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Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre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