Day 7-Call me Bonham

Or call it Moby Dick
though the book bore
nothing on the title,
or the sticks broken,
or whipped away
while the band walked
off stage as he beat bare
hands bloody, and, maybe
a little drunk, he rocked
one foot on the treadle.
To make a mighty hook
you play a mighty lick
leave a damning wake,
and a broken stick,
and a riff, or two, behind.

Here's a much shortened version of John Bonham's drum solo from Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick." Legend has it, he sometimes played for 30 mins or more.

Day 6--Two Suppers at Emmaus by Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus
c. 1600-01; Oil on canvas, 54 3/4 x 76 3/4 in; National Gallery, London

The worm in the apple gnaws the fruit away,
 and the dressed fowl the men have devoured

by the time Caravaggio remembers the inn-keeper
 and his creased wife, the finer linens 

and the pitcher as detailed as the Gospel of Luke,
 and the ridiculously large ears of Cleopas.

What fierce blaze gets fired and glazed
 within the tender  hearted as a stranger paints 

the air with his midrash of pigment and time? 
 What light layers enough shadow over years? 

I am inventing this last part; the rest you could have 
 read or been shown on your own:

Caravaggio once punched a drunk in the head 
 and saw Jesus as the man’s flesh dented  

beneath his fist like a warm loaf. For five years,  
 the stranger arose again and again in Caravaggio’s eye.

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus 1606, Oil on canvas, 141 × 175 cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Day 5--Fairy Tale

You are singing Stardust
 like you’re Ella Fitzgerald,

and I am singing Stardust
 dead on as Willie Nelson.

Together we have filled
 our bedroom with enough

dust to set off your asthma,
 though I think you’re scatting

when you cough in that syncopated
 way that sounds like the earliest

records of the tune, before anyone 
 had written a single lyric.

And when I twine Willie’s smooth
 near whine around you,

my eyes closed, imagined bandana
 tight around my forehead,

you nearly die from the reverie,
 the memory of the time

you nearly died running home
 from school, the Wahlberg boy

chasing you. And here is Hoagy Carmichael
  trying to strangle you now
 
with a few changes and a pulverized star. 
 I finish in time to pry

his hands from your neck.
 We catch your breath 

together and close our mouths
 to the lovely and deadly dust

so plentiful in the near-light of dusk, 
  not purple, but dark blue and so plain.

Day 4--Minor Resolution (or Stephen Isserlis Plays the Song of the Birds after the World Explodes)

Not only the small birds but the great, ungrounded
eagle, her slow curve from height, her slow curve
from depths again. I am not a believer in birds of war
but in this lark of the finger on string, in a g-minor wind become hymn.



Note: A lovely translation by Lydia Davis of the original song, along with commentary, from Poetry

Showing a Photograph to Raymond Carver of My Father in His 31st year

The grin and high cheeks, the tightened lips, poised
 before an exclamation to my mother,
   could break Raymond Carver’s taut heart.

His young father carried fish on a string 
 and bottles of beer in one hand. Little
  Raymond had not yet been born.

But I am the serious bellied boy
 at the wooden arm of your old lawn chair.
  I am pictured and pleasant enough and small.

I desire to be the opened book, 
 the paper in your right hand’s steadied grip, 
  left hand relaxed from reading me.

I would like to show you Raymond Carver’s
 poem and the 1934 Ford
  he parked behind his Daddy.

I would like to show Ray the jig-sawed scar
 on your outside right thigh and ask him why
  he thinks it never healed. 

Here's the classic Carver poem on which this is a riff.

Day 2-30 Ekphrastics in 30 Days

Moby Dick

I am halfway through
Moby Dick, the painting
by Pollock, and, again
I can’t finish the damned
thing—too large and too much
time he spends dissecting
every bit of blue. I mean
how many harpoons and turning
flukes does a world need?
I am stranded in the upper left hand
corner for like a week before
I begin to descend and when
I reach the roiling mess
of what seems to be fire
and mountains and men
and black fins, a pair of feet
or two, and Queequeg’s sacred
map of the back of the world,
I think, I am such a Starbuck.
I should have watched a movie,
or started the painting from the bottom,
where I knew it would end

30 Ekphrastics in 30 Days

It's National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), among other things. I will write an ekphrastic a day for the next 30 days.




April 90th

Scuttled in the wake of Pablo’s Gertrude,
awakened by the turn and term of head,
I head into the April air construed
by 90 airs of Bach strewn through my head.
Thrown hard against the arm chair’s broken arm,
she breaks her brow and plays an April Fool
and fools Picasso like a Harlequin,
and likens then herself to paint. His tools
of eye and self and paint and eye and self
she eyes herself, her velvet coat, her skirt.
He coats her in a gown of browns. She tells
me, Leo, grown and groan and sounds of hurt
sound palatable to a posing girl.
One palette, brother, tints and soils the world.