Approach misled (Translation) by Sue Chenette

After J K D's Approach mislead


Mail me actual captured arabesques: bitter sin-snug scarves,
the hello-tropic marrow bone. Cult or scene? Zigzag
to ask, snag aromatic undulations of pork tenders:
in weather woods, catch trout. Caterwaul purr in oblique
carnal call botany. Slant repair, dew hut, hi-
jack the laugh loom, love, proceeding aweigh with fishers stitched
ten per cent hooch wild, a swim fin the hunch of a need pent
sounddreaming, awakedrumming. Pulsed hop. Stilt alp
or alpen-perch shock a snow storm grain-forage trick
a spin or wheedle on the accused tincturist’s go for gold lime
in a gulf gloom, holiday brought to test integument.
A paisley manatee disc offer, pre-authorized. Waltz roar
satin-sway slipping tiptoe blue? Tones are lickin’ under
the hexed or lost duck blind. Woven inculpable of morning.
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx

Kneeling

by Sue Chenette after gv, AD, JKD, & BBB


What do I know?
/////
Kneeling in these pages
/////
minstrelsy of crossings
/////
bred bun bow fire
/////
half triangulated
/////
while outside
/////
wind-shuffled leaves
/////

Dunvegan by Sue Chenette

Everyone should have a friend in Dunvegan,
her small brick house with one front gable
built close to the road, seeming
to have grown out of the north Ontario land,
or to have become part of it.
Climb the stairs late after red wine talk.
Fall asleep in the narrow room
with its simple cot and wash stand
only night and wind outside.
Wake to the brush of an oak branch
against the window
slow seep of uncluttered dawn.

What Was Offered by Sue Chenette

after "check this box" and "very yes very no" by Lisa Pasold; "Zerochre Zerochrome" by Sean S. and "A mite giddy on-egging" and "On" by Gvance
********
**********
Under the gift wrap, no watered silk,
********
but raploch wool,
***
wound round a doll with stone for a head.
*****
What was offered.
*******
She wove it a grass placemat,
*******
drew circles of moisture at its mouth,
********
mothered it until
**********
light pushed into the bones.
********
It taught her mineral memory --
********
a hard nut meat almost Macadamian --
********
and to keep the vertebrae perishably
***********
but tightly upright
******
daring a skating trick
**********
on the oilstained woodplank floor.

Regret by Sue Chenette

after "Dormitories" by Sean S and "Beachfront Properties" and "Toss" by JKD
********
*********
Slow train at the night crossroads
********
backtracking scratched contexts
********
scrabbled content
********
contending
********
with the imaginable (false)
***********
old valise
**********
flipped coin
*********
jinxed waltz
*********

New Yorker Poem by Sue Chenette (new)

xxx
New Yorker Poem

I felt separate from them in every way but at the same time could not deny the things that bound us together.
xxx
At first, he continued to sleep in the park in order to save money.
xxx
She’s a very methodical person, so she always leaves it in exactly the same spot.
xxx
He could speak Slovenian to me and he could easily disregard any of my demands.
xxx
The fundamentalists succeeded for a time.
xxx
The situation is worse than that, though.
xxx
The video shows the officers walking him to the local station and slamming the door shut on his cell.
xxx
We crept to the spot where we’d seen him.
xxx
No time for more wandering; the game was drawing down.
xxx
Somewhere I must have lost a glove.
xxx

Red by Sue Chenette

wore red......wed Rod....(owed dower)....deeded ore....woe
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ///////////////////////////
redo...........wore red.....drew deer.....worded wood..weeded word
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /
erred.......eroded order.....wore red....rode rodeo.....wowed Ed
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
wooed weed..rowed dew........or...........wore red....dowered Drew
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
reordered door....O.............doer...............do........wear red

hearing her by Sue Chenette

..........after Sliver by JKD

hearing her
sparks converging
emboldened splotch of meteorites
(from which supine body?)

chipped darkness
spittle-showered
braceleted in languid language

mother-of-pearl-rippled
wavelets
leveled fever dream
(leaves
[effects]
sliver where from out
contained fire
soundwave spike

breaks/wakes
emerging

***

a beautiful burning

by Sue Chenette, after how to write by Sean S, Point of View by Geo Vance, and Sighting by JKD

memory's brazen burning
whispered rush of flame
at the edge of cave-shadow

hooks for your mind or heart
shimmering shimmy-shaped
such tricks

even the glowing coals
refuse solidity:

look -- they've fallen together
ashes, and panoplies of sparks
....

Libation (new, sort of) by Sue Chenette

This is a new rewords, but was written as a "wreading" (http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/wreadiing-experiments.html) of Margaret Christakos' poem "Photo" (from Sooner. Toronto: Coach House, 2005) which is posted under comments.

Jug of sighed. Her. On apple pored and poured
from fallen wanting, of fixed light, taken
*****
by moon-shine, which tolling rang down
the hours to darn! again – awful rumpus.
*****
What’s tendered, sun-scorched (kissed) we cure, un-
willing shattered glass, against Eve’s protocols
*****
circumambulations, stilled fermentations. Swept.
(I’m cold, you?) I’m cold, you. Flashes in the pan
*****
throw mazed alarms motionless as chagrin
parlayed into nosir. A dozen ways I can’t
*****
seed you. It ripens and falls of its own weight.
For hollandaise I will muster technique.
*****
Premise: silken sauce, golden. Crisp asparagus
then libation. My garden (silver bells,
*****
cockle shells). Season slipping into drought’s
parched habit (folding and folding, a ladder
*****
not quite reaching the green-leafy branch,
broken rung, ravenous ghosts of repletion).
*****
*****

Triangulation by Sue Chenette

after JKD’s "Overland," posted Feb 6, which is in turn after "drafts from Winter Constellations" by Nate Pritts.
.................
as if in the wind-tossed grasses
inheres
...............some crystalline geometry
.....................susceptible to triangulation
............
.....................the dealt world, its wick and flame
.............
beneath the sky’s cobalt clatter
..............
*
......................
But always iceblink
a shimmered horizon—
..............twined paths and yin-yang clues
..............constants refracted under lake water
............
Our deceptions opening doors into strange light
................
*
.......................
The stars spiked, windblown
patinad with myth
............
witness to our displacements
.............
..................what became of stone?
..............
Once, a woman, traveling:
...........................
*
.................................
followed a trace of glazed spice
mulling star-formations and window-glints
..........
their dislocated and sporadic clusters
...................
*
........................
early sun, moonlight burning through
a rage for some defining order
..........
.........................falling
along long distances
.......rusted reflections of bodies rolling in sleep
....................& then afterward
........................................& further
until then;
..........................
*
.............................
skeletal dance in wind-tossed grasses
............
staggered and jagged, cleft, flung
...........
how to keep
the wind-wrenched night in check
.............
....................... ..embers
rekindled to an ordering rage
............
..........................small patter of sparks
..........................against the wide sky
..........................
*
..............................
Birch trees bend to their waists
in the gusting wind
............
..............................poems like closed eyes
............
............apart from the fire’s whispers
............the rustle and fall of small deceptions
............
slips of peeling white holding moonlight
..........................

Postcard from the State of Luddition
by Sue Chenette after Amanda Deutch's "Help: not a poem" and attendant comments

We were Spaced out in the amber sand
not keeping tabs as to risk
when Non-Breaking waves rolled in, dense

........& nbsp <> ITTK

..................................Help!
>>>>>>>>>>>

Pretrip
by Sue Chenette after Barbara Beck's Travel 1

We were daredevil amateurs
scornful of plastic raincoats
eyes the area of beguilement and
our senses on the go
as we pantomimed
first-person together
in a pretrip kind of learn
the usual jobs, marriages
waving signs a little beyond
^^^^^^^^^^^

The Objects
by Sue Chenette after gvance’s "How it Started" and JD’s "Pertinacious" and "Sheltered Lengths"

Wary of words
they stood naked in limning light,
brightly opaque, perennial.

It was the bangles tempted them,
half-scrawled with the glamour
of being named,

and so they acquiesced when
jibberish held out a braceleted arm
beginning the long dance.
^^^^^^^^^^^

Shard
by Sue Chenette after JD's Pertinacious



shin bone fished from a shuffle bag


I had a bone to pick with you


some femur or fever ((k)nee(d) bone) or fib-
ular shard


lim(b)(n)ed in the shadblow's overhang


....................(dem bones dem
............................dry bones)

The mathematician to his lady love, by Sue Chenette. After φ by george vance

The mathematician to his lady love

lark me in spirals
incurve me round the tender rim of your ear
dance me dunce-like re. tagged averages
helix me a voluted capital
the sum of our traction will yield multividing
mine us introuvable in the them

After "Burlesque" by AD "Echoes" "Whit(h)er" "In Somnolence" JKD "A Kind of Soft Sound" AM "Imagine Laid..." BS "Stainless Sunset..." MN "Glut" JW

(Please note, as the blogger format doesn't allow long enough lines on some screens, that this is meant to be all in couplets, with one final last line.)
We Carried Shallow Bowls
by Sue Chenette

We carried shallow bowls through thickets of oak and thistle
past Blockbuster and Rush, Sleep Comfort, Blinds To Go

balanced them in both hands. Sometimes
wandering the mall after work we saw reflected

flashes of flightless birds familiar with tufts and feathers,
displaced in vague parts of our body. Or bonelets

fell in splintering the blue places forgotten.
On soft mornings the bowls cradled mirror-echelons

clouds whorled and rafted an inverted sky and then,
or nights when satellites and planets hung lit in the dark water

it seemed deeper. We weren’t sure.
From time to time the surface, pinguid, exploded in flame

and we staggered, stiffened our arms to save ourselves.
Some burned, woke again as white dust

in the 3 am fluorescence of our television screens.
We grieved for them, rain troubled our thin roof.

Our palms thickened with calluses, fingers warped
around the particular shapes of soup plates, saladiers.

Our necks cricked looking into them.
The bowls grew heavy, and when we came through dusty vines

to October, its yellow leaves pressed tight against the sky,
we laid them on the grass. It wasn’t the water’s shimmer we missed

when, with a kind of soft sound, we set them down,
but their rough concavity against our hands:

concrete, or stone, knobbed gourds, gnarled ironwood.