Those Watercolor Journals: A Vlog
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Pinkdogwood asked about those watercolored poetry journals of my yesteryear, and so this vlog is for her. (Ironically, given the heat in this house, the video kept changing color as I recorded.)
While searching the too-hot closets for this exhibition A, I found other journals of the not-color-drenched variety. Below is a found poem from an August 2nd, many years ago, when extroverted rhyme still mattered to me in poems.
But before I get to that, there is this: The other day I was reading Maya Ganesan's Apologies to an Apple, a book this lovely eleven-year-old poet had sent to me. Maya's the real thing; she absolutely is. When I look back on what I was writing way back then and look now to what this so intelligent soul writes today—the clear brooked wonder of it, the no-rush-toward-conclusion of it, the simple made large—I see a slice of the future, and the future looks like wisdom unspooled.
This, then, from my own past.
Who shall know this wooden
window box when you are gone?
Shall know it as you do at night,
shall watch, shall wait for pink
to enter through the moon's white light?
Who will care enough to guard
this mottled wall, the mason's hand?
Who will listen and belong
to street sounds, urban moods, to
the swish step skip of jumprope song?
And what will there be when
there cannot be your interludes anymore?
What will stand where two guitars
now balance on the floor?
And what will become of your easle eyes
when at last you shut the door?
