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