folio : short takes on the prose poem
I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely. I don’t remember when I first encountered the form. There was no aha moment; rather, my love of the prose poem grew gradually. The more I read, the more I was drawn to its energy and to the internal leaps that filled me with delight. I am drawn to how the prose poem lobbies against narrative – at least the prose poems I am most strongly attracted to – and asks instead for poems built on associations and resonances. With prose poetry it often feels as if I’m wrestling with myself, trying to break through the known into something strange and new. I have an ongoing battle with the form. On the one hand, I love how it insists that I play and let go of the rational; on the other, it can’t be nonsense. The poem has to reach for, and find, what is true and authentic. There is, for me, an element of magic in a successful prose poem having to do with language and the small detonations contained within.
intertidal zone
When I close my eyes a tide pool appears. A little trapped world swims behind my eyelids. All the creatures you’d expect to be there are there. Sea urchins, plankton, invertebrates. The things left stranded when the tide goes out. As a child I counted to one hundred while the others hid. Where are you? I called out. Nobody answered in the lengthening shadows. Have you not learned by now that you can’t force it? That what wants to stay hidden stays hidden? I am happiest with my eyes closed. Some floaters wave as they pass. One, that looks just like my brother, winks as it drifts by with the jerky movements of a seahorse.
hard evidence
In the days when proof of infidelity was needed to obtain a divorce, my father hired a call girl with scarlet lips to pose in bed with him. In 1958, this was evidence. My mother went before the magistrate with a wounded bird in her pocket and begged for an allowance to buy seed. It was not for herself, she said, but for the starving wrens and their babies. After my father left, she sold pampas grass to the local florist to make ends meet. If he’d had a cell phone on Mount Moriah, Abraham could have recorded God’s voice commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. A body cam would have been even better. That would have stood up in court. That would have silenced the naysayers once and for all.
