Letter to my Country in the Middle of the Night:

No, I am not afraid
to walk down the deserted street
of a beach vacation town
in the middle of the night.

I’m not afraid. I am comfortable.

I am lost in a sea, a sea of
mediocrity, of sameness, of states
joined together by the dotted lines of
Wal-Marts and McDonalds on the map.

My dear country who has raised me
to be so unafraid and free: Do you see me
sitting here in filth?

Don’t you see that “Farm-to-Table”
is not just another corporate marketing ploy
to generate a profit? Don’t you see that
I am lonely, too?

I am grateful to glide through your land
unscathed, my dear country, but please
just look at me. Look at me and see me.
Then maybe I won’t be so lost and lonely
on your shores.

"You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone." - Miller Williams.

You do not know
what to do
about your mother who
all your life
has been a sort of kept woman.
You do not know
except you do.
You get identical
headaches
you stay up late
you swear at your
child in the same
breath you tell him
you love him.
You search and
search in all the dumbest
places for love:
at the bar
on-line
driving past cars in traffic
(you look, you can't help it)
all the while
the love you seek
is right here
down at the sinew
the spirit and the bone
your own blood
your flesh and smile
burned like snapshots
on your brain.

Mud Season

Vermont, April 2010 marks the anniversary
of my son’s birth. I spread his eight years on the table
as if he could be measured or given monetary
value. Someone has to write the fable

of his life and keep it like a promissory note.
Someone has to witness the new leaf
on the maple, tote
around the vision, tinged with the belief

that symbiosis is prone to etiolate
the mother. The boy, flippant as a magazine.
Of course I chose to germinate, to create.
But who tells you motherhood is like the metabolic catalyst Tetrazene?

These eight years my body feels the slake
of the turning of baby to boy to grown man. A solemn
memory, his body in mine, I take
with me in my cells. His life, this spring, rises like a column

from the mud: full of grit
and wet black Earth. I’m bound
to get stuck. May as well tie me to the spit
and roast me. Listen to the sound.

Recycled

Spring has sprung.
The same road
carves out
the dull path
you take through landscapes
daily.
Hidden
broken
things are
revealed in spring.
Chunks of asphalt
wind-strewn limbs.
In between
Not a Thru Street
(but a blur of rain)
and Easy St.
a man
checks his mail
sifts
through stark white
pieces
of unwanted
information
quickly calculates
what he’ll keep
what he’ll recycle.

From Hunger Mountain Journal: Congratulations also to runner-up Samantha Kolber of Montpelier, Vermont for “Jewel Tones,” a Pantoum (in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza.)

“One of the many difficulties of writing in strict form is the pitfall of allowing the form of the poem to take over the content or the intention of the poet,” writes Matthew Dickman. “In “Jewel Tones” we see the opposite: A poet utilizing the form to carry the very human desire of the person writing it.”

Please check the website of Hunger Mountain Journal for my poem, Jewel Tones, to be published there soon: www.hungermtn.org

Dear Matthew: A Ghazal

Remember me, remember me: it’s what any woman wants.
Between night & sleep your arm hooks around my waist but I want the security of your days.

Days dragged out in quiet inner longings. Do you meditatate on the curve of my hips?
I want to know you might even smile when you think of me.

I want to know you know me as well as your hands know how to hold me,
That your heart and mind pin me down as hard.

We don’t do lovemaking, most of the time it’s just sex.
Skin on skin, the smell of you: I can get drunk on less than this.

Enough wine and your whispering in my ear all the desires of your cock
I might just believe it feels something like love.

I want to tell you everything I know.
Lives invisible live within these walls
Yet they hold me, and that is what I know.
They hold my books, my poems, family portraits,
Blankets, a couch, an unplayed guitar: All
the things I think I need to live a life.
And that is what I know. To live one's life
Between walls, among things. Comfort. Luxuries.
I dip Oreos in milk; the wind howls.
Winter screeches past my door and I am warm
Inside, while outside, the almost full moon,
With its cold face, stares down the snowy ground.
It's all I know: to watch with rapture at
The seasons, to listen and think each car
That squeals by or parks in front of my house
Is him, coming to tell me he loves me.
But it's not him. It's just me. And the wind.
Cookies & milk. These four walls I call home.

I am broken, I feel broken, only happy when I write a poem though I hear nothing nothing in the wind in the street in my cat’s sleeping breath to suggest a poem tonight. I hear nothing. I see nothing, therefore, I am nothing. Thinking is never enough to be something. You can’t just think to be. You must also see. You must also hear. You must also feel. You must be. Otherwise, what separates us from a tree stump? How do we know if a tree can or cannot think? Or feel? Or see? Or hear? Or know—I write that word real slow and if the font of my handwriting had an “italics” function I’d use it on know. It’s this “knowing” we seek, we look for, we crave to be part of. It’s this knowing I sometimes convince myself I have, I set myself apart, and then never really find anyone else who “knows” (words real slow BOLD and italics in quotations just to set it apart, to give it weight, to give it importance.) And I don’t even know what I know or how I know, but I know I know, and I crave to meet others who do, too. Like I can just look them in the eyes and I’ll know, and he or she will know, too, and we’ll be together in this knowing. Am I talking crazy talk or does it all make sense? Maybe it was all that acid in my youth, maybe the endorphins from my natural childbirth in my twenties, maybe the hiking to the tops of mountains, I don’t know what, or who, or what, gave it to me but I feel so strongly that I have it. You know?

Blue on white.
Blue on green.
Blue on blue.
The colors of you
Mother.
Crooked branch,
frozen thigh,
I just barely see you with my eye.
Drive by one yellow tree
in a huddle of March
green firs.

How you confer
your muddled shapes
your muted grays
in a veil.

Many times I’ve come to your chair.
Today I notice the seams in
your ocean wall,
the line down and through
the dolphin’s tail.

Black-striped
diamond
drill-bit
saws
at my tooth.
I smell the burn fetid burn,
swallow blood, bits of bone
the sucker missed.

I had to surrender to the
needle’s rape of me:
the plum violation
in my jaw — red , raw, plunged
yellow grip — needless to say
I felt more
than the tip.

I’m gonna get you numb.

That’s what we tell our Mother
when the winter comes.

The icicles demand
their stake in my mouth.

Bite down hard.

I write in raindrops Scottie in the Kingdom says to me, and a deluge of creativity comes raining down on me, comes pouring down sometimes when that muse whispers in my ear, tells me what I want to hear, which is people being creative and making meaning with their lives. Meaning with words, and meaning in whorls, which can't even be recreated no matter how hard we try, no matter how often we ask why, there's just a certain something to the science of life recreating itself in intermittent shadows and swirls of worlds.

An Excerpt from Everyday Seven Minutes, my book in progress:

I glide miraculous through this air that could be the air rushing off the peaked mountains in your picture, or the red and yellow fire of autumn in the fields of that other picture, or the rusted boat in Honduras. I glide miraculous through words and worlds and who needs travel when you've got a pen. I could be Zen, I could be back then going everywhere I should have gone before becoming a mother. But I am this other creature, this other human of inhuman remains what maintains stability in the frothy light of dusk and bedtime, you don't even know what's mine as you drive this time to my house. I am miraculous as I glide, and slide, and love the feeling of you inside me, how could it be, a poet finds something so divine outside herself, she can't help herself, she just wants to write and be heard and be understood, no matter what's good, no matter my mood, or who or what or where. You like hardware, and we write a poem about it, and you are genius in your simplicity, so simple, no duplicity, hard at work making wood, making words, making poems, who could have known? I'd have a naked man on my couch this evening. Do I dare, do I dare? How could I be so bold? Don't I do as I'm told? Writing. Free. So free to be me. To look at this man asleep and wonder if he really knows me. Or does he really want to.

Mammography Room

The mammography room where
my left breast is talked about
is small, and on the desk stands
a rubber spatula
in a silly wicker basket in the shape of an owl.

Rubber pads on machines can't cushion the words
nodule, left quadrant, biopsy.
My blood drips from bitten cuticles
(I could never shake your hand,
doctor).

His voice on the other end of the phone is only
36 hours too late, babbling about tastes
not having colors, and Swedish Fish turned hairy
at the bottom of a pint glass of beer.

Some performance, this life.
This pain and swollen mass, this
learning how to listen
to these vibes, the ones that tell me when
to cry, when to write.

Telling me: he was never the one.
I'm always looking, just as deep,
trying to pick up the one blip in the x-ray
that could mean something
or nothing at all.

Making Metaphors About Metaphors on Valentine's Day

My heart scrapes against glass
again in the wind. It's a metal heart,
red, with a small hole in the upper left corner.
It's less than perfect (everything always is).

The wind shoots down the street as if it's aimed,
a tunnel of sound, it's the only sound in this small town.
A few ghostly howls, a steady drone, and it could almost lull me
to sleep if not for that jolting scrape of metal and glass.

It gives me a start as I lay in bed, and makes me think twice
about hanging love out on the porch like that.
After tonight's storm, I'll find my heart on the ground.
A little dented maybe. All wet. That's how it goes, I guess.

I still have hope that this time, the storm won't be too strong.
And this time my heart will survive. I'll just pick it up, brush it
off, and hang it back up on that rusted nail.
'Cause I'm the kind of gal who hangs her heart outside, who loves hearts made of steel.

Single-handedly
I alone
am alone
by choosing
to be me
by choosing
to be free
what crazy woman
raises a son on her own
what crazy woman
falls in love
more than once
and thinks each time
this is the one
the one true saving
she’s been waiting for.

Triolet

Pieces of you get left behind.
Ripe dandelions on a windy day,
stragglers by design.
Pieces of you get left behind:
your skin, your breath, your imprint on my mind.
Sometimes I wish the whole of you would stay.
Pieces of you get left behind
as ripe dandelions on a windy day.

Methodically walking because it’s the only thing I know how to do
as I contemplate leaving you.

I know you’re not the one but I still want you to be.
You’re too different from me.

I just want someone to love;
to love me.

To hold hands with down the street;
recite poetry.

But don’t cover me, nor devour me
or make me feel incomplete.

Life’s just not that neat
even with all the straight lines I see

as I walk from line to line
on the squares of sidewalk.

I gawk at the way we follow lines:
the crosswalk
the timeline, and tick-tock, the clock.

Even the cigarette in the hand
is a line to our death.

Oh nonsense, nonsense, none of this
makes any sense, like the yew and the moontree,

some great powers that be,
an inverted universe

where I am a poet
and the lines follow me.

Samantha Kolber
from 1/17/08

I Think It’s Sort of Amazing

With the wind at my back, the points of yellow stars always point to you
as if the punt in the bottle coaxes the wine from the neck.

Sometimes your mind won’t stop, not even for
a moment, not even to take in the shift in color in a cloud at sunset.

They say the whole is greater than the sum
but I wonder if greater is better...or worse.

The sky that just sits above your head as an offering:
some silence is peaceful while others are awkward, drinking

wine the color of crimson and blood, like oceans after
a feed, rolling through folds of a tapestry more colorful than you can possibly weave.

Ruled by ways we can’t understand, the not knowing a weight on our shoulders,
and maybe, just maybe, all that came before, is all that will come to be.

Words like branches reach out to the sky;
Poets always walk alone and wonder why.

Poets always stare too long at the beautiful:
a child, the moon, a blueberry bush so full.

A random lady in front of a Friendly's
bends to touch a white flower, its green leaves

point up skyward.
Again, I see that metaphor, awkward

of life and beings all reaching up
as if to grow from bottom to top is not to give up.

As if to write about it makes it so.
My son says don't write about me though.

He asks, Is it about these crayons?
It is now, but way beyond

those four basic colors, red, yellow, green, blue,
which can't even capture you.

The riper of two fruits to my taste
is a man's words that fall from so much haste.

All this desire I try to feed,
my fingertips stained from picking blueberries.

A Sunday afternoon, a day almost done.
A poet almost satisfied with what she's begun

to articulate, to communicate:
a fishamajig on a plate,

a few french fries, the still blue skies
and something from deep within that plies

through the waves of black ink crashing down on the pages through this pen.
As if writing in a booth in a crowded Friendly's is a way to find my Zen.

Divine Light wants to pour into my head through an opening I am not sure I want to admit exists. If I am open, I am vulnerable. If I am closed, I may as well be dead.

Epiphany at the end of a poem (or at 2:39 am)

This is what a poet must do: make the invisible visible
a thought, a feeling, an idea
only poets see these
fly as a bird, run as a wolf, stand naked as a tree.