August 13: Poetic Inspiration, Nikky Finney, "The Aureole"

 I haven't written a poem for a while.  I've scrawled some ideas in my journal, but my life has sort of gotten in the way recently.  Now, I have a small amount of time before the fall semester begins.  A couple of weeks.  I'm not going to wait for the muse to strike me.  If I did that, I'd never write another poem ever again. 

So I will read some books and sit down with my journal every day.  I have an idea for a new collection of poems.  Perhaps I'll pursue that.  Writing a book of poetry is an interesting endeavor.  It's not like fiction, plotted out.  It's not like nonfiction, where there's a certain amount of research and shaping.  Writing a book of poems is like chasing a fog bank as it races toward the sea.

Nikky Finney provides me some poetic inspiration.  As I said in a previous post, she does not write short poems.  Her work is lyrical and stunning, but it is also sprawling, like a Kansas wheat field.  Yet, there's something inherently personal and private, as if she's telling you about secrets that could change the world.  Secrets about justice and race.  And love.

Saint Marty is always a sucker for a great love poem.

The Aureole

by:  Nikky Finney

               I stop my hand midair.

 

               If I touch her there everything about me will be true.

               The New World discovered without pick or ax.

 

               I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.

               I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.

 

               My hand remembers, treading the watery room,

               just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.

 

Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car,

lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace

for her mud-pie crusty work boots.

 

She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed

twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks &

stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,

 

break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls

inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of

hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:

 

souped, shiny, low to the ground.

 

               The stars over the Atlantic are dangling

               salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is

               $20 a night; special winter off-season rate.

               No one else here but us and the night clerk,

               five floors below, alone with his cherished

               stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails

               in a primal search for every constellation

               hiding in the sky of your body. My hand

               waits for permission, for my life to agree

               to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night

               Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you

               there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb

               the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?

               You are a woman with film reels for eyes.

               Years of long talking have brought us to the

               land of the body. Our skin is one endless

               prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,

               I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.

               The old claw hammer and monkey wrench

               that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the

               yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be

               thrust into my painter’s pants against my

               will. I will never be able to wash or peel

               any of this away. Before the night is over

               someone I do not know will want the keys

               to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase

               me down the street. A gaggle of spooked

               hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,

               never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-

               ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground

               of sweet clover.