Silence has fallen?

Yeah, I've been really busy this term, and for this I apologize sincerely. BUT... I'm in a poetry class! This means that I get to write poetry for homework even though it's just for fun! So here are two poems I've written as part of our exercises. One of them I like (the first one) and it's a blank verse exercise, so everything's in iambic pentameter. The second sucks (the prompt was vague... some sort of enjambment exercise? I didn't understand it and I think it shows), but I figure I might as well share it. I'll be posting more soon, since I'm acclimatizing myself to the term... But here they are!

My Grandfather Sits in the Cemetery Where He’ll be Buried

I practice saying “Florida” out loud.
The etymology is Spanish, but
I cannot fathom what it means. The moss…
The Spanish moss conquers its mannequins
And casts its net to catch the katydids,
Cicadas. How it smells of catacombs.
But this moss does not grow in Colombia.
Just purple orchids, roses pink as health.
I see these flowers all around me now,
But only as a tool for mourning. Graves.
I think this is the plot they’ve set aside.
La mía. Look at all this Spanish moss.

My mother killed herself right after church
When I was twelve. She smelled of fens. I cried
So hard I had forgotten that she died.
I buried her, later my sister too
The same way. This is how I coped with death.
Good Friday: when guerillas scalped my son
Because he didn’t know to shoot a gun
When running towards the victory of peace.

And yet in all these contexts, all the same.
I’m fluent in this dialect of loss.
I practice saying “moriré” out loud.
The Romances are all from Latin, but
The etymology of “death” is Life.



Because I was too lazy to fasten the strap,

My watch regrettably reveled on the concrete at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis
five minutes before curtain.
I trusted its proclivity for survival,
Even though the encrusted rivets
Suspended
Themselves in the gears.
The more I shook it
—I didn’t realize this until I took it to the jeweler three months later—
The more the flimsy steel arched its back,
And the onslaught
Of minute semblances of time
Got caught in dormant skeletal alloy caverns.
The poetic whimsy of busting your watch
Until its innards resemble
A human sacrifice…
All on accident
Of course.
It wouldn’t suffice to say
That how time employs itself
Is so evident in what we
Possess.
Otherwise, we would all be skeptics.


Unpublished Material, ©2012 Cali Digre

Daily Sketches III

Right now I am on a plane on my way back to campus... AND I'M SO EXCITED!!! Hope everyone had a happy new years and yadda yadda yadda and I was busy being cultural at EPCOT (every bit ironic as it sounds...) and ringing in the new year and sleeping and not getting tan. But I just finished writing three of the image poems, which are not really as "imagey" as I thought/ hoped they would be. They have an elaboration on some images that I made, but a few just really really resemble another free verse with more in-your-face imagery. But yeah... Here are the three that I've written. I'll have the other two ready maybe a little later...

1. Blood Pressure,
Grateful for it like a pulse
Of silver, a blue straw tapping
A rhythm in quiet exhaustion.
To worship this percussion
Is to love the simplicity of strength.
Iambs flock from the mosque
To every place they are barely required.
The missionaries of the bare essential.


2. Flat (final)
“Topical” is like a glacier pouring itself out onto Aconcagua,
The relationship between a finger and grimy asphalt.
“Penetrating” is like grass roots on a sidewalk crevice,
The tenacity of a fault line burying itself into the skin of the earth,
The way I peel an orange.
The way space peels away a neutron star.
I know about the latter than the former,
But only because it so resembles “pain.”
Is my head on this pillow “topical”
Or “penetrating?”



3. Dressed Up

A folded copy of a partita that resembles a peony
sits on my desk behind you.
The thick notes dot it with inky dew
in a language that you can’t speak but I can.
I weigh it in my hands, knowing paper doesn’t bounce,
but nor does a squash ball.
Nor does a pillow.
I lie restlessly on this score flower because
I just don’t understand you.

The way the ink smudged resembles a cerulean,
like a puddle at Disney World.
Your tie matches the copyright origami matches your eyes
and so I do not acknowledge any.
They all blur together like autopsy skins
of the victims of asphyxiation.
Then, out of the blue, I give up.
I throw away the peony because
I am sick trying to learn how you made it.

Unpublished Material, ©2012 (WHAT?!?!) Cali Digre