OctPoWriMo Day 16. Measure with Your Mouth

OctPoWriMo Day 16. Screams in the Night

The voice of a poem is the style and perspective that a specific poet brings to her work. Each of us bring our unique voice to our poems which includes all of the choices that we make: the words, the line breaks, the stanza breaks, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. The more we write, the clearer our voice becomes.

In Tony Hoagland’s The Art of Voice(Aal), he talks about distance as part of voice. One way to draw the reader close is to use apostrophe or specific address. He uses the example, “Listen, Daisy.” Who might you address directly in your poem?

Example Poem: “Apparition” by Mark Doty from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection(Aal)

Apparition

I’m carrying an orange plastic bucket of compost
down from the top of the garden—sweet dark,

fibrous rot, promising—when the light changes
as if someone’s flipped a switch that does

what? Reverses the day. Leaves chorusing,
dizzy. And then my mother says

—she’s been gone more than thirty years,
not her voice, the voice of her in me—

You’ve got to forgive me. I’m choke and sputter
in the wild daylight, speechless to that:

maybe I’m really crazy now, but I believe
in the backwards morning I am my mother’s son,

we are at last equally in love
with intoxication, I am unregenerate,

the trees are on fire, fifty-eight years of lost bells.
I drop my basket and stand struck

in the iron-mouth afternoon. She says
I never meant to harm you. Then

the young dog barks, down by the front gate,
he’s probably gotten out, and she says,

calmly, clearly, Go take care of your baby.

~Mark Doty

What images does the poet use to express his “crazy” feeling?

Prompts: Imagine a ghost appearing to you while you were doing something you enjoy doing. How would you react? What would you say? What would the spirit say to you? Use sensory imagery to express your sudden change in mood.

Possible form: Speak the poem first – use a tape recorder and just speak until you get all your ideas recorded. Listen back and write down the best lines to form your poem.

~

Measure with Your Mouth

I was slicing mangoes for no one

when you leaned out of the yellow flesh,

with that grin; half-rotten, half-kind;

and said, “Still pretending sweetness?”

Grandmother, is that your hand guiding the salt again?
The kettle takes up its old siren you taught it to sing at the boil, to hush with a lifted palm.
The ghost could speak in the rhythm of recipes, instructing or correcting, and
I wrestle with memory and grief.

Steam fogs the window, and there we are,

your bracelets clattering in my wrists,

knife bright as a Sunday homily.

You say, Measure with your mouth.

I say, I am trying.

The lamp flickers like a bad memory.
You never believed in happy endings.
“Go on,” you say, “taste.”
The mango stings the cut on my thumb; like a lemon,
I want to forgive you and don’t.

Outside, the dog barks at nothing.

“Take care of your hunger,” you say.

I plate the fruit for no one,

and the room, at last, behaves.

Listen, old friend in the glass,
the kettle’s screaming again,
and for a second
I thought it was you.

I’m at the dish rack,
steam whispering down the spine of my shirt
when you fog the window and say,
“You still run from me.”

Steel bowl a small moon in my hands,

breath like a saw. You grin; half-rotten, half-kind;

“You said I’d never last.”

Steel answers steel; my pulse hammers time.

I count by salt: lip, wrist, tongue.

The light flickers; cheap tube-light thunder; and there’s that old staircase in my chest.

Between who I was and who I’ve built myself into,

And with that metallic steamy heartbeat, I climb anyway.

I was halfway through a book when the lamp flickered,
you always hated happy endings, didn’t you?
“You again. Tea or silence?” I offer the ghost.
“Sips,” you say. “Then we’ll talk.”

I pour into depth, rise through ache, building the life I refused you.

On the last rinse, you step back.

The window keeps only my breath.

“Okay,” you say, “now stay.”

Am I speaking to a lost love, or to solitude itself?
The ghost might say something that disarms my control.

~ Oizys.

[Some thoughts: The prompt asked me to address someone directly, to use apostrophe, like “Listen, Daisy,” or “Mother, are you watching?”. I tried to capture the moment a ghost appears while I was doing something ordinary or comforting. And, I used sensory detail to mark the emotional and physical shift, that “crazy” flick of reality turning on its head. For me, the haunting lives in the everyday. A grandmother appearing while you’re cooking, maybe you’re stirring risotto, and she appears in the steam. Like a ghost from your past, maybe an old version of yourself, appears in the window. You’re traveling solo again and a ghost sits beside you at a café. So it’s about voice meeting haunting, the moment the ordinary world and the unseen one briefly recognize each other, the collision of the everyday with the ethereal.]