A Sketch in Purple Crayon, with thanks to Harold

----

I had a long talk with you the other day.
Oh, I know—you don’t remember it.
That’s because it happened in purple crayon.
No, it’s alright. All our best conversations
Are like that. I’m used to it.

I drew us a nice sofa, and two glasses of tea.
I drew you there beside me, I drew
A beautiful friendship
I wrote down all your words in speech bubbles;
But all I had was this purple crayon,
So I’m afraid it’s a bit discoloured--
No matter. One gets used to purple after a while.


*note: this poem was written a longish while ago, but never posted and more or less forgotten. I just ran across it the other day.

little boys

they've not yet learned strength.
when the toast burns too black, they can't eat it.
can't. that's that.

they've yet to learn weakness
the deep sincere marrow locked away
in their tough bones.

And God said

...let there be light.

Now, I have to sharpen my pencil first.
And while His notebook was the sleeping universe, mine
is this half-filled yellow legal pad.
I'm just an apprentice to the Almighty Maker,
watching with deep
inquisitive eyes as His Poem
Unfolds.

three poems and a pop quiz

q. shenaynay

Wow. What hip and happenin' speed poets you all turned out to be! So what did I tell you... whipping out a pedal-to-the-metal poem like that was pretty fun, now wasn't it? Might just have to do it again this week. Like at a red light or something. Hoo boy. Why not?

You people are cool - did we ever tell you that?

We got the five poems we asked for and some to spare, so here are the first three we whipped out, as promised. And because the fun just never ends here at the Beehive, you get to guess who wrote what! (If you've read any of the poems we've posted here before, this should not be excessively puzzling.)


The correct order of authorship of the following three poems is:
a. Fa, Beatrice, QS
b. QS, Fa, Beatrice
c. Fa, QS, Beatrice
d. Beatrice, QS, Fa
e. Wislawa Szymborska, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joni Mitchell


Dallas to Graham

Pastures roll
and I unfold
drinking space
breathing green
upon green

All my missing clouds are here
every race and creed of them --
They say
they fled the metal
piercing their space
in that place I am leaving behind,
fled the counterfeit canopy
that daily dims their aerie carnival
and mine --
exiled, to explode here
in this rapture of rumbling dance
and white breath.

Air, my love! they cry to me
and gasping,
I sing alto

Dance, my love! they sing,
and I try
but my bones cry --

I need water
deep rocking water
water wide and full of fleeing clouds
at play;
water
to slip and laugh and sing
to my brittle bones
soon
before they return to dust.


The Paper Beckons

Sloshing around in big rubber boots
clumsy lumberjack hands--
you fell stands of words
and ride them down the swift river
swift cold river
churning with monsters-- see the teeth
snap around your ankles? that one
dines on split infinitives, this one
prefers run-on sentences,
but they're all hungry.
Your lumberjack boots fill with water
your calloused lumberjack hands grip
the slipping words for dear life
rushing whirling
tumble rolling
colliding jamming uncontrollable
headstrong
words.


Hide Behind the Moon

Little girl can’t handle a knife
Little boy shouldn’t see too many guns
But turn on the news
Then turn it right off
Cover your eyes
Cause all you’re gonna see
Is a bunch of little boys
Who can’t handle their power

We’ve got to separate,
Call a time out
Go hide behind the moon

Call out the bands
All the lonely altos
They’ve all got to comprehend
The mess we’re all in

The blood of the fugitives
Covers our lies
Covers our footprints in shame

I’m not saying we’re stardust
I’m not saying we’re golden
But we’ve got to get back
Get back what we were
before we saw

Alchemy

When you read this, I want you to feel the branch beneath you
Swell like a ship on a great grey mane of wind.
I want you to feel your blood pound even in your teeth
As you run and run and run bareheaded in the cold winter sunlight.
I want your hands to understand cool silky streams,
Your fingers to know the keys beneath them
As sonatas glisten and stumble past
And Mozart turns over in his grave.

When you read this, I want your heart to burst
For scarlet and purple,
Wuthering Heights by flashlight,
Sun poured sideways in the grass,
The touch of a beloved hand.

When you read this, have compassion on a poet's ineffectual alchemy,
For Life transmuted to these lines of print retains but
The faintest flicker of a pulse; still,

When you read this,
I want you to feel with me,
See with me,
Run in the wind with me.

When you read this,
I want you to know.

Season Turns

In that world you knew it was fall
When the first crisp scarlet leaf unmoored from the tree.
The first day of school was always cool and clear
New-sweater weather.

This world isn't so neet neat. Leaves fall
More or less all year round and they're
Mostly brown anyway. The first day of
School was 84 degrees and murky to boot.

disillusionment you say? bah.

I like this world pretty well, actually.

it's messy and stories don't stop at The End and you have to do more than shriek when you see a cockroach in the kitchen cabinet and when you want to Find Out More you can't just Check It Out at your Local Library and broken limbs just aren't that glamorous and gallons of milk don't appear in the refrigerator magically right on schedule and North is only Up if you're holding the map the right way and come to find out the Good Guys are really pretty indifferent most of the time.

But

I've got a life to live,
And you love me.

Thirsty

You arm yourself with shovels and sandwiches.
You are thirsty.
You are going to dig a well.
You attack the dry earth. Charge!

Dirt in your eyes and hair and clothes;
Dirt, which unfortunately
Does not seem very responsive to good intentions.
Nothing but dirt.

Soon you're at the bottom of a pit
That refuses to become a well. You're trapped,
Surrounded with the innards of the earth.
Quick! --you cry-- Bring buckets to haul it all away!

You run out of buckets.
You run out of sandwiches.
You're still digging-- might as well--
You've nothing else to do down in the pit.

And then, lo!

-- Rain.

A Song to Nothing-At-All

Here's a song to Nothing-At-All
Because there's too much Anything
For one small pencil.

Here's a song to Nothing-At-All
Because Something is far too significant
For just any ears.

Here's a song to Nothing-At-All
Because Everything is rather expansive
For these weak eyes.

Here's a song to Nothing-At-All
Because I'm too small for the Opera
And yet I must sing.

The Lines, Invisible

Q. Shenaynay

Our family has a history of making up stories in tandem -- we did this a lot when the girls were small, particularly in situations that involved lots of waiting. One of us would start the story and then we would each take a turn adding the next bit. It was super for honing listening skills, not to mention a mighty impressive exercise in creativity. Besides that, it was usually ripping silly fun.

Later, when we found ourselves sitting through hours and hours of Suzuki recitals (I'm talking 4 hour long, mind-numbing shindigs), we began writing stories in tandem in a notebook that we would pass down the row. Now these were just beyond bizarre. Maybe I will post one sometime.

But now Fa and I have taken it into the techno realm: we have come into a little habit of writing tandem poetry using Instant Messenger. I send her a line, with no comment about what it might mean, and she writes the next line or two, and so on. Okay, maybe we're a little odd, but this is how we get our kicks. Besides, we like odd.

Here's one:


The Lines

I face the lines and turn;
ducks rise before my face.
I covet their ascent, their fleeing
grey souls rise to the yellow void.
In their boundlessness I feel my bounds,
grey bounds, like all that binds.
Yellow is free, yellow is flight --
but mired I am, in clay and weeds,
all brown and binding.
Mired I am here
gazing up at gold.


Here's another, from a couple of months ago:


Invisible

Invisibility, said he
and his eyes went opaque
like shades of a closing store;
and musing on crystal balls
he smirks at finding
a glass doorknob in his hand
and feels the heavy tumble
of the lock.

My kingdom for the key, said she,
remembering other doors
left swinging in the wind;
she had the skeleton for those --
but the seventh rib is missing,
which this door requires.

Invisibility, says he
and his eyes go opaque.
He wraps his thoughts in a blanket
and wonders that he is alone.


This is a surprisingly serendipitous thing to do -- waiting for the next line to come back to you is sort of like a little dose of that big thrill of getting a letter in the mail. And since you only have to come up with one line at a time, it's all a matter of light-hearted intrigue with no big creative pressure.

We might just have to take this show on the road, so to speak. So if you ever get an email or and IM message from one of us with one strange line of something that might be poetry, you shall know how to proceed. We'll be waiting!

(I'm coming after you next, Shieldmaiden!)

So I was feeling a little silly this morning during composition...

Fa-so-la-la

An Ode to March, Occasioned by the Sight of my New Flip-flops, and Composed Whilst Sitting in the Red Chair by the Window, after a Repast of Cold Ovaltine

---------
Oh! Season of mists and mellow frui--

(Wait! Wait! Wrong season. ahem. Sorry. Here we go--)

Bright star, would I were steadfa--

(Oh botheration! That's not it either... do, do excuse me...)

Thou foster-child of silence and slo--

(Confound it all! That was about a hunk of pottery! Oh drats.

I give up. March will just have to go ode itself. So there.)

will flop and voice winter in rain music

Q. Shenaynay


Late Friday night, when it finally rained so hard that the skylight once again sounded like some sort of cosmic percussion instrument, we decided to seize the moment in case the drought returned as soon as the storm passed.

We turned off all the lights and fired up the fireplace and the stereo and lit all the candles. Didn't talk much. We just listened to all of it. Fa and I silently messed around with all the little word strips in the magnetic poetry tray on the coffee table, marvelling over how wowzy one can get whilst composing verses under the influence of some truly great jazz singers, candlelight, and the rumble of thunder beside a sizzling fire. For example, this hot little number:

we could
be in love
under every full moon
stagger with me
through this brilliant dance
dizzy I sing
to myself

It started raining even harder. The Shieldmaiden and Spuddy drifted in and forgot to leave. We put on some Puccini arias, nabbed our blankies, and chatted quietly off and on until the candles extinguished themselves. Fa and Spuddy curled up together and drifted off to La Boheme, never to return. It was sublime.

And so this one I can only blame on myself and Madame Butterfly:

Oh give thou me
a popsicle
and perchance
I shall give thee
a delicious green kiss

Quite appropriate for March, the month of St. Patrick's Day, no? (Say, I may have invented a new way to accomplish the wearin' o' the green!)

oh, ps. The title of this post? That was Spuddy's magnetic poem. He was definitely flopped on the sofa. I rather like it.

An Atheist In Love

It's awfully sweet of the Future
To be so indefinable, so postponable.
The best political move ever,
And so good for the economy!

By its very nature it grants us leave
For all the Spunk and Pluck
We care to indulge in-- how kind,
How thoughtful of it.

We're left here, cheeky, like a reader
On the first page of Middlemarch--
--The end is, after all, so many inches away!
Anything could happen! You'll see!

So thank you, dear Future! A thousand
Thousand thanks-- from politicians,
Sports fans, the self-employed, artists,
And unrequited lovers everywhere.

Hearth Thoughts

It's good to see the origins and ends of things;
To lay and light fires
And watch them through to glimmering conclusions.

The joy of knowing both first and last page
Of books, first and last day
Of years, dawn and dusk of days.

Small eras, yet
irretrievable and true.

Larger origins and ends may pass silent and unseen--
Sleek cats slipping through fence-post clutter
Of things that were significant for a week or two;

So there's nothing for it but to cherish them all,
All dawns, all dusks, bad and good, irretrievable and true, all,
All. Cherish them all. You never know.

Resignation

At the risk of perpetrating a cliche
I must admit-- the light in this room
Is golden. Just plain golden.

There's nothing I can do about it,
Either. Not even the most original
Flight of poetic fancy

Will render this light anything
But golden. Humph. Ah well--
One must resign one's self

And recall that all the best things
Are cliches; from golden light to poetry to
Love, and that most of all.

Logos

by Fa-So-La-La


In spoken Word and
the speaking of it lies the
beginning of all- a Word
was my entrance, was
the wings of my flight; with
Word I approach my God

And the Word was God

Small

by Fa-So-La-La


I was startled by the world today--
The sky surprised my habits
And I saw that I was small.

I am a pinpoint in the universe,
A smallish-pinkish spot,
A speck on the face of glory.

All things in perspective now, and I
Could cry--for if this speck
Alone had tarnished, and no other---

The Lamb would still have bled.

After Biology

by Fa-So-La-La


The Sacred and the Sacredly Ordained
Are marked by order--
Covenants and cells
A Mighty Wonder.

Humanity is selfish squalor--
It cannot see
Beauties in Him-- but only--
Divinity of Me.