Fiddlings of a Poet in a Month of Poetry
by Kathryn Winograd
“I must confess that I, too, like it:,” writes Ronald Wallace in his poem, The McPoem, “the poem that’s fired up flat and fast with condiments…/ A poem you can count on always to be/ the same-small, domestic, fun for the whole/ family.”
So what does a girl do when she fears her poem stuck beneath the golden arches of the McPoem? McPoem? Dreaded moniker bestowed upon the predictable workshop poem born of tidy narrative sensibility, careful blue milk imagery, and that reader-weaning epiphany of transformation.
Oh, but she loves it so-the ordinary title of an ordinary day, the perfect epigraph signaling “deep, deep,” the orderly figurative turns and twists until the last redemptive “oh.”
Does she turn it on its head? Let epiphany become title? And narrative genesis become end?
Is she wrong-headed, this girl? But what of tenderness, the unexpected quiet of a cradling hand?
***
A word is elegy to what it signifies
Robert Hass
You teach me eye and arm, your hand cradling
the weighted base of this microscope.
A careful, slow turning of power, this,
and at your touch a miniscule slice of frog
muscle transforms into clear facets
of rubies, I say, the new world already
naming itself into the bearable.
Do you see? you ask me, catching now
a nail scraping of onion between wedded
glass, my terrible nightly weepings
dissipating into thin paper
as I squint one-eyed down the eye tube
into light, nudge the first apparent nothings
into the torn edges of onion,
the illuminated epidermis-
those soldierly cells with their black dots,
eyes, I think, of this translated nuclei—
littering the dear and visible world with our
dreams of sphere and stem, word and tears
***
of sphere and stem word and tear
littering the dear and visible world
eyes i think of this translated nuclei-
these soldierly cells with their black dots
their illuminated epidermis-
into the torn edges of onion into light
nudge the first apparent nothings
as i squint one-eyed down the eye tube
dissipating into thin paper glass my terrible
nightly weepings
a nail scraping of onion between the wedded
do you see? my daughter asks me-catching now
naming itself into the bearable-
of rubies I say the new world already
muscle transforms into clear facets and at her
touch a miniscule slice of frog
a careful slow turning of power this:
the weighted base of this microscope
her teaching me eye and arm her hand cradling
Kathy will be presenting a workshop on radical revision, Discovering Kintsugi
