Poems on Wednesdays

I arrived a little late to the poetry party but I am so glad I decided to go.

I’ve hopscotched around the world through poems. Found and lost myself in poems. Felt a little less alone. Tried on other points of view. Felt the cold of a winter and the loneliness that lived there; danced with daffodils and listened to the crickets in a poem.

For a while, I kept a poem in my purse, folded up somewhere there at the bottom of the tumult but there.     

One day at a bookstore I found the March 2004 edition of Poetry. Inside were a few poems by Atsuro Riley. Even his named sounded like a poem.  The first one, “Picture” started like this:

“This is the house (and jungle-strangled yard) I come from/ and carry.”

The five poems were thick with imagery, taking me to a South I didn’t know.  Told through the point of view of a young boy, we see his Mama, “mainly: boiling jelly. She’s the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there.”

He takes us to his front porch: “Our (in-warped) wooden porch door is kick-scarred and/splintering. The hinges of it rust-cry and –rasp in time with/ every Tailspin-wind…”

Rust-cry! How does Riley know to put his words together in this way? How does someone make such lovely, lively mayhem with the same stack of half a million words everyone has to pick from? He crosshatches words and backbends others. He dares.

He ends one poem with these lines:

“Ex-anchored for example/

Yesterdaddy./

Zags.”

His poems tell stories I am still puzzling out.