Spanish Moss

I was working on my other "daily vignettes," but then this just so happened to appear and I had to write it. Being a northerner, there are a lot of foreign aspects of the south. Did I mention that I'm spending the rest of winter break in Florida? Maybe not, but now you know. ANYWAY, the most haunting part of the South for me is Spanish Moss. So naturally I wrote a poem about it. Here it is... it's very rough, and I won't be doing any editing to it. It was just something that... yeah... happened.

Spanish Moss

Tree tulle conquers the mannequin,
The drapery mismatching the leaves.
Consumption. Succumbing. Nets casting for cicadas
And katydids. I cannot describe the smell:
Half like a catacomb,
Half like a carafe full of fen water.
This alien construction.
The night calls it.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Daily Sketches II

Here are the poems after round 1. Poem 4 is a finished product. Tune in soon to see more development!

1. Blood Pressure,
The token of gratitude from the heart,
The pulses straining vital veins
And pulling the hair of my heart with care.
I am strong, so my rhythm
Is canonical: Only when important.
A heartbeat with intention,
A beat like a pilgrimage.

2. Flat
Are these dots perforations
Or the coagulation of stitches,
The way blood meanders to crevices?
I want to rip apart the semantics of the words “topical” and “penetrating.”
The nuances I suppose to be the needlepoint
That makes one like a rash and the other like a wound.
Yet as a print, neither are so convincing.

3. Dressed Up

One time I thought nothing of whatever
came between
“Bach” and “Back.”
I thought nothing of origami,
not speaking a foreign language,
how high a squash ball bounces,
only doing things that I am good at,
sleeping on a couch as a vagabond yuppie.

I did think of boys with light blue eyes
that complemented the khakis they never wore,
But that is the evanescence of casual dress:
everyone wears their best at some point,
because that is what really matters,
and their sport coats prove themselves better windows.

I am blinded by bachelors in ecru
That all went to your Latin school.
I toss some crumpled piece of paper you gave me
into the waste basket,
and it lands like a meteor.

4. It Was Sunny Today. (Final)

It was sunny today, for five minutes.
I hadn't seen a solar aspect of winter since coming here a week ago.
I forgot the clarity it had,
Beautiful transience, translucence,
The way it winded over the asphalt and the trees.
The way it cherished itself.
I turned a corner and it dispersed
Like helium in a vocal cord,

How could something so enveloping
Evaporate so quickly, so willingly?
I was watching a grateful suicide.
Maybe in another week
I'll remember to be grateful.
But for now,
I only feel betrayal.

5. Christmas Looks like October

The precision today. I can't imagine snow or other assorted…
Figments of the season.
The dry air relieves us of snow,
Thus of a real winter .
I can still smell the fossilized autumn.
Christmas looks like October.
I had imagined it sticking like porridge
On the ribs of the earth,
But all I see is caprice,
Where the frost touched the lawn,
And left,
A handprint on glass.

6. Gaggle

I watched five or six school buses
As they drove in front of me
And I wanted to honk
Because they were going too slow.
I settled for a lower velocity
And envisioned them as logs transporting sleeping goslings.

I prefer when I must turn back to look
Because I have the choice to ignore
And think myself better.
But I cannot close my eyes now
Even though I am not too fond of geese.

One in the back stares at me with a mucous mustache
And I remember uncomfortable leather,
Hot metal slides,
Clorox on Barbies,
Everything I was too good for.
I get disoriented in traffic
Because I can't help but notice
That we are all going
In the same direction.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Daily Sketches

So... Merry Christmas/ sixth day of Hanukkah!

I've been busy doing a lot of prose work on the side, and while it's been fun, it has detracted significantly from my poetry endeavors this break. I've also been doing a lot of break-themed activities, and those don't usually mix well with setting goals.

However, I have been doing something super duper informal that I have decided to turn into my form of a game show. In the past two weeks I've intermittently written some very casual free verse on random musings of my day and thought it would be cool to develop them in stages. So that's what I'm gonna do. In each stage I'm going to leave one as a "final product" (the quotations meaning that they will be FAR from satisfactory to me...) and continue to work on the other ones. The stages will occur as follows:

1. Polished free verse
2. Image poems (free verse, but abstract, and... very descriptive)
3. Loose rhyme and meter
4. Structured rhyme and meter
5. Sonnet (English or Italian)
6. Some other delivered formal structure. I'll decide which is appropriate when I get to the last one.

Here are the original six sketches or vignettes, usually written in a couple of minutes and focusing on one simple aspect. I've handwritten all of them in my notebook (sooooo hipster), and they're a tad rough. They'll look much better after the first edit. I'll also give them all titles, because I think titles are very important.


1. Blood Pressure, (I wrote this one on my hand in the parking lot of CVS... YEAH!)

The token of gratitude from the heart,
The pulses straining veins
And pulling my heart hair with care.
I'm strong so my rhythm
Is canonical. Only when important.
Beat with intention.
Beat like a pilgrimage.

2. Untitled (About the print of my bedsheets, written right before I fell asleep)

Are these dots perforations? Stitches?
I want to rip apart the semantics of the words.
Topical? Penetrating? I suppose that to be the needlepoint
That makes one like a rash and the other like a wound.
Yet as a print, neither are so convincing.

3. Untitled

One day I thought nothing of whatever
came between
BAC Corp and Back Group LLC.
I thought nothing of folding paper,
not speaking a foreign language,
how high a squash ball bounces.
I did think of boys with light blue eyes
that complemented the khakis they never wore,
but that is transient. Everyone dresses up sometimes
and their sportcoats detract from their eyes so I don't notice them.
I toss a wad of crumpled paper into the waste basket,
And it lands like a meteor.

4. It Was Sunny Today.

It was sunny today, for five minutes.
I hadn't seen a solar aspect of winter since coming here a week ago.
I forgot the clarity it had,
Beautiful transience, translucence,
The way it skimmed over the wind and the trees.
I turned a corner and it disappeared
Like helium in a vocal cord.
How could something so enveloping
Evaporate so quickly, willingly?
Maybe in another week
I'll remember to be grateful,
But for now,
I only feel betrayal.

5. Untitled

The clarity of today. I can't imagine snow or other...
Assorted...
Figments of the season.
The dry air relieves us of snow,
But of a real winter too.
I imagined it sticking like porridge
On the ribs of the earth,
But all I see is caprice,
Where the frost came
And left
Like a handprint on glass.

6. Untitled

I watched five or six school buses
As they drove in front of me
And I wanted to honk
Because they were going too slow.
I like when things are behind me,
LIke elementary schools,
Hot metal slides,
School buses.
I get disoriented when I'm staring at them
In traffic
On the way to my life.
But I can't help but notice
That we are all going
In the same direction.

Tune in this week for stage one and see which contestant stays as the final product!

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

A POEM!!!!!

Yup, so here's a poem. I wrote another poem yesterday, but I don't feel like sharing it. This one feels more... done? Not sure; could just be the finality of writing it in a word doc rather than on your hand sitting in a car in the parking lot of CVS.

This a huge allegory for my past. I'm not one to look back at things fondly... I'm more of a future kind of person... but lately I've been missing things. It may be because of break and staying at home for a while, or whatever. But for some reason a bunch of Grecian and Roman art (friezes, mosaics, frescoes) all came to mind, and I envisioned myself as a mosaic: lots of little things making a much bigger thing. And yeah, it's me speaking to my past (literally, friezes are older than mosaics) and finally seeing the beauty in how crude it was in certain senses.


A Regretful Mosaic has a Monologue

Once upon a time, there was rancor.
There was an enormity of displeasure
For what you were and are.
In masochism I could sit and measure
It all in a vestibule of opportunities
I could never embrace. You were a frieze
On the wall there, a substitute for blank, or
A fresco. You were just there, just to mar.

Reliefs are so violent. I always saw them as hate
And destruction to make something. It was all unclean.
I have no room for different styles.
My taste accommodates few.

Maybe I have grown up, or maybe it was you,
But I refuse to recall when I saw beauty
In your carvings rather than a regret
That you weren’t made of tiles
Or painted when wet.
Maybe to just appreciate something I’ve never seen,
Maybe to just appreciate…
That could’ve been my duty.

I wonder which of us would last
The longest. I don’t want it to be me.
I have commitment like worms.

I can’t believe I’d ever be
On good terms
With my past.


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Uhhh....

So this time finals hit and I gave no notice of a hiatus. For this I apologize.. sort of. These past few weeks have been incredibly turbulent, hence the lack of posts. But don't worry. I'll be at a loss of commitments once I go home for break, so expect a lot of cathartic poetry. Trust me... it will happen.

To tide you over, here are a pair of poems I wrote in response to my abuelo's passing. They were not really about him but rather for me coping. My sonnet "Orange Peals" was also about him, though he was still alive at the time.

SO.... yeah.... here's some stuff.


Cremation

My psychiatrist made me do this exercise so I wouldn’t kill myself:
Draw anything that was bothering me
In detail
And take a match to it. That was happiness: cleansed, liberated pain.
It worked well
Some of the time,
But most of the time
I just sat there, watching the graphite ignite and sputter,
The scraps of paper withering like idealists on a pyre.
I would hold my hands over the flames and let them pinch me.
The ashes breathed like an old man:
Reluctant, but purposeful,
Violent, but natural.
When they died they turned blue.
I left the heaps on the driveway.
The world makes a good urn.

When I was no longer trying to kill myself,
My grandfather died.
He could have used the exercise more than I did.
He liked living
Some of the time,
But most of the time
He would contemplate in silence,
Chewing his cheek until his eyes watered,
Imbibing every facet of regret.
So of course, at his funeral, we took a match to him.
I just sat there, watching the blanket dissolve
And pinching myself.
Abuelo is dead.
Abuelo is dead.
Abuelo is dead.
Yet I swore he reminded me of scraps of paper.
And I swore I saw him smiling.
When it was all over his ashes were blue
And we put him in a pile.
An urn makes a bad world.


You Stayed Overnight

The night before my grandfather’s funeral,
I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up the whole time
Thinking to myself.
But I didn’t think at all about him
Or mortality
Or anything I was supposed to think about.
I thought about you.
I thought about how we managed
To not touch each other at all
While sleeping on a twin bed
The night before I left for home.
How I nestled to your side like a spear,
Checking to see if you were still alive.
I figured you were; you snore sounded like stripping ropes.
I could predict their pitch and feel them sink into your diaphragm
Like stones. Like pebbles. Like complaints.
You weren’t supposed to fall asleep. You were supposed to leave after tea,
After talking for one hour,
Two hours,
Four.
I’m an atheist, but I never have guests, especially ones like you.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

So many words

I have decided to post another short story I've written for my creative writing class, and this one is... well... much longer. In this one Samuel's role as an antagonist is very obvious, and in the context of these other two characters, he really is. On his own he's not that bad of a guy, but most people are okay on their own. Frankly, this guy is an enormous asshole. So yeah. Enjoy this.


Gross Hurt
The plastic plant in the corner seemed to grow. It was the liveliest thing in the waiting room. The rubber foliage clung to its surroundings with tenacity, asserting its existence in the most menial of manners. Its subtlety was Callahan’s fixation as he sat in a chair, waiting to meet Professor Doanday, the head of the English department.
Callahan sighed as he saw a picture of Samuel Coldridge, the college’s newest contribution to western literature. Samuel was standing stiffly in the middle of a professor conglomerate. They enveloped him in intellectual audacity, beaming at their supposed progeny. Samuel was not even looking at the camera. His eyes vacantly reflected the camera’s flash, his mind clearly elsewhere. Samuel was Callahan’s reason for coming to this tiny Massachusetts college two thousand miles east of home, for pursuing an English major his parents vehemently opposed, for the past three years of his life that had involved him reciting Keats instead of fastening his cleats, reading haiku instead of NBA scoreboards, forgoing his protein milkshakes and weightlifting and cross-training in the frost for football to exhaust himself on the nuances of Mountain Interval.
Callahan was overjoyed to hear that Samuel would be a teacher’s assistant in some of the creative writing courses. He was meeting Professor Doanday for this sole purpose.
Instead of an eccentric, shoeless old man shuffling about in wool socks and toting a stained coffee mug in tenured dignity, a young college-age man approached Callahan. He moved quickly and spastically, clutching in latex gloves an enormous folder filled with manuscripts written in charcoal. Callahan knew exactly what they were.
“Quentin Hoakes, department assistant,” the man said as he extended his hand, struggling to keep the folder from dilapidation. Callahan shook his hand so firmly that Quentin squawked. Callahan was still burly, still commanded a physical presence, but most of his definition had resigned to fat
Quentin breathed deeply. “Professor Doanday is taking a personal day.”
“Callahan Grossherz,” Callahan replied. “Are those… new works?”
Quentin looked down in alarm at the manuscripts that had fluttered to the carpet. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, these are going to the printer tomorrow.”
“Are you…”
“Yes, his publisher.” Quentin’s quivering voice squandered his attempts at pride.
“But I thought…”
“Oh, no, I’m not allowed to change anything. These are original. Fresh too. I think this is yesterday’s batch. He’s quite prodigious, isn’t- DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH THAT!”
Callahan withdrew his curious hand, not out of fear, but rather from pity for the grossly abused Quentin the publisher.
“Sorry! It’s just that… NO ONE!—is allowed to touch them. Mr. Coldridge is quite exact in how he wants these published. Nothing changes, not the orthography, not the syntax. Really. He told me if I so much as touch them with my bare hands he would set my car on fire.”
Callahan laughed. Quentin did not.
“So, why are you here?” Quentin’s voice cracked.
“I was just wondering what class Mr. Coldridge is TA’ing this term. I’m a huge fan, and I would love to meet-”
“Introductory Creative Writing, taught by Professor Marks, meets Mondays and Thursdays at one PM in the classroom down the hall. No prerequisites, show up on time, don’t use big words, do not ask Mr. Coldridge personal questions.” Quentin had repeated this course description before.
“Thanks so much for your-”
Quentin’s speed doubled as he manically scurried out of the room, his heartbeat converging to a razorblade to the wrist or a bed sheet noose. Callahan was very, very excited for the course offerings this September.
The next Monday was the first day of school and the first day of class. Callahan arrived at class so early that he disrupted the senior seminar meeting beforehand. He felt no shame. Three years had accumulated to the fixed point twenty minutes from now. He played with his pencil, trying to make it spin on the desk. It would always sputter and stop, the sharpened end pointing in the same direction every time the parking lot outside. He saw Quentin neurotically running into his Scion with the same folder and speeding off.
After a few minutes the rest of the class came in pods of two and three assuming places by their friends. No one acknowledged Callahan. No one sat by him, either. He continued spinning his pencil and it continued pointing towards the parking lot. Quentin had scurried back into the parking lot, his tiny sedan ill fitted for the drifting he was trying to do.
Green eyes. He saw them in the girl next to him.
He did not know that her name was Ambrosia Froid. He did not know that she was an insomniac and that her irises would emit a more potent hue if only she slept more than a few hours a week. He did not know how she would lie on a bench and caress the grass, letting single words float into her mind that she would make a poem out of. He would learn all these things shortly.
“Hello.” He greeted her with a gentle wave.
Froid looked at him, perplexed.
He did not know that she was Samuel Tyler Coldridge’s girlfriend. But he knew she was beautiful.
“Hello,” she responded finally, turning her head away.
“What brings you to this class?” Samuel wanted to hear more syllables from her.
“Writing,” she replied, still not looking at him but rather arbitrarily organizing a stack of papers in her folder.
Callahan laughed nervously. Small talk did not get him into this college. “Oh, but of course! I love Coldridge’s poetry so much. It’s so… free. I did my senior project in English on ?y(not)ou! Such a great book. I’m so happy he publishes his poetry. I hear he’s a real introvert. But I guess that’s okay, because he’s one of the greatest poets who’s ever lived! I guess he can do whatever he wants, as long as he keeps writing like that. He’s like another e.e. cummings, no, wait, better than e.e. cummings!”
He did not know that Froid had not been listening to anything he had said after “oh.” Samuel had entered the room.
Samuel did not look at her at all while he crossed the room. His mind was clearly writing a poem. He tapped his leather briefcase with his fingers, coming up with a polyrhythm for a meter, percussing sharper when he broke his rhythm with misplaced orthography, a parenthetical. Everything was at his command. He made his own language through the perversion of another. Word order perversion. Grammatical category perversion. Orthography perversion. A few called it sacrilegious. Everyone else called it genius.
As he passed Froid he stopped and gently tapped her four times on the left shoulder. Tum tum ta-tum. That meant “coffee at-three”. “No” was never an answer. As soon as class was over Froid would rush to Samuel’s side. If she stopped to use the restroom or talk to a friend, Samuel would not wait for her and continue walking on his own. Samuel was going to do whatever pleased him, and he would less than minimally accommodate companions.
Froid called this a challenge. Everyone else called it abusive.
Callahan did not know this. He didn’t even know that Froid was completely ignoring him. To him the mere vision of Froid’s profile, eyes fixated on something in the distance, her angular features in the foreground, was lovely enough. Silence was lovely enough.
Callahan learned many things that class period. He learned that Froid’s name was Froid when the professor called on her. He learned that Froid wrote minimalistic poetry. He learned that Froid had a nervous twitch whenever Samuel would tap his briefcase as if she were expected to know the meaning of every iteration that came from his relentless percussion.
“So, do you wanna grab a bite to-”
Froid got up immediately and walked over towards Samuel, and the two briskly made their way out of the room together, Samuel grabbing Froid’s needle-like fingers and convulsively toting her to his desires.
Thus, Callahan learned that Froid was dating Samuel.
The next day Callahan was walking outside and saw Froid lying on a bench, eyes closed, caressing the grass. She couldn’t see him approaching, and if she had she would have certainly arisen quickly, avoiding any reality that involved him. She found him annoying, boring, and useless. Samuel called people like this “adverbs.” Froid began using the term too.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” He began, towering over Froid, blocking her escape routes.
Froid opened her eyes lamely and stared at the mammoth, sun-glared Callahan. She contemplated ignoring him, but his smile was too eager to completely disappoint.
“Lovely,” she replied. “A great day to relax.”
“Can I join you?”
Froid wanted to say no. She wanted to resume her compulsory nap, close her eyes and be the only thing in existence aside from stars in her inner eyelids and words half-lucidly floating around in her brain.
Froid wanted to place Callahan next to Samuel and see how he would fare. She could imagine Samuel, in debilitating apathy, insulting Callahan with every insult he had created. “Athlete” for the burly, brawny student at this school on some sort of recruitment program. “Yeshi,” a corruption of “Jeshua,” for the overtly religious students that sought his conversion. Samuel liked these people. Often he would convert them. “Greeking leek.” “Suicide python.” “Faux-litician.” Samuel had one for everyone.
Finally, of course, there was “adverb.” Froid wanted Samuel to use all of these on Callahan, for she thought this was the only way to make him leave her alone.
Yet in spite of all this contemplation, she merely said “yes.” Callahan sat down beside her.
“You must be a sophomore, right? I mean, you didn’t just meet Samuel in the past couple days.”
Froid nodded. “We met last year at a poetry reading. He was standing alone because no one wanted to talk to him. He doesn’t converse well. He’s too busy thinking about more important things.”
“What’s he like?”
Froid hesitated. “Quiet, occupied. Like I said, he’s always thinking about poetry, so it’s hard for him to interact with people.” Froid smirked with satisfaction as if she had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In terms of difficulty, she really had.
“Yeah, he’s kind of like his poetry, isn’t he?”
Froid nodded again. “He’s exactly like his poetry. That’s what I like so much about him. He’s a walking poem. Talking to him is literally like analyzing his poetry.”
Callahan saw her attempt a smile but she couldn’t feel it.
“I’ve never read your poetry.” Callahan attempted a new conversation. “Do you have anything on you?”
Froid looked at him but didn’t say anything.
Callahan kept her glance. “You can tell a lot about a person by their poetry, can’t you?”
Froid showed him her poem:
“find out
why light seeps
and sleeps
in blue
orange
fire morgues
eating
and killing.
my
word
turns to
ash.”
Callahan looked at the poem, and then at Froid.
“Beautiful,” he sighed.
“What does it mean?” she demanded.
“Is there a right answer?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m minimalistic, not abstract.”
Callahan looked back down at the poem.
“Why is it beautiful?” she asked again.
Callahan fixated on the vowels, as if this poem were some sort of cryptographic key. He remained silent for too long. In a momentary slip up of her dominance over Callahan, dominance over this adverb, she smiled. It was for three seconds and it was offhand. But she smiled like ice cream, like an air, like an exhale that had been waiting completion. He did not require analysis. He was simply someone who loved poetry. And he did not know the reason for everything.
Callahan saw this foreign expression from two feet away. Samuel saw it from fifty. When Froid’s smile sailed over into the distance and caught with Samuel’s eyes, she immediately got up and ran towards him. Callahan had meant nothing. He watched her run away, towards Samuel, towards that poem that she had been making sense of for so long.
The next day in class Callahan rolled his pencil in his lap, waiting for Froid. Samuel had come to class early, and they were the only two in the room. Callahan saw him lying on some chairs, smoking, in a peculiar but familiar position.
“We’re not allowed to smoke here, right?” Callahan said evenly. “Look at all this wood paneling.” Samuel didn’t move. He had no interest in the wood paneling in the room, and even less interest in Callahan.
Samuel restarted. “I know someone who sleeps like that.”
“Only person in the world,” Samuel replied with no inflection.
Callahan laughed at his mistake. “Actually, I have a friend who does that. She’s in this class. Do you know her?”
“Name?”
“Ambrosia Froid.”
“No, you athlete. Yours.”
“Uh… Callahan Grossherz.”
“Do you want to ask me questions, Callahan Grossherz?” Samuel sat up. His torso was surprisingly long as he leaned forward and relieved smoke from his thin lips.
“Questions about what?”
“About what you thought of my lectures, or why you’re interested in poetry. Vapid, self-necessitating politeness. Don’t worry; I am not one to feign interest. I do not give a damn either way.”
“How about you answer my first question first,” Callahan pressed.
Samuel shrugged his shoulders like a giant vulture. “I know her.”
Callahan nodded. “I guess I could ask you some more questions. What were you thinking when-”
Samuel got up wordlessly and walked over towards the garbage can and tossed his cigarette butt in it. Callahan stopped midsentence to incredulously watch him disregard every rule of etiquette. When Samuel returned he appeared bored.
“Why did you stop?” Samuel asked as if Callahan had interrupted him.
“Well, it seemed like you were about to leave…”
“I am an artist, Athlete. I never leave things half-finished unless they are meant to be that way.”
“Well, I was just wondering what you thought when you wrote ‘wet rock’.”
Samuel smiled. “I was jacking off.”
Callahan again was shocked. “You can’t be serious, Mr. Coldridge! What were you really thinking?”
“What does it matter to you?”
“You offered to answer my questions!”
“I offered, but that does not mean I will follow through.”
“But you just said that you always follow things through unless they’re meant to be like that!”
“Because it is. My purposes are for me and me alone.”
“But then why did you offer?”
Samuel sneered. “Just to see what you would do, Athlete.” And then Samuel stood up, even taller still, and walked out of the room.
Shortly thereafter the rest of the class arrived. Froid did not; neither did Samuel.
After class, Callahan went on the quad in search of Froid. He examined every bench, hunted under trees, walked past pods of students sitting in a circle playing the same three chords on a guitar. He was cold. Froid. Froid. Where are you?
Froid did not appear in class the next day either. Callahan spent his free energy looking for her. Samuel had reappeared in class, completely unscathed and uninterested in Callahan’s apparent paranoia. Samuel almost looked refreshed, as if he had cried out of his intestines and then returned to poetry for a form of constructive catharsis.
Froid was nowhere to be seen. For all that Callahan knew, she was a hallucination. Froid. Cold, callous Froid.
The next week Callahan found Froid under several layers, hood up, in the café where she had gone with Samuel. She sat at the table with nothing in front of her and nothing on her aside from her clothes. No backpack, no poetry. She was too weak to even look annoyed with Callahan sat down in front of her.
“Where the hell have you been?” he whispered. “You didn’t show up to class for a few days, and I’ve been assuming the worst!”
Froid’s eyes combated gravity and looked up at Callahan’s. She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and pointed at the headline on it.
“Transfer application?” The two words did not process together in Callahan’s mind. He sat at the table, unclear about whether to be a vigilante and tear it up or cradle it in his arms. Before he could make up his mind, Froid snatched it back and cradled it in hers.
“University of Washington,” she rasped. “Physics.”
“That’s on the other side of the country!”
“No shit.”
“But you’re so good at poetry!”
“Physics too.”
“Why? Is it because of me? Him?”
Froid shattered in front of him. Callahan, in a state of panic, pulled out pieces of notebook paper and handed them to her like tissues. She did not acknowledge the gesture.
“Samuel…” she began.
“What did Samuel do to you?”
She rolled up her sleeves. There were handprint-shaped bruises all over her forearms.
“Holy shit….” Callahan held her tiny forearms in his hand. They were cold. He rubbed them gently to heat them up.
“I didn’t know Samuel could become angry,” she began again. “I thought he would just break up with me.”
“That bastard, how dare treat you like this!”
“He told me…” She stopped immediately.
“He told you what?”
“He said…”
“He said…?”
“That he lives to do whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants. And he… cornered me.”
Callahan began piecing the scene in his head.
“I told him no, that we should just break up. It was what he clearly wanted to do. But…”
“But what?”
“He kicked me in the back of my calves, and I collapsed from the pain. He repeated what he said and grabbed my forearms and pinned me down.”
Callahan’s eyes began to boil.
“When it was… over… He broke up with me. He said he didn’t want someone who interfered with what he wanted. He told me that I had broken my promise, that I could bear to be with him regardless of what he wanted or needed.”
Her dried-out eyes wrinkled in another attempt at a smile. “I lost the challenge.”
Samuel walked past the coffee shop outside. Callahan could only look at him. He got up, for a moment completely forgetting about Froid. His fist in preemptive shot-put balls, he was ready to succumb to entropy, beat his idol’s face into a chaos that not even Samuel could write.
As Callahan jabbed Samuel repeatedly in the jaw, in the cheekbone, red ribbons tying knots all over Samuel’s face, Samuel sat there and took the abuse. Callahan couldn’t understand why.
“Aren’t you gonna fight back, you disgusting son of a bitch? Aren’t you gonna try to beat the shit out of the guy who talked to your girlfriend? Come on, you can feel pain. FIGHT BACK!”
When it became more obvious that no matter how great the abuse that Samuel would not return the favor, Callahan felt awkward and stopped. Samuel lay on the ground, semi-conscious in a salty red haze, but smiling in some sort of morbid triumph.
“Athlete, why would I fight you back? It is not like you touched one of my manuscripts or something. If anything, I should be thanking you.”
Callahan forgot his anger. “For what?”
“For showing me what I could control and what I could not. Froid, without doubt, fell into the latter category.”
“How dare you treat her like that!”
“Like what? She is not in my world anymore. I do not acknowledge her. She is not my poetry.”
“HER FOREARMS!”
“I was foolish. I held on to her, tried to keep her in my world, but she refused. Trust me, athlete, it was very traumatizing. Afterwards it was the first time I ever cried.”
“So this is how you define your ‘world.’ Anything you can control is part of your world, anything you can’t just doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, do not preach my own doctrine to me, athlete. You are beginning to sound like a faux-litician!”
“For trying to play God, you’re pretty pathetic.”
“I do not care what you think, if I have not already made that apparent.”
“Clearly you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t have done that to her.”
Samuel frowned. He tried to stand but nearly collapsed again.
“Clearly. An adjective ending in –ly. Such a weak word. It suits you well, Athlete.”
Callahan would have punched him again had Samuel’s nose been any less deformed.
Callahan turned back towards the inside the café. His table was now empty. There was a piece of paper lying on it. He turned to Samuel and back.
“Thank you again, Athlete. I enjoy becoming recommitted to what is my real creation.” As Samuel limped away, oblivious to the violence on his face, Callahan rushed back to the table to see what Froid had left. It was not her transfer application. It was one of her poems.
Callahan crumbled it up into a ball without even reading it and threw it in the trashcan. In the distance he saw a Scion on fire.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

It's 70 degrees today

I'm waiting for office hours at the moment, and decided to write a poem while I waited.

Vernal November

A warm hand protecting a cold one
From the thaw. Calm breath and real water
Dissolve the leaves into soft pillows.
Nestled like a sock under bed sheets:
Forgotten, yet safe.
Converged browns, awoken from decay
To have one look back
And pause,
Take a second last breath.

Red is good for stitching,
For the sunset,
For the grass,
For the asphalt.
The bravery in sleeping.

POEM!

I just proved to myself that I can't be away from poetry for too long... While on the way to Cornell with the skating team I wrote this poem about birch trees by the highway. I like birch trees. I also got back into the swing of rhyming. It's nice to go back to things sometime, though you may see a lot of free verse in the future..


The Last Birch


Protrudes like a bleached bone
Out of emaciated soil,
A semblance of decay, a highlight
Of how November makes one alone.
She shivers at the frosted coil,
She shivers at the frosted night.

Her leaves escaped a week ago. They were right to flee
With the vitality, the grass, the flat green,
The violence of a changing scene,
The forest tracing a skeletal sea.

Where are her companions now? Oh, yes.
They splinter from the ground up, like trauma
Seizing hold of a child. But I digress.
A tree cannot feel drama.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

WHOA WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WORDS

So in the spirit of me throwing random things at you guys, I'm gonna switch things up again. Behold, a temporary direction for this blog! So my Creative Writing course has switched now into fiction rather than poetry, and as much as I love poetry, I'd like to start doing some fiction again too. Part of the reason I opt for poetry is because I'm lazy: a poem can be written relatively quickly and can vary in length. Characters, scenes, plots, standard structure, their omission is all up to you. I have written about as much fiction as I have poetry, but I love poetry more. Again, because I'm lazy. And I love playing with structure. The only rule in poetry is that you have to create everything. Also because my writing style in the past couple years has begun to savor brevity. Nuances are beautiful.

So anyways, this is a short story that took me forever to write (READ: lazy. And sick too, I suppose). The protagonist for the story is the antagonist in a novel idea that I'm developing at the moment. I did a character sketch for him for class last week and had a blast because I LOVE doing character sketches. It's the opposite of fiction. You create a persona who can do whatever he or she pleases with a plot. The plot does nothing to the persona. And thus, Samuel Tyler Coldridge (yes, a parody of sorts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though NOTHING alike), goes about his merry way thinking about why he writes poetry about ten seconds before he presents his poetry at this huge poetry reading in UW Seattle. Why Seattle? Not sure; I've never been. But the Suzzallo Reading Room, according to Google Images at least, is reminiscent of a church. VERY reminiscent of a church.

Well, I think I've talked enough. As if this word count isn't already quadruple what these usually are.


Higher Wisdom



“Samuel Tyler Coldridge….”

Bombastic. Heavy. Ornate. The speaker’s tone weighed on his ears like a King James Bible. A Bach four-voice English Suite. Grandiose and pretentious. Samuel hated any writing that was not his, including this thirty-second introduction. He hadn’t prepared anything. He refused, in his typical passiveness, to write himself an introduction, and he memorized all his poetry. He sat in the front row of the Suzzallo Reading Room at the University of Washington, analyzing the structure. It reminded him of the nave of a church. His position in the next several minutes would shift to the pulpit. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Samuel Tyler Coldridge, a twenty-four year old sociopath who wants nothing more than to go back to sleep on a naked mattress. And the Word was God. The beginning, of course, would be in about two minutes. Did Samuel think of himself as God? In the context of his poetry, yes. And for him, that was all that mattered.

“… A visionary of syntax….”

The way Samuel used syntax had invited comparison between him and e. e. cummings. Samuel liked bending things to his will, notably, people and words. Words, of course, were much easier to manipulate. People were too independent. And they always failed his minimal expectations.

“… And grammar in poetry…”

Words never did. “Autumn” would not complain if it were used as a verb. He had written a poem once comprised only of nouns in various grammatical categories. He hated adverbs ending in -ly. They were derivations of adjectives. Weak and useless. He called many people “adverbs.”

Poetry was the only thing Samuel thought could exert his existence. Cogito, ergo sum. I verse, therefore I am. And where I am, I am God.

“… Is here today. This…”

Here? Today? What was he doing here? What did he agree to do? Oh yes.

Quentin the publisher had begged him to do this poetry-reading thing. Samuel had agreed to it because Quentin the publisher said that this would be “your big break!” with an exclamation point. Samuel thought the exclamation point was too late. He had already had his big break when he was eleven and found a coffee-stained copy of Robert Frost’s North of Boston under an issue of Better Homes and Gardens in the powder room. Art to wipe one’s ass to. His parents sure taught him many useful things. They also taught him to never split infinitives. Or write in fragments or end phrases with prepositions. Or both.

“… Is a…”

Quentin the publisher was ecstatic. Quentin the publisher wriggled in his seat anticipating the next word. Quentin the publisher would have ran up to the pulpit and read Samuel’s poetry in a heartbeat had Samuel requested it. That was just the kind of person Quentin the publisher was. Many commended Samuel for finding such a devoted yet nurturing publisher. Samuel called Quentin the publisher an adverb. Quentin the publisher still did not comprehend that Samuel meant it as an insult.

“Privilege!”

Everyone clapped as Samuel remained unresponsive. His hands were cupped over his mouth, and he breathed into them. He had been motionless for the entirety of the speech but right now was set on doing one of two actions.

“Ladies and Gentlemen:”

Turn his back on his entire life philosophy.

“Samuel Tyler Coldridge!”

Or run.

The audience applauded as Samuel emerged out of the bobbing heads. He moved away from his seat, still unclear which plan he was carrying out. Once he stopped he noted that he was in front of the pulpit. So this is where my poetry takes me.

People plopped everywhere, like dead fish, vacuous eyes in evaporated wonder. This nerveless pod, their sashimi textured will. Arrogance could not save him. Everyone was attentive. Samuel was God for the next two minutes. But Samuel was a God who wanted no responsibilities for disciples. And the only disciples that he desired were the ones that he could create.

Samuel scanned the audience for anyone that was not either ready to succumb to euphoric turrets like Quentin the publisher or armed with a note pad and pen and taking notes of his every movement. He caught the wondered gaze of a college-aged boy and swore he saw the boy take furious note of it. Samuel was looking forward to reading this one’s thesis.

He was also looking forward to firing Quentin the publisher and never releasing any of his poetry ever again. He believed he was a self-sufficient human, and as far as poetry and intrinsic wealth went, he was right.

A pair of familiar eyes in the audience.

Not ready to immortalize him into writing or to receive his Word. Two eyes, frail and dimmed by years of insomnia. He knew why she didn’t sleep. He knew better than anyone.

Ambrosia Froid didn’t look at him. She looked at his poem floating in preparation in his mind. She waited because she knew she was the only person in the world entitled to hear this poem. And she was right. He knew she was right. She needed to hear this poem, if no one else. The poem needed to return to its nexus. That was God’s mandate. He would read this poem and decline the other two.

Often Samuel closed his eyes when he recited his poetry, but instead he looked straight into hers.

“hIre why’s(dumb),” he began.

This was the poem that he had written in a few minutes, not in the morning or during the enigmas of the day like most of his other works. He had written it after her, after she showed him the cracks in his world. She was the reason he called everyone adverbs and why he stopped humanizing Quentin the publisher. He couldn’t stand the sight of the most tangible representation of someone else’s free will. Was she also God? In the context of exerting her world onto his, then yes. And to him, that was all that mattered.

There were no similarities between how he had planned for her to fit in his world and how she did, and even after he cast her aside with the great thoughtlessness that he imbued, she had already demonstrated much more than he had ever wanted. He wasn’t God in her world, and that simple fact trickled back into his own. Omnipotence was a hollow word.

As soon as he finished the poem he sat back down. Quentin the publisher’s eyes were alight in terror, motioning that Samuel go right back up to the front of Suzzallo and continue with the other two poems. Samuel shook his head. He wanted to see Froid.

With the unplanned truncation of the program, there was extra time for the reception. Students threw themselves in Samuel’s path, hoping their martyrdom would enable them to ask some trite question about Samuel’s choice of orthography or why he always ended his poem with the letter “I,” but Samuel was in no mood for converts. He wanted to see the one person he could never convert.

Froid was lying on a bench, her left arm dangling off the side so she could caress the grass. Her eyes were closed, so she couldn’t see Samuel approaching. Nothing else existed aside from her, the wooden bench cradling her back, and the feeling of grass. Samuel stood and watched her for a few moments.

“If it were not for you, I would have run off this campus the moment she said my name,” he said. His voice suggested no origin: perfect, standard English, no slang, a sociolinguist’s nightmare. Just words.

Froid opened her eyes and looked at Samuel but said nothing.

“I never tell people about what inspired a poem, but it seems important to tell you so,” Samuel continued.

Froid did not respond at all to Samuel. He waited for her to react in some way, but it never came.

“Why are you here?”

Froid sat up. “I go to school here now. For physics.”

“You switched majors?”
Froid nodded.

“You transferred schools?”

Froid nodded again.

“Why?” Samuel knew why, but he wanted to hear her consent.

Froid instead got up and ran off. Samuel didn’t try to pursue her.

She hates me that much. She wants no recollection of me. Samuel imagined the freshman in his writing seminar doing physics on the other side of the country, taking debilitating strides to vacate Samuel Tyler Coldridge from her existence. The paradox.

She had changed her entire life for him. The thought gave him sickening pleasure.


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

New Twist

So I've been sick this past weekend, which is why I didn't get a poem up yesterday... supposedly. But anyways my last poetry assignment in my class was to write a section poem, which I decided to do on the nature of Norway. You will see that these poems are familiar: these were part of my summer project, and I reinterpreted them to create new poems. This was actually really interesting. It was fun to see things redrawn this way. Anyways, yup. I've included the original poem and then the redraw.


7/3

Water blends too well with things,
As if it were all on single strings.
A certain place finds my eyes,
Not to be described as one noun.
They clouds are gray, this place like ashes.

And so I watch it, and I
Am positive that this is the sky.
But a little boy splashes,
And then I realize
I’ve been looking down.


Water Blends Too Well with Things

In its aquamarine interpretation of trees
And people. The softness, serenity of fluid outlines,
The impertinence of detail.
Because they way one moves is often—
More important? No— more conspicuous.
Only the clouds look the same, but that may be because of their
Movement. They float under the lilies like gentle fish.
The breeze sighs among the rocks and some tumble in casually,
The pond catching its breath once they all finally sink.
My face never had so much movement.

7/8

The duck swam.

Its feet made waves
In a perforated triangle.

And the duck spoke: “I am
A master now. My choice saves
This certain grass from being eaten.

“But oh, I am so far from the highest view.
The danger I feel! Often I think a wolf will mangle
Me by my neck. But, even then, a wolf can be beaten.
By you.”



To a Duck:

Why are you so fragile? Your shivers ripple through
Your glass skeleton. I expect you to shatter, your hollow bones
Whistling like a bent oboe among the reeds.
You assert yourself as if you were an unorthodox question,
Incredible shame for an innocent inquisition,
Grinding out of an indecisive mouth.
I can imagine many more ways for you to die
Than for you to live,
Though I suppose if you weren’t so brittle,
I wouldn’t find you so beautiful.

7/22

rolling quiet
just static of
shock a scream
couldnt pass through
the air is too brittle

no birds
but ashes
no weeping rain
but smoke hangs
too bleak for rain or birds

7/23

Save me, trees! I cry.
You are more fortunate than I!

How you stand, foreboding
In endless array. How you stand
Forever, keeping hold of the land.
How you stand unafraid in the dark.
Never telling if you are imploding.
Never telling save your bark.

I’ve hated you for having no soul.

But you sure have this all under control.



The Forests in Hallingdal, Vestlandet, Norway

Every glass building in Regjeringsstrøket
Has more of itself on the street
Than in its iron framework.
These trees are older than the government.
Never has Oslo been so lit with flowers and prayer candles, but
Flora grows back every spring, after the forest fires, of course.
A bullet to the head can instantly kill a fifteen-year-old boy.
It takes at least twenty axe swings to fell an oak.
We make cemeteries out of people.
We make churches out of trees.


7/27

The dark could but converge.
It hung at a fixed point,
Incorrigible to urge.

How stubborn was it one
Evening. The clouds floated
On the darkest cusp, a joint
That was quickly demoted.

For the days are shorter.
And as for the sun,
I’m not sure if we can afford her.


A Month’s Aging of the Midnight Sun

There used to be an eternal day, the sun bowing to a point
Then escaping the darkness, swimming back upstream
Into the sky. I suppose it was perseverance.
But the summer aged.
The air is damp from too much movement,
From too much life doing too much too fast.
The sun limps behind the thick clouds,
Its light sallow compared to June.
She sleeps longer now, and sometimes she forgets to wake.
I have not seen her in three days.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

100TH POST?!?!

I'm legitimately surprised that I made it this far on this blog. If you had told me last year that I would be still writing fairly regularly, I would've patted your head and told you to divorce yourself of your idealism. But yeah... this actually happened. Thanks to all my regular readers; I would be lying if I said that you all are my reason for maintaining this blog, but I do certainly appreciate the support I've gotten :)

So in honor of this momentous occasion, I decided to do my once a season write-up outside on the Green. I usually write in nice weather, but yesterday it was drizzly and kind of gross. This is a sonnet. However, because my class is all about me trying new things, this isn't your typical Elizabethan or Italian sonnet. This is a modern sonnet: no iambic pentameter, no fixed rhyme scheme. It does, however, have more skeletal aspects: the fourteen lines, and the volta or "turn," that changes the mood between a group of six lines and a group of eight. Without further ado, here it is

Orange Peals

I have the damndest time peeling this orange.
The trauma of its gory failure will retain in my nail beds:
Pressure too little, pressure too great.
The rinds pattering into my waste basket like hail,
Its own measurement of time: thick, saccharine exhalations every twelve seconds or so.
An organic pointillism makes a canvas out of milk cartons, blue wrappers, taciturn tissues.

Wanting to prolong the mnemonic nocturne of skin on plastic,
I stop and look at the oak tree outside my window.
Its rind is peeling too, peacefully, like a new year's ball celebrating the early rain that gave it this color.
The process is consensual, and each liberated leaf illuminates itself on the asphalt.
It doesn't even need a breeze; they both let go at the same time.
They synchronize the pealing of both clocks:
The one accepting death,
And the one accepting loss.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Pantoum

So I've played around with structure more, and this time I bring you a pantoum, a poem similar to a villanelle in that it has lines repeating. I'm too lazy to explain the structure, but you'll see the effect it makes. Anyways, this poem is about the day that I got a blade in my leg that almost cost me my career at the ripe old age of 9 -1 day. I have taken a lot out of the experience, but I decided to focus on the theme of lack of control of outside circumstances, which I definitely learned the hard way. Fun fact: the first line I wrote was "And the slice." Not that you really care...


The ice all in red dresses,
I cannot forget the sun rising.
The day I learned too much
Does not remember easy.

I cannot forget the sun rising.
The way the ice teaches
Does not remember easy,
But what is real pain?

The way the ice teaches?
Not really by choice,
But what is real pain:
“We fear what our habits can’t control.”

Not really by choice,
I’m not so fond of jumping, but I figure
We fear what our habits can’t control.
Mine, I suppose, is that I fall.

I’m not so fond of jumping, but I figure
We all have regrets.
Mine, I suppose, is that I fall.
The ice becomes accustomed to our picks.

We all have regrets,
How blades travel where they aren’t supposed to.
The ice becomes accustomed to our picks
And the slice.

How blades travel where they aren’t supposed to.
A glance I never wanted to make.
And the slice.
I will never forget the floating as I fell.

A glance I never wanted to make,
The ice all in red dresses.
I will never forget the floating as I fell,
The day I learned too much.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 by Cali Digre

Pleasant Arena

Our next prompt was to write a poem about a place that has significance to you. Of course I picked Pleasant Arena. This poem is a huge departure from what I've written in the past. Just trying different ideas.

Everything I know about life I learned at Pleasant Ice Arena

I know from a bottle cap in the vending machine we were forbidden to use
That a cow can go up stairs but not down.
Grasshoppers and spiders can cross-breed.
We call them “sprickets,” and it’s good luck if you squish one
Trying to put your skates on.
“Fungus” and “among us” are good rhymes,
Though I wouldn’t like to divulge where I heard them together.
It takes three toe picks in the ice to dig out the rusted paint
That falls from the ceiling like tetanus confetti.
I found one in shape of a blob once. So did a lot of people.

In the summer I can still smell
The compost site, divided by the parking lot,
And how we would sit on the hill for hours
And guess what people had thrown away.
The fourteen hundred and seventy-seven steps
From the front door to the nearest Bruegger’s
Go by more quickly when you’re holding someone’s hand,
Still cool and somewhat damp from a session of falling.
They go by slowly when he moves to Florida
And you realize the little bastard still has one of your magenta gloves
And it is probably infested with ringworm from being in that bag
That always smelled like bread, in the bad way.

I learned that the more you fall, the less it hurts,
That sometimes there is a God,
But only after a damn good session.
You’ll have better results with the innards of a spricket
Smeared like oil on the sole of your tights.
The other times the only thing you can feel is your blade carving,
In that soft growl, resonating across cement walls,
Making your mark on the world before it is wiped clean by a zamboni.
That doesn’t matter. Just start over again.
The paint on the ceiling restarts its celebration every ninety minutes.

That happiness is in a Snapple bottle
I hid under a yoga mat for a year
And then found this August, and finding out
That I don’t really change all that much.



Unpublished Material, ©2011 by Cali Digre

Villanelle

I don't think I've ever spent so much time writing a poem and debating where it's going. Villanelles are time-consuming as is and even more so when you have no idea what to do with it. So this became what I'd like to call "elicited cynicism," since I've found I have a pattern of writing some pretty cynical things when I don't have a theme in mind.


Innate is not Genius

You glide across this rough terrain
An afternoon, an afterthought.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

A simple star lighting the rain,
Recycling what a day had brought,
You glide across this rough terrain.

Caprices that we all maintain
Have been, by you, ventures unbought.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

So can your innocence explain—
With a lost meaning of “distraught”—
“You glide across this rough terrain?”

Simplicity has little gain
Without cognizance. That says not
“Nothing could ever give you pain.”

What sensory must be in wane,
And what a war must you have fought!
You glide across this rough terrain.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

List Poem Exercise

This was an exercise due in class for today. I wasn't a huge fan of it, but I've been so busy that I decided to post it. We were supposed to use repetition effectively. I decided I liked to write about fall.


The leaves sleeping on the pine branches,
The leaves resting their ardent oranges and reds,
The leaves reaching their fingers to one another,
The leaves tumbling when the wind tickles them.

The breezes meandering through the thicket, like
A creek suspended by needles. The breezes picking up
The fire from the grass, joyfully, to celebrate the end
Of an epoch only captured by green. The breezes
Interlocking, changing course with
The breezes that never caress the ground.

This matted earth, partially wrangled from wear,
This matted earth, nearly soiled from the stale,
This matted earth, completely close to the past seasons.

What was August? Could anyone remember?
What was the heat like? Is the lawn still bleached?
What was of the solstice storm? What architecture was lost?

This deconstruction is natural. Time for us to observe
This deconstruction and acknowledge the skeletons
This deconstruction makes of everything. Forever,
This deconstruction will be prompt, it will be needed.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

EXCITING NEWS!

I've yet to share this with you all, but I got into English 80 at my school, which is the intro creative writing course. What does this mean? POETRY IS MY HOMEWORK! It's wonderful, it's actually multitasking to upkeep this blog! What I'll be doing is posting all the poems I write for that class up here to share with you guys, starting with the one today. Our first assignment was to write a poem that "meanders" a bit before it gets to its meaning (I write a lot of these poems, but they all have to be fresh. So no recycling allowed). This poem I wrote today on the subject of tea. I'm an avid tea drinker and probably drink more of it than any of your European grandmothers. I've never utilized tea as a metaphor in my poetry, let alone think about the symbolism that it can convey. And I like it. You will definitely see more poems about tea in the future.

Side note: the teas I describe in the end of the first stanza are white tea (made from baby tea leaves, I like to think of it as young tea), rooibos (not really tea but an herbal variety, full flavored and very energetic, for lack of a better word), Gunpowder tea (usually a green tea, which is mature leaves, named so because of how they're packaged to look like bullets and often stored in metal containers), and Pu-erh (oolong tea fermented in caves, most oxidized, "oldest" tea leaf I suppose). They are in some ways different stages in the tea's life, as well as humans (birth, adolescence, war, death).

You now know more about tea than you probably ever cared about.

DepraviTea

In under three minutes, a teakettle
Produces a raspy postlude.
The leaves bloom in the heat,
Their diffusion, their perfumes
Caress the clarity, suggest a mood:
Simple white, clean and sincere,
Rooibos from Bourbon Street.
A musket green with notes of metal,
Oolong stored in tombs.
But the actual tea is one to fear.

Harmful if swallowed. Do not ingest.

Once it is tossed, no one grieves.
The essence is the sole value.
We drink our tea with little haste,
Unaware of travesties,
Incognizant of our profanity,
The sin we never knew.
Are we steeped tealeaves?
Are we the this kind of humanity,
Exploited of our victories,
And then left to waste?

Cheesy Poem with a Cheesy Nautical Metaphor

So tomorrow begins the start of a new term, and so of course I needed to write a poem. The weirdest thing about this year is that I know what to expect, but then I have no idea what it's going to be like. Naturally, what came to mind was the sea. A sailor may think he knows the waters that he frequents, but they are different every day, every voyage, and so the best he can do is assume that anything will be partially familiar and partially chance. Thus I came up with this.

It's nice writing poems again. I usually balk at first, but once I realize that I really should be writing, I let it all flow out. Yay, powers of inertia!

I have been here before,
But in the second time around,
Differences abound.
A wave breaching a familiar shore
And yet aware of little more.

So what can I expect, or brace?
As if the certainty dried out
When the sail came about
And I returned to a place
That thrives in morphing space.

So I close my eyes, let the rope slip,
For I must conserve when needed,
When adversity is greeted,
The weather may be fair this trip,
But many forces damage a ship.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Posting more often?

I'm trying to ease my way back into this blog after writing so much so often in Norway (I SWEAR I'll finish the project, or maybe restart it. It failed the day that I decided not to post, since you have to post EVERY DAY. This is a long parenthetical). Anyway, I traveled back to college today, and so I felt like the occasion was momentous enough to REQUIRE me to go back to writing a poem, even though I wasn't all crazy about it. Be that as it may, I'm still satisfied with the results.
Also I'm not gonna sleep well tonight because I'm so excited for moving in tomorrow.

When any other figure is wrong,
When any other weather is a storm,
When any other joy is amiss.

I may be one to stand alone,
Yet this puts me in a perfect tone.

But is this home?
Is that what I call this?

Was I without it for so long,
Or does it assume a form
Of whatever I need, like foam?

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Uhh... hi?

I'm terrible with starting things in the beginning. I write my poems backwards, write my intro paragraphs last, and hate hate hate coming up with titles. If you ever wanna see the nexus of my poems, read the last two lines.

Except this one. This one just started at the beginning and kept going. This is about a month's worth of poemlessness in my system fighting its way out in this pretty cynical piece. Anyway, as per usual I've been writing about the weather and the landscape, and how I cannot stand Minnesota summers. For me, they're just a humid incubus and do nothing more than make me sick and feel perpetually overheated. I also dislike it because many days in the summer are just endlessly the same. Winter can have surprises, good or bad, and it is a much more divisive season. People love it or hate it, deal with the snow or relish it. Most people uniformly think "yeah, summer's nice."

What an introduction. Here's the poem.

Rotten August

The trees are just an imprint
Fading in the humid light
At the end of August. The birds,
They look at migration as a glint
Of hope, of salvation through flight.
And what do I feel? I cannot say.
The summer exhales, and her words
Crumble in the flooded grass, decay.
Is this what the end of creation looked like?
Is this what the creation of our end conveys?
I cannot be sad or admire these matted days,
Not when death hasn’t made a strike.

Ummmm

So you've all noticed that I've suddenly stopped my poem project. This is not unintentional. I'm in dire need of a break from writing poems, so I'm going to finish the final fifteen sometime in the future. I'm taking time off from poetry to do some other creative stuff, just as a change of pace.

Don't worry; I'll be back!

Just not for a bit.

I hope to come back refreshed and filled with eagerness to write poetry. I'm just a bit burned out.

-Cali

35

So today ended my six weeks in Norway. It was quite sad, I must admit, but I will look forward to returning someday soon. Upon leaving, I got to thinking about who I was the last time I was there and how I could have never dreamed that I would be the person I am today. It's sort of crazy. I've been keeping my journal from the last time I was here and likewise almost don't remember being that person. I'm not saying that I've become a better person or a worse person. I'm just different. Different sense of humor, mannerisms, perspective.

Moral: When we are living, it's hard to see both where we've come from and where we're going.

I cannot say exactly when
Any return seemed rather cold.
Regarding now, could I say then
On where I’ve come from, where I’ve been?
The future could not be foretold.

So time is victim of this theft
Where gradient is quite in lack
And recollection far from deft:
What was I like when I first left,
And who will I be when I come back?


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Hiatus

I'm going to be going on a little break because finals are between now and the end of the week. I'll resume posting on Friday with number 35!

-Lazy Cali

33 and 34

I was in Røros this weekend and very not apt to use the internet so as to maximize my enjoyment there. Røros is hands down my favorite place in the world, and I have been waiting for three years to go back there. I had a wonderful weekend and even cried a bit on my way back (cheesy, I know, but at least I'm being upfront about it).

The first poem I wrote about the play called "Elden" that I saw there. It's about Røros' role in a war between Norway and Sweden in the early 1700's. Sweden had invaded Norway and on its way back home decided to stop in Røros and take all the copper that was there, since Røros was a big mining town until the 1970's. The inhabitants initially hid the copper, but when the Swedes threatened to burn the entire town, which is comprised almost completely of timber buildings, the inhabitants relented. Unfortunately, on their way back to Sweden, the entire Swedish army froze to death in the mountains. The entire play was about the hopelessness of war.

Moral: just because you think you need something does not mean you actually do.


7/30

Who wants it?
Who wants that stain
Seeping, spreading?
Where are we heading
When it wants us more?

But we need a bit.
We need some pain
To make us feel our worth.
We need to explain our birth.
We need our need of war.


The second poem I wrote right after leaving Røros when I was crying a little bit and watching it disappear behind the mountains. Just as I had strived to see every last bit of Røros when I was there, I saw it as much as possible.

Moral: It's okay to look back sometimes.

7/31

What little view these birches grant,
A pity that the clouds have stayed
And petrified this single plain.
This mountain bend is sure a crime.

Time reversed itself. So near.
In six minutes will you appear.

So I sit rearwards on this train.
I hate how you fade,
I hate looking back, but I can’t
Help but see you one last time.


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

32

On Tuesday, while examining the wreckage from the bomb, my friends and I also went out to the cemetery behind St. Olavs Domkirke to visit the graves of some of Norway's most favorite artists and people. One person buried there is Henrik Wergeland, whom I have become quite fond of. My favorite poem of his was written on his deathbed when he was dying of TB, and in it he cries for spring, one of the prevailing characters in his poem, to save him. I find the opening line so beautiful:

"O springtime, springtime, save me!
No one has loved you more tenderly than I."

So... without further ado, I wrote this poem to him in response to his fear of death and fear of oblivion.

Moral: we are all immortalized, even if we never live to see it.


Mortality is not well-behaved, too
Decided on rejecting the call,
Bitter that life enslaved you.

You knew you would succumb one
Day. Your fear depraved you.

You knew you would be merely
Part of the frost, part of the fall.

Yet your springtime has saved you.
How could she ever betray someone
Who loved her so sincerely?

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

31= amount of time I was stuck doing nothing

In a huge change of pace from my poems from the last week or so, here is a humorous poem from a circumstance that happened to me today. I was taking a shower in my dorm room and when I tried to leave I found myself locked in, since you lock the shower from the outside. I find this stupid, and I was there for about a half an hour pacing and trying to get out. However, I counted wall tiles in several different ways and got to 486 full ones in our bathroom! So... that's something I didn't know before.

Moral: when you're bored, you think about things that you'd probably never think of.

boring things sure get fun
when your pacing is a pastime.
you can count tiles in arrays,
or individually. oh, sublime!
i wonder why we capitalize one
person, but not the others. days
are counted from the morning right?
was one person discriminating against night?
oh well, this what i did for a half hour
when i was locked in my goddamn shower.

30

I've noticed that the days are becoming shorter fairly rapidly here. Granted, the sun is still out at 10:30, it used to not really go completely down. Midnight here resembled about 9 pm back home. This poem doesn't have a moral.

The dark could but converge.
It hung at a fixed point,
Incorrigible to urge.

How stubborn was it one
Evening. The clouds floated
On the darkest cusp, a joint
That was quickly demoted.

For the days are shorter.
And as for the sun,
I’m not sure if we can afford her.

29

Flowers in front of Oslo Domkirke


My friends and I went back downtown this evening to take in more of the events, especially because it was difficult to do so last night when we were one of 150,000 people marching in Oslo. As we walked along Karl Johan and side streets, and by the block were the bomb went off, we noted the number of roses there were in front of Parliament, the Imperial Palace, churches, fences, even intersections. They were scattered but dense gardens. I've noted that people tend to grieve really intensely, get it out of the way, and move on, sometimes back into violent, insensitive lives, but when they grieve again, they'll be planting roses.

Moral: some things are forgotten over time, but they will happen in patterns.


flowers, you grow as
a million wishes
on the streets, sidewalk,
on our hearts, perhaps.
for hope, nutritious.

i see us relapse,
forget in distant talk,
but the mind still has
tendencies. you’ll bloom
in our wake of gloom.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Tjue Åtte

Today the city of Oslo had a rose and candle procession through the city, and my friends and I went. So did a lot of other people. 150,000 other people to be exact. I'd never been in a crowd that big, but there was something sincerely moving about the population of Oslo marching from City Hall to Oslo Domkirke holding roses in the air. Oslo has gone out of shock and into mourning, but not reproach and anguish. People are banding together. The last quote is a now famous quote by one of the survivors of the shootings at Utøyen, and I think it fits the general opinion of the citizens very well.

We are the city! We enter,
We pulse through the streets
Like blood. Its heart beats
As we march through the center.
“Ja, vi elsker dette landet!” is implied.
No one sings it but you can hear.
Everyone to everyone is dear,
As one voiced had cried,
“If one man can create that much hate,
Imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create.”

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

26 and 27

The first poem is a poem I wrote in my journal as part of my seasonal hand-written poem exercise. I usually give trees a very bad rap in some of my poems, but I found something redeeming about them as I drove past them in the forest. They may only give an illusion of strength, but sometimes anything is good enough.

The second poem I wrote upon returning to Oslo this weekend. People are still in shock, but the city is very quiet. No students are outside, people are quiet at dinner. I don't sense despair here.


7/23

Save me, trees! I cry
You are more fortunate than I!

How you stand, foreboding
In endless array. How you stand
Forever, keeping hold of the land.
How you stand unafraid in the dark.
Never telling if you are imploding.
Never telling save your bark.

I’ve hated you for having no soul.

But you sure have this all under control.

7/24

I have seen the sky
In tears. I have seen
The clouds scream vengeance
For the loss of May.

Yet it is quiet today,
Lost the urge to cry.
Lost urge for a sentence.
Lost of all clean.

Careful how we tread,
Fragile little head.


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

A terrible half-way point

As you may or may not have already heard, there were twin bomb attacks in Oslo this afternoon. A bomb went off at the city center about 5 km from campus, and I actually heard it and thought it was thunder. Later in the afternoon, there was a shooting at a youth camp for the Labour Party in an island. All in all, I've heard of 18 casualties. I was almost not going to write a poem, but I decided I had to capture what I felt when I walked outside shortly after hearing. Everyone and everything was so fragile. I will also be out of the city this weekend, so I'll be posting twice on Sunday again.

rolling quiet
just static of
shock a scream
couldnt pass through
the air is too brittle

no birds
but ashes
no weeping rain
but smoke hangs
too bleak for rain or birds

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

24

It's my half birthday today, so I decided to be all punny and transfer it into a poem. So I did that. This poem is just the first half of all the words of the poem. Is the meaning lost on you? Well, it should be. Don't worry; I'll post the whole words so you can actually read the poem too.

Moral: The entirety of things is generally necessary to understand them.

Wh nee th seco se o scre?
Do no on a pa ev matt?
Is it no go th so thi on shat?
Sin wh mu w pai ent sce?
Ca we no sti ded wh i mea?

An ye, thi shou b se an hea.
Wh i ha a exper t m?
Fu i ho i al sho b.
Yo ma fi th man abs.
D no wor, i i ju ha a wo.


Who needs that second set of screens?
Does not only a part ever matter?
Is it not good that some things only shatter?
Since when must we paint entire scenes?
Can we not still deduce what it means?

And yet, things should be seen and heard.
What is half an experience to me?
Full is how it all should be.
You may find this manner absurd.
Do not worry, it is just half a word.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

23 I guess?

I miss doing more lighthearted stuff. This was from an incident that happened today after we had dinner in Oslo. We were getting on the T Bane, or Oslo's metro subway system, and while two of my friends made it, my two other friends and I were behind them and the doors closed on us literally, snapping my friend's sunglasses literally in half. It was crazy and rather hilarious. This recounts the incident.

Moral: nothing is free. Not even when you have a month pass to the entire public transportation system in Oslo.

The dinner deep in our gut,
We ran on the platform. Our climb
Was too slow. The doors violently shut
On sunglasses and broke them somewhat.
The T Bane sure likes things on time.

Perhaps the trade was not so fair.
Offerings can be rather sundry.
The metro door had taken its share
For transporting us everywhere.
But I guess we were all hungry.


Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Double poem

So we're reading A Doll's House by Ibsen in my literature class, a play I wasn't familiar with. I enjoyed and decided to write this poem about Nora, the doll in her husband's house who asserts her freedom. So yeah. If you haven't read it, sorry, but if you have, here you go. This one doesn't really have a moral either. I didn't have one in mind; I just wanted to describe Nora.

A doll, maniacal
Dancing, they clapped
As you did your track.
But beyond the brass
You saw your liberty.

The wires snapped
On your back.
You held your mass
Like an uprooted tree,
Like virgin wool.

Do you lack
What would pass
For apathy,
Or a meager pull
To adapt?

Break the glass,
Break from me.
But careful,
You are so apt
To crack.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Inconsistency is my middle name

Or at least it should be. No poem today again. I'll do double duty tomorrow I PROMISE.
On the bright side, this time I'm warning you guys

Two poems... again

These are poems twenty and twenty one. I experienced severe writer's block yesterday and instead of manning up and admitting it, I just went to bed. However, I compensated for that today during the beautiful bus ride back from Bergen. That was a lot of B's.

The first poem was written after seeing this view of this:



It dawned on me at this point that no matter how many pictures I took, I would never capture the full beauty of the scene, which frustrated me. So I wrote this to whine.

Moral: human capacity of feeling far exceeds the capacity to convey it

Endless, endless, they vex
Me, and as the vistas go wan
I strain myself for precision.
Write perfection, undo knots
And explain it as my vision.

But I’m only human.
My feelings are more complex
Than my words.
I get close to my thoughts,
And they fly away like birds.

Also today, we went through different scenery than the way we came. We went up through Hardangervidda, or a mountain range by the Hardanger Fjord and spent a bunch of the time above the tree line. Way more stark but still beautiful.



This poem doesn't really have a moral or anything. Just wanted to prove to myself that I can describe something. Haha.

Not even the trees reach here.
Their branches are finite.
Fog hangs like the porch light
To give what is around it fear.
Oh cairns, the ground to you is dear.

Snow is an eternal creed.
It is pure here, always around.
Too cold for a profane sound.
Survival at least can reap its seed,
Not much more than what you need.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Whoops/ Triple threat

So Wednesday night I had an excuse to not post. I was in a hotel with no internet, but I dutifully wrote my poem anyway. We were staying in a valley, and I watched a mountain darken as the sun went down. This is also one of the first poems I've written in a while with a very strict meter somewhat like some of the old romantic poetry. I've been kind of caught up in romanticism while floating down fjords and going through mountains. Because it's contagious, seriously. You get around nature too long, you start really worshipping it.

Moral: Big or small, the flighty and cowardly have no power.

7/13

The mountains have so few of friends,
For when the midnight here descends
All that they leave are silhouettes.
Who would place hope in any stone
That cannot brave the dark alone?
And so they crumble to their shell.
Like lonely trees that lift their height,
So much they paint against the light.
So much have they in their regrets,
So much their traces have to tell.

Since being in Bergen, I've been busy and going crazy with Grieg. I've always really liked his music, and my favorite piece of his is called "Våren" or "Last Spring." I've always wanted to write a poem to go along with the music, not so much as text but as a supplementary piece. So that's what I did.

Moral: Memories are eternal

7/14

The green is buried below.
But I will always remember
The earth’s hello
Last spring.

Birds deep in the summer sky.
But I will always remember
Their very first cry
Last spring.

I will always remember
Last spring.

And finally, I've tried my hand at writing something a little lighter. Often times I get so wrapped up in my poetry that I don't always inject humor into it. So that's what I'm doing. Just to make sure I still have a sense of humor. Bergen is a lovely but very touristy city, so I've been laughing at the gimmicky/ kitschy things they have for sale that really aren't worth it.

Moral: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.


7/15

A Norwegian flag hat,
An “I heart Bergen” cup,
A magnet with a troll,
You know, the stuff that
Really makes you whole.

I’m not gonna lie.
This truth was thought up
By many, many scholars:
“My friend, you can buy
Anything with dollars.”

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Poem Sixteen?

I think this is poem sixteen? The last poem was two in one, so I guess this is technically the sixteenth.

This poem is entirely in six word phrases and lines, to commemorate the SIXteenth poem and because six word phrases are supposedly the most aesthetically pleasing or something. Seriously, look it up. Entire books have been written like thus. I don't quite understand why.

I always seem to neglect summer. I write extensively for spring and fall and winter, but summer for me is the middle child. In it I'm either waiting for fall or missing spring. But I've decided to give it the attention it deserves. One thing I've always found about summer is that it is the shortest season and it goes all out, in heat and sunshine and daylight hours, but then it slips into fall very quickly. That's why I wrote this poem.

Moral: quantity does not always surpass quality.

Oh summer, your boundaries so defined:
Don’t you know how to live?
Does pacing matter in your mind?
I think that is not so.
You run only for the go,
Until you have nothing to give.

But I suppose that is allure.
If not now, then not again.
If not killing, then the cure.
Black and white, now and then.

Two poems in one

This is the double poem that I promised. It's also in blank verse, kind of. None of my stuff is really in blank verse, because I make it all rhyme in some way or another. I'm not quite sure what brought about the inspiration for this one. It came out on its own terms and was a surprise to me while I was writing it and I was seeing what it was becoming.

Moral: lies kill people, because people who are not in reality are not alive.

Never guess. Exert yourself until
You know that whatever you doubt
Is incapable of falsehood. Often lies
Sew themselves so that their thread
Is borne neatly from the reality.
But when its truth is found out,
What happens? Does your breath still?
Do you flounder at the duality?
Lying does not make the liar dead.
Rather, it’s just how the victim dies.
People cannot exist outside the realm
Of truth. Truth is our oxygen, our blood,
Our creator. And it can be withheld.
A killer dissociates a person from the real
In whatever way. They alter the truth
When the victim believes. They overwhelm,
They multiply, they dictate what to feel,
They survive, caked on like mud
And they swirl, and then they meld!
Behold a dystopia in its youth.

No poem today

Seriously. I'm exhausted right now and want nothing more than to sleep. I'll make it up somehow later in the week. Maybe I'll post a longer poem or something. Yeah.

:(

XIII poem

This is an example of a poem that doesn't really have a clear moral message. I wanted to keep playing around with my more artsy side and write a more descriptive poem, once again inspired by Sognsvannen. Sognsvann deserves its own label for inspiration. Anyways, note the huge run-on sentence that is the first stanza and how the words spill over onto the other line, like a wave spills over onto the shore.

Well, I guess this kind of has a moral of some things just don't come back, while some do, but I'm not going to press it like I do with the other ones.

The heartbeat of the lake is aud
ible from the coastline and col
ors swing from blue to a god
ly gold that sticks to a hull
bottom of a boat that drags it
self along the ground like a ser
pent before it leaves forever to sit
uate itself on a silken path of blur.

Not a wave upon the shore.

It doesn’t greet you anymore.

The twelfth poem

I've been spending a lot of time at Sognsvannen, a lake on the north side of Oslo where I've started running every other day. About 5/6ths of the way through my run, I always take my sneakers and socks off and dip my feet in the water on this beach. Today I watched a duck going about its business, eating and stuff, before it turned to me, saw me, and flew off. It made a very lovely wake because the water was so still, which inspired this structure.

Moral: There is always someone above you and below you. You are fearful and to be feared.

The duck swam.

Its feet made waves
In a perforated triangle.

And the duck spoke: “I am
A master now. My choice saves
This certain grass from being eaten.

“But oh, I am so far from the highest view.
The danger I feel! Often I fear a wolf will mangle
Me by my neck. But, even then, a wolf can be beaten.
By you.”

Unpublished Material ©2011 Cali Digre

Eleven? Yeah, I think so.

I'm gonna be honest; I looked at my screen for a while before I came up with this one. I even had written half of another poem. I was in a big mood for some structure playing, and so I tried out a new style called a Tanka. It's a Japanese five line poem whose first and third lines have five syllables while the rest have seven. Unfortunately, I looked at that poem and realized that it was not going to come out, so I started from scratch.

Keeping the whole playing with structure in mind, I decided something new: DIFFERENT SIZED STANZAS! As you can see, the first stanza has two lines, the second three, the third four, and the final has one. It ended up working very well with the new theme I came up with about rain. BECAUSE IT FINALLY RAINED TODAY! It never actually rains here, I've hypothesized. The sky threatens you, then the clouds leave, then they come back the next day. Seriously. I think the structure ended working out great with the poem.

Moral: things get resolved in one way or another.


Things sure have a style,
Like the sky: suspense.

I suppose the anticipated
Holds a certain glory
When strain is dissipated

And nothing is tense.
This is the weather’s story.
Because, as I saw, for a very, very long while,
This hanging remained,

But finally it rained.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

o ha1 r0ses

So I just looked outside and saw some roses growing on the side of the dorm. This inspired this poem. I wanted to play with some structure. I've been doing a lot of two five-line stanzas, so I cut them up thus. And the first and the last line end with "roses;" the first stanza implies that roses are divine (hence the sole capitalization). However, when it is shown that "All can be Roses," they don't lose their status so much as "All" reaches the same level. Yeah, that's an explanation.

Moral: The tragedy is not that some things are inherently evil, but that they think themselves incapable of becoming good.

o Roses,
you quiet touch
of passion!

how so much
falls ashen
and supposes

itself a ration!
the life it closes
is not such.
All can be Roses.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

NUEVE

So today I felt like doing a little throwback. I revisited an old favorite structure of mine: AAAAB CCCCB. Of late I've shied away from it of late because I think that it gets a little bit kitschy, but for the sake of sake, I decided to try it again.
Second throwback: me complaining about the weather= quintessential Cali poem. If you do not remember, in the spring all I did for poems was either whine that it was almost spring, wasn't spring, raining, snowing, snowing too late, or looking at pretty flowers. The weather here has not been particularly good, according to the natives, and it really hasn't. Yesterday was the nicest day we had since I was here, and it was supposed to be nice again today but then I woke up to monotone skies. Though it COULD be nice tomorrow. But in general, lots of overcast and brinks of rain. It didn't actually rain today but it seemed so impending I couldn't help but put it in a poem.

Moral: nothing is predictable. Not even authorities are always right.

The silver coats the road
As if it were immortal code
To act as though it all flowed
In harmony. A certain goad
Gave false hope to a tide

Of possible ways to hunt the time.
Often life gives way to a crime
Like lounging. Nothing. Sublime.
But the roads today are mostly grime.
I think that the weatherman lied.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Sad face :(

I have absolutely nothing for today. I feel terrible but I literally cannot come up with anything. This is probably the most severe writer's block I've had in months. So, bear with me. The only remedy for these things is patience. Imagine that my brain is a bunsen burner that has been randomly snuffed out by a 9th grade boy who does not want to witness a double replacement reaction. I'm just waiting for a flint stone to spark something up again. And it will. Eventually.

No, that was not some sort of stanzaless, formless, new age sort of poem. That was an excuse.

Oh, and happy fourth of July.

Wait a minute....


SPARK

Moral: countries are not people; people are countries, and therefore countries cannot be described like places or things.

What can you tell
About what is home?
It is certainly not the loam
That gives one his spell.
It is but the mind.

So a country gives way
To what its people feel,
And do, and think, and real
Changes occur each day.
No nation can be defined.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Poooooooem (7 o's long)

Today I took a hike in Nordmarka and around Sognsvann and encountered this:



Since this pond was so smooth I literally couldn't tell what was it and what was the sky, I decided it would make a nice poem.

Moral: things may be similar, but they are not the same.

Water blends too well with things,
As if it were all on single strings.
A certain place finds my eyes,
Not to be described as one noun.
They clouds are gray, this place like ashes.

And so I watch it, and I
Am positive that this is the sky.
But a little boy splashes,
And then I realize
I’ve been looking down.

poemsix

While reading outside today I watched a group of girls move two benches together and talk amongst themselves. I don't know what they said, since they spoke Georgian, but when they finished talking they seemed much happier than when they started. This has nothing to do with anything else I did today.

Also note the rhyme scheme is ABCBA, symmetrical like a clam. I don't need to tell about the obvious clam/oyster imagery here either.

Moral: Sometimes a friend's ear can solve your problems. Friendship itself is to be treasured.

Opened like a clam,
A closed circuit, perhaps,
It faces its twin.
Fervent conversation traps
Itself, gram by gram.

They had sat on this bench,
And the one across from it,
With musings still within.
They expelled all of their grit,
And pearls formed from that quench.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Cinco／五

So I have returned to a model that I used a little bit in my last poem project: using two languages in a poem, and then MASHING THEM TOGETHER! Since I have now picked up Japanese as well, I can add it to the mix. And Norwegian will be coming along, eventually, so I'll have SO MUCH FUN! But seriously.

Of course, these poems will have accompanying translations.

This poem didn't really have any specific inspiration today, just felt like mixing some languages up. Note that the Japanese section is a haiku: the "feet" (syllables in English) correspond to kana (Chinese characters, hiragana, katakana, basically each little entity), though I cheated because I do not know some of the kanji, so I just used hiragana syllables instead. HEHE.

Moral: beyond us has much to offer, but we are often afraid.

Si jalaras a la cortina,
¿Qué verías? La esquina
No tiene mucha para oferte,
Quizás seas demasiado confortable.

窓から見て、
けしきが待っている。
一緒に行こう！

(Mado kara mite,
keshiki ga matteiru.
issho ni ikou!

Pero tanto miedo tiene tu espíritu.
ばかだ！こわい過ぎる。
(baka da! kowaisugiru.)

TRANSLATION:
If you pulled at the curtain,
What would you see? The corner
Does not have much to offer you,
Maybe you are too comfortable.

Look from the window.
The scenery is waiting.
Let's go together!

But your spirit has a lot of fear.
You are a fool! You are too afraid.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre