Building With Words
GRANDFATHER
Black and gray newsprint grid, grimy
in the kitchen he seemed impregnated with cooking gas.
The smoke would float causing the sky to close.
I toed the dark floors worn of varnish
and fantasy, one degree can change.
The critics wrote what the others wrote.
Light lasts and bends in the telling, imagine it tumbling
Sundays, his legs frail.
A great multitude, nomadic,
surrender echoes of commingled tongues,
subtle ways the opposite sex, the fields.
But still the office-working weekend warrior
the old neighborhood.
for bars, but his four walls.
As for the hard, durable crust, forgotten
always the possibility of surprise,
stampede of red and green across the plain,
sometimes a goat is just a goat.
Pluck the child ashore,
from the vinyl tablecloth.
Got to reach some honeycomb?
on the sun like a lens,
if anything his strides lengthen.
While an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, assembling several of my failed poems, I cut them up line by line, 200 lines of poetry in all, and posted two poster boards at the entrance to my studio space to attract the cut-up lines. The idea was to produce hidden linkages I had not previously seen in my work. Visitors posted the lines of poetry and became co-authors of a final product—a completed poem. 71 lines out of the 200 available were posted, suggesting the participation of roughly 71 co-poets (liberal interpretation of the rules means some visitor-poets may have posted more than one line). The finished product contains linkages I find astonishing. The poem naturally divides itself into three discrete sections. One of the sections is presented here.
