important than it is. It is a constant moving serenity with the siren going distant but constant. I close my eyes because I’m blacking out anyway. I am not in control. I am passive: rolled around through halls and into cars and out of them, given shots, given the shakes, made drowsy, shot through with side effects. Time rolls away and then stops, wheeled into the ambulance ward. I feel comfortable until they tell me I can leave.

Another attempt made a few days ago, also the first real thing I’ve written since school got out:

Ambulance Haiku
fading in and out
sirens yell, the ground speeds by
faces float above

Springtime, Alone

I can’t find those foil-wrapped chocolate eggs
in bags of yellow netting,
the kind my parents disassembled and sorted by colour:
gold, green, pink, purple, and blue,
divided into four equal groups,
then hidden between black piano keys and under couch cushions.
This year they will be in three equal groups.
This year they may not be hidden at all.
I need to find them.

Dollarama only has atomic pink rabbit-shaped Peeps,
the kind that look soft but will have stale edges
by Easter Monday.
But they also have brooms, sold in three parts:
handle, brush, and dustpan,
for easy assembly by college students
who have never owned a broom before,
but are threatened by dust
in their dormitory corners.
I tie the plastic Dollarama bag
to my new broom handle
and sling it over one shoulder,
ready to hop a train.

Outside Jean Coutu, a boy and a girl say goodbye, or hello.
They hold both hands, outside and mittenless for the first time.
I remember a fourth kiss on a sunny day,
like a chocolate egg, tender and melting.
I smile for them, but wish for my love:
his grass-soft hair, sunny eyes, two lips around an egg.
He’s looking for something larger,
also hidden, but more bitter than sweet.
I wish I could follow him around with a Ziploc bag in hand,
searching under couch cushions and behind chair legs,
but I know it’s more satisfying to search alone.

My mother gave inscrutable hints
about where to find the eggs she hid.
I find them in the pharmacy:
250-gram yellow mesh bags of
gold, green, pink, purple, and blue,
printed with silver flowers that look like eyelashes or stars.
I buy two bags and bring them back to my college dorm.

In the evening, I hide the eggs.
I divide them into equal groups
and place them on ledges and windowsills.
My love, atomic pink, tender and melting,
isn’t there to find them;
but we were getting stale around the edges,
dusty in our corners,
and he had to hop a train.
He told me that when he comes back, he will start again.
He will be rid of the last brown slush piles
and be clean as spring.

I listen to birds’ inscrutable song.
I wish on sand the dustpan can’t pick up.
I unwrap one green chocolate egg,
printed with silver stars like flowers.

Grandmother

Poetry class assignment: write a villanelle.
My grandma recently went blind in one eye, though for dramatic purposes, it’s general blindness.

Bring me back to when you still had your sight.
Time took your vision, but you are still strong.
Look through the darkness to memory light.

Your daughter struggles, but you do not fight;
You remain content. You’ve battled too long.
Bring me back to when you still had your sight.

I wanted to know stories of your plight,
But you said your books would pass them along.
Look through the darkness to memory light.

You will not see gardens in May sunlight,
And yet still you sing. Your voice and your song
Bring me back to when you still had your sight.

When you die your body will burn to white,
And only your image will be passed on.
Look through the darkness to memory light.

Do not go silent into that good night—
I will tell your stories when you are gone.
Bring me back to when you still had your sight.
Look through the darkness to memory light.

Magnetic poetry

or “Nonsense Poems for Teenagers”. Goofing around on my tiny fridge with some magnetic poetry I received for Valentine’s Day.

give me some sugar, baby

Year of the Rat

The sky was blank, but
the light on in your window
looked like a full moon.

Woordbeests (after Theo Jansen’s Beach Animals)

This is Theo Jansen.
This poem is a first draft but I really wanted to post it. Suggestions are welcome.

He builds poems in his basement,
made from pages and pressure and ink:
fist-sized haikus that crawl slowly,
clusters of couplets with flapping sails,
long-legged villanelles kicking in waves.
(He’s working his way up to an epic.)
He practices walking them back and forth,
powered by his little puffs of breath.
One day they will live on their own,
walking away from criticism and
dodging misinterpretation.
For now, they need his help.

The Cartographer

I have navigated your open roads
and travelled your uncharted territories,
kicked around your back streets
and slept under your warm night skies.
But ever since we tore down the highway
between my new city and you,
the map of you in my mind
is growing blank spots and losing lines.
I forget some of your shortcuts and
the exact trails of your bus routes.
I ask about a street name you never had
and you turn away from me,
disappointment in your streetlight eyes.
In me you expected a permanent resident,
an archivist, not a tourist.

In Silence

You took me to a ravine,
where snowy hills
rolled up on either side of us.
They stilled the wind
and hushed the city noise.
In their presence
I could not speak;
I passed my words
in telegraph pulses
to your hand.

Los Angeles

Original assignment, from September 2007: write a poem about a place you have never visited, using intimate detail to show that the speaker knows the place.  This is the edited version, after it was put through a workshop.

Los Angeles
I wanted to go out,
to cruise down Sunset with the top of your car down,
past silicone shopping malls and mannequin girls,
waving my feet in gold mules out the window.

I wanted to go to the beach
and watch the surfers and the sunbathers,
slice into the salty water
and eat melon on the boardwalk.

I wanted to slam with punks and college kids,
wearing our leather jackets and striped shirts,
drink a bit too much cheap beer at the bar,
get burritos so we could fall asleep.

But you were dreaming of going home again,
to an island built up like a fortress,
stacked up and nervous,
where you can’t even see the water.

You couldn’t remember Gene Kelly’s feet in cement.
You forgot about parrots perched in jacaranda trees.
You just saw the smog and the money,
zombie movie stars under our feet,
gangsters done up like blue and red clowns,
trees burning down in the Santa Ana winds.

I wanted you to stay here
in a city of canyons and palm trees,
open roads and secret alleyways,
mirrored pools and sunsets and happy endings.
You just smiled bittersweet and said
you didn’t believe in angels.

New assignment: take a poem that involves a person other than the speaker and write a poem about the same event from the other person’s perspective.

Los Angeles
Emily, I wish you would come back to me.
Leave the Pacific Ocean,
wash the salt out of your eyelashes.
Let me wrap the Hudson River
around your bare, tanned arms.

This city can only poison you with
oleander and silicone,
smog and Crip cocaine.
And you know, they lied to you, Emily,
because none of the feathers on the beach
belong to any angels.

But Manhattan doesn’t play pretend;
it knows the rain as well as the sun.
You’d love it there, Emily:
the snow and the subway,
Chinatown and Central Park,
three-chord Bowery sonatas.

So close the picture book, Emily;
you know angels don’t really exist,
except for the statues in Forest Lawn Cemetery
for the ones who couldn’t survive.
Leave the canyons of failed dreams,
chemical sunsets and acid blue pools.
You’ll only suffocate, Emily.
Come back to me.

All Mad Here

Assignment: Take a situation from your own life involving 3 or more people, then substitute characters from the same movie for characters in the situation.

Second draft.  I may expand the fourth verse.

They all went to the Hatter’s party:
Caterpillar, March Hare, Tiger Lily, Dormouse,
the Cheshire Cat and his crazed teeth,
even the White Rabbit,
finally out of the house.

They had taken tea many times before,
these six, laughing and clapping hands.
They pondered and schemed,
played riddles and chess,
and drank to their dear Wonderland.

But this tea time, there was no laughter.
Something in the forest had changed.
They did not drink to their happiness now,
but passed the tea with shaking paws,
and shuddered it down, feeling strange.

They drank and they drank and things got worse:
The Caterpillar and March Hare duelled, and both lost;
the Dormouse spilled his tea and fell asleep;
the Cheshire Cat’s grin grew wilder-eyed,
and the Tiger Lily flapped and raved in disgust.

And even the staid and stern White Rabbit
drank much more than he was able;
he forgot his engagements
and ticking pocket watch,
and he slid straight under the table.