balanced on the edge

Jill and Carolee have a fun poetry site aptly called Poem, where they post a poem for participants to read, enjoy, study, and maybe use as a springboard for writing. The first for this season is Denise Duhamel’s mock sestina, Delta Flight 659: to Sean Penn.

My imitation is about a local celebrity, a gorilla named Willie B, who was kept indoors for 27 years, until they renovated the Atlanta Zoo. It’s so sad to see animals kept locked up.

I see this piece as more of an exercise than a poem, and a hard exercise at that. In Denise Duhamel’s piece, she plays on Sean Penn’s name, ending each line with a different word that includes the syllable pen. I’m very impressed with her results now that I’ve tried it myself.

Glass Houses

In Atlanta there lived a gorilla named Willie B
who died in 2000, the year before
911. He was forty, I remember,
because I was too, just beginning
a new millennium as Willie B’s heartbeats
were fading, six years after his baby

Kudzoo was born. The last time we saw Willie B
he squatted between
boulders on a hillside, behind
thick glass walls, maybe
listening to human kids bellowing
Willie B! Willie B! Bees

and flies drew invisible lines beneath
tree limbs where he lounged on a bed
of grass, near females nursing babies.
His eyes were as dark as tea. Crabby
kids pressed their hands on the glass, beseeching
Willie B to pound his chest like a typical beast,

as if he were King Kong, bedazzled
by a lovely blonde. But he was no sucker for bedlam,
he was the prince of his tribe, a beatific
icon who didn’t seem to notice the bedraggled
trees in the pretend forest, or the Frisbees
flying through the sky beyond

the walls of his outdoor bedroom.
His keepers had made him live behind
bars for twenty-seven years, in a room befitting
an ax murderer or an embezzler.
Now he was as free as the Bengal
tiger in the zooscape nearby.

He had a full belly and his days were benign,
a becoming epitaph for human beings
too, we who bate bears and belabor the point that we’re human.

Dear Holly,

Mystic

Stand still long enough in the present
moment, and Border Town springs
to life, a mirage of mirrored souls
strolling down Main Street amid a sea
of glass-front shops. Twenty-four hours
a day, they say, it may appear,

sometimes as near to you as a pear
in a bowl, a still life given as a present
we open by breathing, forgetting the hour-
hand, the minutes, the seconds that spring
to life in a primordial sea,
a briny home, birthplace of our souls.

Border Town, Edge City, we don’t know it by a sole
name; a phantom place appearing
as Atlantis, tendrils of sea
anemone fingers waving the present
tense in our faces, until the spring
that winds us loosens, a slack Slinky in our

chest that slows the hour-
glass sands. We plant the soles
of our feet, grow roots, soak up spring
water until openings appear,
inner floodgates that present
a view to the hidden city of Eternal Spring.

It’s a Shangri-La we thought we’d never see –
conjured countless times at happy hours,
downing gin and tonics to wash away the presence
of black marks on our mortal souls.
It’s like wind in the trees, or peering

into a well, fed with a spring
meandering from underground seas.
A cavern in the ribcage, it once appeared
to us as the cauldron of a witching hour,
but now has become our sole
mio, a sunny bow on a wrapped present.

Time is an unfurling spring, a malleable hour
in which we see the yards of our souls
uncurling, appearing to us as our own present.

***

Holly (Lost Kite) and I have been responding to each other’s poems in what has become a series. Here is her poem.

The prompt this week at RWP was to collaborate on a prompt, and then mix up the prompts to write a poem. I’ve got to admit that although I contributed to the prompt, I chose to collaborate by responding to Holly’s poem.