OctPoWriMo Day 7. “spine & ribs” // “BACKBONE”

OctPoWriMo Day 7. The Core of Our Beings

In poetry, the skeleton of your poem can be its poetic form or shape on the page. It can be the through line of the poem: a mood, a color, a theme, or extended metaphor. It can also be an emotional arc and/or a narrative structure.

Example Poem: “Sleeping with One Eye Open” by Mark Strand from Voetica.

Sleeping With One Eye Open

Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas
Of the house make their usual racket–
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
Instead,
They are still.
And the maples,
Able
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke
Not a sound from their branches
Clutches.
It’s my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. Even the half-moon
(Half-man,
Half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good, and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
~Mark Strand

How does the structure of this poem help to convey the meaning?

Prompt: Write a poem about a skeleton of any kind. Use sensory details from at least three senses, and a personal experience of one of the fears from your list. Use your line breaks to give your poem an interesting skeleton.

Possible form: Mesostic. The Mesostic was created by John Cage. You may choose to use the Mesostic Poem Generator to generate many different Mesostics until you find your favorite.

~

A note before you read: I tried understanding Strand's poem as I found it super interesting. Strand’s poem builds a rattled music out of short stepped lines and internal rhyme (“maples / able,” “rattled / saddled / handled”), making a house that should creak stay eerily still while the speaker absorbs the disturbance and form enacts anxiety. The abrupt line breaks (often on prepositions/articles) create micro-stutters; the repeated two-beat tail-rhyme mimics the half-moon’s off-kilter light; and the final couplet’s neat closure (“open / hoping”) ironically seals the dread. So, net: structure = symptom. The OctPoWriMo Day 7 prompt asked for a poem about a skeleton, with at least three senses, a personal fear, and line breaks that are a skeleton. Here are two versions: a free-verse “spine & ribs” layout, and a mesostic (John Cage's "What you say. . ."–style) whose vertical word is BACKBONE (I mark the vertical letters in Caps inside the lines). (For mesostic background: vertical phrase intersecting mid-line, unlike acrostics.)

Poem 1. “spine & ribs”
(Free-verse;
Fear: the latch that won’t open; 

Senses: sound, touch, smell, taste, sight)

the night is
a thin spine
    of doors

I put my ear to the vertebrae—
  k—k—click (no give)
the metal’s breath tastes
  like a coin held too long—
copper on the tongue,
    palms damp as peeled fruit.

under paint:
  the musk of old wood, rain-leaked,
a faint mold note rising—my mother once said
    the house keeps receipts.

I count each rib of the corridor—
  frame, jamb, latch, bolt—
as if touching the names could hold the world still.

behind me, the air’s cool hand
  slides my hair aside;
in front, the keyhole is a pin-eye sun,
  sting bright, useless.

“open,” I say, softly, to the bones of the door.
the hinges remember their rust and answer
  with a powder-dry sigh.
I press the whole map of my body to wood—
  grain against skin,
    fear against frame—
until the house and I share one cautious heartbeat.

somewhere a kettle begins to think;
somewhere a street dog shakes rain from its coat;
and something inside me—
    the small animal that hates to be seen—
climbs back into its cage of ribs,
  lays down,
    and listens to my breath
find its old, honest measure.

Poem 2. “BACKBONE”
(Vertical letters down the center spell BACKBONE;
Senses used: taste/metal, touch/sweat-grain-heat, smell/varnish-rain-gas, sound/kettle-brake-tags, sight/moonlight.)

Brittle moonlight sips the keyhole; I taste metal on my tongue, a
hAnd on the knob, slick with a kitchen-salt sweat—
the Corridor holds itsself together by smell: old varnish, rain, a thread of gas—
the locK thinks about other careers again.
Beneath my palm the door’s grain BuRns a faint path—
mOrse from another room: kettle / bus-brake / a dog’s tags—
the Night leans its ribs against mine;
and i End the count at one word that fits in any latch: here.

~ Oizys.