Wednesday, August 27, 2003

POEM OF THE DAY The Memory Hospital  or  The Home for Wayward Muses My head creaks, like an old treehouse. I totter on my heels, occasionally, because the spirits are walking around up there, in for a leisurely stroll to destiny and death. My head is as full of chatter and squeal as a shortwave radio, as full of old women's voices as a nursing home, and when I begin to write I smell a smell like vacuum tubes heating up in an old TV. My head is full of smells. The smell of burning forest in the wind. The smell of magnolia and lovemaking. The smell of melting plastic. The smell of powder on my great grandmother's skin as she rocks this little child. Many old women live in my head. The woman with short bobbed hair who sells used books and chain smokes Pall Mall cigarettes. The tiny birdlike crone in the red sequin jacket, gatekeeper at the shrine of St. Liberace in Las Vegas. Two sets of Fates, one speaking old Norse, the other archaic Greek. My head is a tenement for Lost and Found Muses. My head is for lease, due to be subdivided. I pay my back womb rent in poems and I'm always behind on my payments. I climb the stairs as I don't trust the elevator to the penthouse, slip through the door standing ajar. The Landlady is old, old, old. Today she wears an embroidered Chinese silk jacket and reclines in decrepit elegance on a large, overstuffed, and ancient divan, smoking opium and drinking absinthe. Her eyes follow the smoke from her pipe, and she sings very softly, in French. I think, is this the muse to whom I've devoted my life? I don't even speak French. Still, I walk over and sit down at the antique vanity table pushed in front of the window...she has quite a view over the roofs of the world... A blank sheet of paper is already rolled into the black Smith-Corona typewriter perched on the ricketty table. I begin to peck away at the keys.  When she nods, the poem is over. Dana Pattillo (PoD 42) 2:00:27 AM    comment []

GUEST POET: Heather Matthew A woman’s tale   i Taking the chair, sitting with washed wool in an aproned lap teasing it, running through fingers soft with lanolin the treadling foot rhythmically linking hand and purpose colours spilling balls bobbing baskets of fleece carder’s combs shuttles and spindles bobbins and winding paraphernalia now in boxes labelled and stored for another generation.   ii the empty chair waiting, listening to time, fine yarn rolled in readiness for winding around wooden pegs on the mother’s board measured as a continuous skein until the moment arrives for cutting an ancient procedure the warp carried in ceremony for the dressing of the loom.   iii angels help their sticks support the raddle, the warp spread evenly, wrapped around the breast beam, making the threaded cross tension the warp is slapped briskly, grasped by the first choke tie shaken and pulled, then laid back gently on the beam’s breast the roller wound with ratchet and pawl clicking clockwise for the beaming.   iv taking the chair fronting the loom counting heddles the warps edges uncrowded as the thread is passed through the eye only, the beater is replaced the angels remove their sticks all warp ends sleyed through the dented reed the slip knots tied and tightened the sett in sequence awaiting the heading.   v checking for errors in these first picks weaving women scarves unbound wrinkles of hair unravelled falling into faces intent on passing a shuttle through the shed the beater drawn forward loom thumping its beat on the wooden floor cheers from the past this plaid of warp and weft remembered through the textured touch of a full spun yarn.   Heather Matthew 2003    Heather says this poem is part of a series on women's work. Her posts can be found on the Poetry Espresso elist at Topica.com   12:22:58 AM    comment []