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Unpublished Material, ©2012 Cali Digre
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
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
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
Friday, December 30, 2011
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
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
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
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
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
Sunday, December 25, 2011
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
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
Friday, December 9, 2011
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
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
Sunday, December 4, 2011
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
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
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