"the rest"

One of my FaceBook friends has a birthday today. As I was writing a note on her "Wall", which originally read something like "Today is the first day of the rest . . . ", it struck me that there was a poem in there. Then I thought of the anecdote that appears at the top of the piece, and after about a half-hour of fiddling, today's poem, of four-lines, was born. I tried a few stabs at lengthening it, but it seems that after the first four lines, it is complete.

It features tight internal rhyme and some dense word-play. I particularly like the play on "quarrel", which I suppose may be obscure, although a look past the obvious in at any dictionary will open it up.

the rest

"fiery braille"

The title of this poem ("fiery braille") derives from Tom's lines in the opening of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie":

“. . . the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

WIlliams' dynamic image seems more relevant now than it did in the forties, or during its referent, the Great Depression. In the thirties, unfettered greed was the engine; today, the driving force is still greed lubricated by oil. My poem focuses on a single flower, but the drama no longer simmering in the background is obvious.

thoughts below ground, the series

This series of poems is based on the fact that my office is in the basement, it is spring, and I have been noticing worm castings all over the lawn.

Worms remind me of the Hamlet's line in Hamlet, in which having killed Polonius, he tells the king to look for the old schemer "not where he eats but where he is eaten. . . certain politic worms are e'en at him."

The setting, then, is under ground, from the narrator worm's point of view.

The snake references came about as a result of a breakfast nook conversation with son Pete. We were discussing out-of-character actions that people take; he told me about the belief of

Kundalini yoga, in which there is said to be a fire-snake, coiled in three and a half coils in the base chakra (one of seven power-zones along the human spine). It is coiled around the Shiva lingham ­ the male line of force that comes down from the sky. Kundalini is an Earth force that comes up from the Earth. Kundalini yoga is the practise of awakening the snake and allowing it to rise up the spine until it reaches the highest chakra, the Crown chakra, where the meeting of Shiva and Shakti lead to enlightenment and the trance of Samadhi ­ ecstasy ­ the annihilation of the ego and the end of duality.

[I refer for my source here to a Google search using the terms snake+"human spine"+mythology and I excerpted this passage from an article in http://www.2012theodyssey.com/articles-beyond.html to which I do not particularly subscribe; however, I find the speculation interesting.]