Chijitsu: The Lingering, Long Spring Day – A Haibun

No longer Cohesive

The Lingering, Long Spring Day

Each second, like a drip from a faucet–like the faucet he took apart, so I could clean it while he waited for the silicone to dry around the new sink–drops into the abyss. The sink leaked, then he fixed the leak, but came back and took it all apart because he didn’t like the plumbing, but it wouldn’t be mended because the old sink had corroded. A small drip now a three week project.

The seconds pool to minutes like the rain never stopping fills the lake and the river pouring over its banks. The chopping, angry waves threaten. The rain is incessant. Sheets of streams cut the gray at diagonals and meet the windows like acrylic nails impatiently waiting at the bar. I imagine them tapping on the porcelain of the new sink.

The minutes accumulate–drip by drip, converging pools to rising lake–into an hour. This hour is heavy with rain and the cleaner faucet lords over the new sink unused awaiting more hours to dry and your unexpected call brings a glimmer of cheer, but quickly whirlpools into uninvited conspiratorial nonsense and the seconds stand still until you will stop.

Fat droplets linger
At the bottom of streaked panes
Then fall to the earth

 

I wrote this in response to the Monday Haibun prompt at dVerse Poets Pub

 

 

N is for Noosphere

noosphere: noun – the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution

 

An Apple Is An Apple

Would you like to play a game?
All you need’s an active brain.
It starts upon the physical plane
But is played in the noosphere.

As Vladimir Vernadsky said
There is power in your head
To change material processes
A new riddle risen before us

You won’t need to leave your room
We’ll start looking at a blot and boom
Association levels bloom
Some meanings and duration shared

It can be played in any season
Just use the force of human reason
To control the will of legion
With consequence beyond the surface

We’ll meet beyond the horizon of
The imaginable and then think above
A heart symbolic of to love
To a higher dimension of meaning

If a match, a vision shared
Was there energy when we paired
Measurable, material aired
In the realm of the unimaginable?

No? Let’s play again.

 

Further Reading

Would you like to learn more about the noosphere? You may want to check out:

150 Years of Vernadsky: The Noösphere (Volume 2)

Cosmic Humanism;: A Theory of the Eight-Dimensional Cosmos Based on Integrative Principles from Science, Religion, and Art by Oliver Reiser

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance by Rupert Sheldrake

The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap by Peter Russell

Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness (Manifesto Series) by Jose Arguelles

The Economics of The Noösphere: Why Lyndon LaRouche Is The World’s Most Successful Economic Forecaster Of the Past Four Decades by Lyndon H LaRouche Jr. and Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky

Happy Reading and Writing in the Noosphere!

See you tomorrow.

N is for Nisus – I woke up thinking it was Monday. I’ll do another N tomorrow.

nisus: noun – a mental or physical effort to attain an end; impulse: a perfective urge or endeavor

Villain in the Garden by Maria L. Berg 2016

 

Fresh-Scented Answer

Six months of siege
The men are restless
The tents can’t cover the stench of
prairie baked with sweat, blood and waste
I have no more blood-roiling speeches to impart
I need air and with haste

I disguise myself as peasant
And sneak inside the wall
To a garden drawn by sweet perfume
A song rises on the wind
Dipping and caressing the blooms
Unknowingly revealing my heart’s desire

The nisus to create chaos
Put on pause to find order
In silent centering or the mathematical
Arrangements of octaves
relaxing into combined harmony and discord

With a purple lock, the battle won
Eros fly your arrow and a temptation for good measure
To pursue the worst betrayal
I feel her watching, I set to scrubbing,
Finding pleasant scents, to masking
Expecting her arrival

Success ’tis mine, his weakness at my feet
As is she, abhorrent monster
Not worth the price I flee
And yet she clings to drowning
Feral gods you taunt
My enemy conquered transformed to hover
And the jilted lover drowned rises to fly, a heron.

The days at sea are slow and draining
But this drama is entertaining for
The once magic king now osprey
has spied the back-biting heron
And dives with talon and beak
Seeking revenge
Like the morning sun will come
This new war never ends

 

Villain Meditates by Maria L. Berg 2016

 

I took these pictures to illustrate my friend Christopher Bailey’s guest post on writer’s block. I love that they fit so well with today’s theme, so I can use them again.

M is for Mawkish

mawkish: adjective – 1. having an insipid often unpleasant taste 2. sickly or puerilely sentimental

writober 27
Mutation by Maria L. Berg 2017

 

Puerilely Sentimental

Your teacup rattles as the table wobbles
I quickly lift my cup in response
The steaming charcoal liquid close to my face
Smells of pleasant bergamot
But I remember its mawkish entanglement and
Center it carefully back in its saucer

I wince as the hammer echos beyond the window
A seagull screams. I smell the ocean
And our wobbling table is in a rowboat
I know I had placed matchbooks under the uneven leg
I bend over to find it and see that the ribbons
Of my ballet shoe have bunched to my ankle again
Frustrated, I begin to cross and wrap the pink satin and
Become embarrassed by the spots of blood

You sip your mawkish tea
The seagull lands on your head and
You lift your teacup to its beak
I worry that the blood from my
Ballet shoes will attract the shark
My ribbons tight, too tight, I hear
A clink of the china and two of my teeth
Float in the now cold tea
You bang your hammer on the table
Making it wobble and tell me to
Go to the dentist
I feel trapped in this rowboat
With you and your seagull and
Search the water for the shark

 

L is for Lapidescent and Lamott

lapidescent – adjective – turning to stone; petrifying

Symbol in the Mountain

 

Watch for spiders when turning to stone

A spider outside titanium tombs admits to gathering glass and
Pokes positive whispers to flip
Lichen over rocky ruins welcome collected chlorinated streams to
Come to yes, the dust spinning
You between tungsten traps sanction catching carbonation and
Stay pro compliment still
Safety-pins under obsidian obsessions permit keeping keeps to
Arrive at every surrender lapidescent.

Anne Lamott’s Truth BombsSigned by Anne Lamott

Last weekend (for my birthday), my sweetie treated me to a talk by Anne Lamott at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. Anne Lamott is the author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. My cousin (whose birthday is the day before mine) got me this book for my birthday years ago when I started my first novel.

We had great seats stage left and while we waited for the event to start, I admired the modern style of the room. The pod-like, tiered balcony seats reminded me of the floating senate sections from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

When she was introduced, we were told she likes to drop “truth bombs” and she did. She started by answering the questions “How do we keep going in these troubled times? Where do we even begin?” Her answer: “The system works because we’re not all nuts on the same day.”

I enjoyed her truth that “Help is the sunny side of control.” It reminded me of all the times my mother so kindly tells me about job opportunities. And sometimes my “help” isn’t what people need.

And if you want to have a better life, “start each day by feeding the hungry babies.”

Her advice for writers?

  • Stop! not writing.
  • Trick other people into writing
  • Write terrible first drafts
  • Get a lot of help
  • Pay attention
  • Wake up

Her newest book Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, in its gorgeous orange cover, was inspired by this song:

Though she said she sang it in church, so maybe not this particular version 🙂

These are fun too:

Want to listen to this song over and over? There are a lot of different recordings of Hallelujah Anyhow to choose from.

Happy Reading and Writing!

See you tomorrow.

Ars Poetica: Poetry At Play

writing-the-abstract.jpg

 

Poetry At Play

Play
Playing
Playing with words
Word play

Rhyme
Rhyming
Rhythm with
Schism and ism

Play
Playing
With beat
iambs and feet
To make line

Form
Forming
Or following
Syllabic plans
Or free stanz-
as

Play
Playing with nouns
Strong, specific nouns
To paint pictures
And bring them to life
with

Action
Acting verbs
Pushing readers
Off balance
Shocking them to emotion
and through relation
to revelation

 

I wrote this in response to the Meet the Bar prompt at dVerse Poets Pub

K is for Kainotophobia and Kakorrhaphiophobia

kainotophobia – fear of change

kakorrhaphiophobia – fear of failure

Rorschach mask

 

Summer Comes Too Soon

Wind whips a chill of impatience. Roiling waves chop at the bulkheads and ramps, speeding the jade of aged concrete, leaving lapilliform spaces for the next surge to fill.
Only the lowest hills are free of the cloud blanket. Toes of snow hint of the giant hiding behind the screen.

Unexpected kainotophobia isolates and penetrates this paradise;
man versus nature in constant battle. He fights the clover, the moss, the dandelions;
the crabrass, lambsquarters, and pokeweed. He is always on the defensive
to the marestail and witchgrass. But kakorrhaphiophobia rules the day.
Every day. Every moment of every day. And he will rule his Eden prison, this utopian cage.

Molten lava heart
Commander of the cloud sky
All watch the mountain

Feather in the Foreground

This is my first attempt at a haibun. When I read the prompt, I worried that today would be the first time my word of the day didn’t fit with the theme, but I think it worked.

Interested in haibun? You may want to check out Contemporary haibun online,

or one of these books:
Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun by Bruce Ross

Landmarks: A Haibun Collection by Ray Rasmussen

Journeys 2017: An Anthology of International Haibun by Angelee Deodhar

Happy Reading and Writing!

See you tomorrow.

J is for Jeremiad

jeremiad: noun – a prolonged lamentation or complaint

In you go

The NaPoWriMo prompt for today talks about the body as a union and about the future state of the union. It’s a fun coincidence that the prompt uses the state of the union as metaphor because Wikipedia states: “A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.” That sounds similar to a state of the union to me.

Thinking about the body as a union, I noticed that there are a lot of movement “J” words:
jut – extend up, out or forward
jump – to spring free from the ground
jumble – to move in a confused and disordered manner
juke – to fake (someone) out of position
juggle – to hold or balance precariously
jounce – to move in an up and down manner
jostle – to come in contact or into collision
jolt – an abrupt sharp jerky blow or movement
joggle – to shake slightly; to move shakily or jerkily
jog – to go at a slow, leisurely, or monotonous pace; to nudge
jive – the dancing performed to jive music
jitterbug – a jazz variation of the two-step
jitter – to make continuous fast repetitive movements
jink – to move quickly or unexpectedly; a quick evasive turn
jiggle – to move with quick little jerks or oscillating motions
jig – any of several lively springy dances in triple rhythm
jibe – to shift suddenly and forcibly from one side to the other
jettison – action of throwing
jet – to move or progress by or as if by jet propulsion
jerk – a single quick motion of short duration; jolting, bouncing, or thrusting motions
jar – a sudden or unexpected shake; an unpleasant break or conflict in rhythm, flow, or transition
jag – to move in jerks
jade – to weary or dull through repetition or excess
jabber – talk rapidly, indistinctly, or unintelligibly
jab – to poke quickly and abruptly; thrust

For today’s poem, I’ll try to work some of those great verbs into my jeremiad.

 

Make The Body Great Again

For too long this union was mind-focused.
A jitterbug of reading and typing,
eyes jibing, fingers jouncing
Hours spent sitting,
jading seats in chair, couch and mattress,
lost in thought and self-jabber
But I say Body first.

The brain is an organ, only one of many
We must set aside our differences
And learn to work together
Jettison idle mindfulness
Jar loose ideas, jig those joints to junctions
Jostle that jumble in juvenile jubilation
Juxtapose jogging with juried jurisdiction

Though we have a long way to go
We should focus on our many accomplishments
We have juked more than anyone could imagine
And jinked in ways no one could understand
Everyone is saying that our jiggle is the very best
But are they reporting it?
Why not focus on our great joggle for a change?

As we jut toward the stars and jab our own flab,
I say jump, get that body jostled
Remember, idle hands are the devil’s playground
There’s little we can do to completely
silence the jibber-jabber,
but a tired body quiets the mind.

 

Happy Reading, Writing and Juggling!

See you tomorrow.

I is for Ignivomous

ignivomous: adjective – vomiting or spewing forth fire.

 

Discovering Fire

 

The Bather

While
she tentatively dips a toe in the crystal water,
he races across the flat, dry land.
Top down, dark hair flying, blasting the classics
Smile so tight he can’t sing along
Smile so long his face tans that way
If he ever stops smiling, contrasting lines will punctuate
and radiate his visage.

While
he travels freely to no particular destination,
they sit across from each other in a dimly lit dining room.
Silver clicks and clacks on China, rings on crystal
She spits vitriol through ignivomous lips between bites.
He hunches over his plate, shoving overflowing forkfuls of steak,
mashed-potatoes and candied carrots,
mushy peas and roasted garlic
His hand works like an excavator.
Beet juice runs down his chin.

While
she expresses disdain over dinner,
the bather has waded up to her thighs.
She faces a troubling decision.
The next few steps are more sensitive.
Will she continue to inch forward?
While waves lap and splash creating goose flesh,
she rises on tiptoe to postpone the painful shock of cold
then steels herself and dives in.

H is for Hypotyposis

hypotyposis: noun – lifelike description of a thing or scene; a vivid, picturesque description of scenes or events.

Contrast

Hypotyposis

They suffered in those seconds turned to years
because a spat became a war when a look cut to murder

The warbler’s whisper twirled to hurricane
A goof that grew to cyclonic calamity

The mouse removing the lion’s thorn proved harder than
Separating the infant from the mob; the pebble from the mountain

A fleck in the eye scratched a swath of brilliant red pain
The minuscule damage opening space for the microbe

Multiplying to pandemic wreckage
A minute seed grown to the height of epic redwood

Termites amassed chew away the home
Never a stitch to sail nor to heal.

monster dancer

I found inspiration for today’s poem in The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 especially the poems in the section “from Tiepolo’s Hound.” Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Interesting side note: This month is the first time I’ve been very interested in the Nobel Prize for Literature and there just so happens to be a scandal going on right now with the prize committee. Swedish Academy in Crisis – New York Times. The story broke in the Swedish news last November: Man with Swedish Academy ties accused of sexual assault – Dagens Nyheter

If you’re interested in learning more about the Nobel Prize, you may want to check out these books:
The Nobel Prize: The Story of Alfred Nobel and the Most Famous Prize in the World
The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius , Controversy and Prestige
Nobel: A Century of Prize Winners

Happy Reading and Writing!

See you tomorrow.