Reflective Poetry & Memorization

What is going on here?  For anyone who has lived in a large, urban area and taken a subway train, a guy in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck is, without question, creepy.  He, and it is almost always a he, is either shouting “Here I am!” or is a shut in who finally found spare change to get out of his apartment.

Straight up, a guy in a lab coat screaming a poem in the ear of a former English professor, who sees it as the pinnacle of pedological accomplishment, i.e., memorization, could only mean Momma was right about studying English.

Many of us will never be doctors, but most of us can aspire to be an English instructor, if not a former U.S. poet laureate.  Case in point: Those of us who listened to our momma, papa, or both, but decided to write poetry anyway.  Oops, is the self-delusion man showing through the cobwebs?  Oh well, might as well take the plunge.
 

Standing Before Us

Sometimes I feel it must be my fault

Like when people —

important people

Show themselves in small communities

Out of the fabric of seclusion

In the places I always go

Where now I walk not alone

but where those I meet

stand in judgment of what I do

Even though I do nothing

Wrong

— Unknown; probably Iowa City, circa 1998

There is no doubt that reflective poetry has an immediacy and power, but this is not a poem about a guy in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck.  It's about instructors, advisors, and committee chairs, as best remembered, at the University of Iowa who refused to help students.  Folks who contributed to a college program's loss of accreditation.  Or, at least, that's what I think the poem is about.  Poetry is a lot like memorization that way.  It's relative.

 
Little Blue Flower

Approach sighs

The flowering mists of grace

Sweet scented sea air

The sound of a heart’s steady pulse

Invisible mists

Cool and dry

A breeze of laughing children

and innocence

As lovers stroll in the park

— Golden Gate Park, 1983


Clair’s Romance

From his smile returned, Clair discovers

feelings of yesterday

Finding that which no longer feels right today

The red of hesitant rage

endured by nervous misgiving

No more living thus

Favoring the want that cannot be theirs

But rather the want of others

In solitude she’s often run

Talking with people as they come and go

Longing for the understanding that has

never really been real

Again, in solitude she runs

Reflecting one of life’s most

subtle seductions

A passion of reality — of self

and acceptance

— Rohnert Park and Chico, California, circa 1984


The Orchard

On paper words fall into place

one by one

Likes trees in an orchard carefully pruned

and tended throughout the years

each bearing fruit after much labor

They fill the mind with nourishment

Turning the empty hours into

ripe plums

Sweet and juicy

Without words understanding starves

from bitter longing

And across streams in woodlets

far away

The adventures of a bold journey

Lost

— Cherry Street, Chico, California, circa 1989

Brain Drain

           Hidden in spirals

      Spirals of frostless frozen

                Frozen fleshy tongues

Tongues melted to chocolate ice cream bars

             Bars across an icy zoo —

Where there ain’t one anymore

             Hurrah!

             — Fingers melted in twisted flesh

             Flesh that rots decayed

Decayed with maggots turning and twisting

   Twisting inside my brain

             Brain dying

Dying lost to old

                 Old life within my brain

                         Drain brain

                               Drain

— Jung Haus, circa 1981, Rohnert Park, California

Sunday’s Storm

The soothsayers sat reading
their chart of orbs
Delighting in its wonders, laughing
with its chords — of merriment

One lone man say listening, another
walked away
Still the women sat there wrestling
with their play

And how the children danced
to show off all their toys
bits of strings and magic flutes
And silly little ploys

And still the women sat there
cackling with the storm
Laughing at its wonders, delighting
in its form

The one lone man left briefly
the other returned to stay
And all the children wondered at who
would win the day

And on, and on, and on they went
until the boy appeared
to show a cup of water
and chase away the tears

In that cup he told his mom a
a soda had been born
And she who first believed
caught him by the arm

A boy had tried to lie to mom
who through the many years
had dreamed things that never were
but in our darkest fears

— McDonald’s, circa 1989, Chico, California