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Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

I'm Really Bad with Titles

I hate adding titles, so this is a poem about spring. Like that narrows it down at all...

Who lit up the green flame?
Who invigorated the grass, the trees?
Who never gave up on spring’s game
Even when she gave not a breeze?
Who clung to her verdant name
As if their faith would bear no shame?

Who watered all the colors today?
Why are the blues brighter, the whites
Crisper than the words they say?
Why do the leaves hold daytime lights?
I’ve but forgotten what is “gray.”
The hue is banned when it is May.

Who reversed the film of fall?
The buds emerge like nothing’s wrong.
A winter’s reign can seem so small
When broken by a vernal song.
And yet the cold I can’t recall
Can be remembered with a squall.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Dartmouth Appreciation Poem

So right now Dartmouth is having Dimensions for all the prospies who could potentially come here. Seeing them run around made me think about where I was a year ago, and how I had (almost) never thought of being here now. And how fortunate I am to be here. Yay nostalgia. Yay prospies.

Also if the rhythm and structure seem familiar, it's because I blatantly copied Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" because I was too lazy to come up with my own structure. Also it seemed fitting because Frost went to Dartmouth for 3 months before he dropped out to take care of his mom. So.. another Dartmouth connection! So metaphysical.


When from a year I am detached,
Nostalgia cannot quite be matched.
Believe in life’s telicity,
A chance that I wisely had snatched.

Emotional simplicity,
And joy’s unkempt felicity
Could do no good service to sing.
Oh, too much electricity.

A pity to forget a spring
When one answer was everything,
When one choice had power to steer
The way even a cloud could fling.

Uncertainty predestines fear,
A shadowed future. In a year
How did I ever end up here?
How did I ever end up here?

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Parables of Dawn: Part II

So as promised, I am posting the second part of the dawn poem that I wrote the morning after I graduated from high school. Partly because I like continuity, partly because it's finally sunny here again, partly because I feel in no mood to stretch my creative tendrils. I posted the other one exactly a month ago, which I swear was not particularly planned. Enjoy!


Gentle sheets cut short my view
Of anything beyond the swing.
The murk obstructs whatever pleasant thing
May occur in the frivolities of dawn today.
The blankets lie dependently too,
Weighing down the trees with gray.

Disowned songs wander in the mist,
Looking for their owners, birds and the like.
The grass scowls from how my feet spike
Its lanugo without any real thought.
I’m sure it could archive its twist
And how against my weight it fought.

The milky film stretched before my eyes
Is not infallible like it seems
As the color settles to cleaner creams
Until the foreground is augmented.
The sheet drops til it lightly lies
Above where the grass has relented.

The grass fondly absorbs the curtain
Until no thread of it remains,
And each grass blade fully contains
A drop of moisture, the soothing dew.
The grass is happy, I am certain,
And I admire the unmuted view.

Haze is never one to linger
And when it leaves, it leaves in good:
The grass is quenched where I had stood.
The pureness glistens on each blade.
The lawn stretches its every finger
Towards the sun that morning made.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Spring

Slanted sunlight’s stretched shadow
Chips away white layers. Pines
Don’t forget the fall ago.
Forest trees boast thicker spines.
Brown remains, but yet in slow
Reaches come the vernal vines.
Grow, little optimists, grow.

I can’t speak for everything,
Too much left for certainty.
Tomorrow’s presence may bring
Beaten frost caked on a tree,
Or a sapling’s single wing.
But that is enough for me:
Hope is all I need for spring.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Late Winter Sky

The wanton climate clipped its fist
To make its way in between
A season’s undernourished sheen
And a new time. A gentle mist
Undoes every icy cyst.

Though not shedding beryl blood
The mountain leaves say “Amethyst!
Our fall colors must still enlist
Patronage.” And so they flood
And mingle with the frost’s scud.

Pure, primary, blue glaze,
Quieter than a spring bud,
Evaporated thawing mud,
Moving towards a verdant phase,
I remain when my eye stays.

And though my life is far from green,
I feel like this deserves some praise,
A progress flourish, Polonaise.
I’ve never seen a sky this clean
In any March I’ve ever seen.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre