Category Archives: poetry

Myrln Monday: Wind Walking

Posted on by
Reply

For a while before his death in April 2008, non-blogger Myrln (aka W. A. Frankonis, i. frans nowak), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and none-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.

Wind Walking
When you walk in the wind,
sometimes it’s helpfully behind,
other times right up in your face.

Which makes wind a lot like people.


waf oct99

Myrln Monday: a daughter grieves

Posted on by
Reply

For a while before his death in April 2008, non-blogger Myrln (aka W. A. Frankonis, i. frans nowak), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and none-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.
On this Myrln Monday, however, she adds her own grieving voice:

Myrln Mondays: There have been a few in a row now, I think, that I have missed. Forgotten. And then when I remember that I’ve forgotten I feel terrible. And ironic. Because while I have forgotten I have not nearly FORGOTTEN. Not even close. It creeps up on me unexpectedly. Often at night as I’m trying to fall asleep. And suddenly it’s upon me. The too soon-ness. Too quick-ness. Unfairness. Eeriness. Incomprehensible
-ness. Surreal-ness. And I am overcome. All the clichés exist within me at once: it’s a bad dream and I’m going to wake up and he’ll still be here.

Just one more day — one more day to be sure we said everything. Wish him back – on a star, on the moon (“I had a talk with the moon last night,” he’d say to me, “and it’s all going to be fine”) — on my worry beads. Self-admonitions, I should have gotten out there more. I should have heard something was really wrong when we talked. I should have gotten out there more. The truth of the phrase “sickening feeling” because every time it comes my stomach hollows out and I feel like I’m going to be sick.

Then it’s gone. The same way each time: full of feeling foolish, selfish, sorry-for-myself. Like I’m the only one who has ever lost someone. Only one who has ever lost her father. Who has ever lost him too quickly, unfairly, unexpectedly. The only one who has had to continue on after…

I may forget the Myrln Mondays amidst painting new rooms, preparing for homeschooling, living my life (as my father would be demanding I do anyway as he pointed out in number 8 of his life lessons poem: “Remember the dead in your heart, but honor life and the living with your time and attention because afterward it’s too late”. but I have not FORGOTTEN. Not even close. And as everyone has told me, as painful, unbearable, agonizing, maddening, sad, lonely and empty remembering is, forgetting is far, far worse that all those together. So I am remembering. And missing. And hurting. And crying. And remembering. Always.

SAND HOLE
They excavated sand,
this father and daughter,
digging to China.
I knew it’d really be closer
to Afghanistan,
but their game had a tradition
to follow.
Fathers and sons
have growing between them,
which can be another kind of hole,
while
fathers and daughters
share games and imagination.
And dug holes
always come out in China.
I wonder where the holes Chinese dig
Come out?
Waf jul99

Myrln Monday: Poem Written in the City..

Posted on by
Reply

For a while before his death in April 2008, non-blogger Myrln (aka W. A. Frankonis, i. frans nowak), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and none-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.

POEM WRITTEN IN THE CITY
OF LANDLOCKED PEOPLE WHO
THINK THAT OCEAN IS ONLY
A WORD AND SUN IS A BALL
FOR SUMMER SUMMERTIME FUN
(for mdf)
bobbing seaborne
on flashing flat planes
of sun’s bouncing image,
a single dory —
oars shipped and tucked
inside for keeping —
seems adrift and lost
from coves safety.
but horizon blocked,
navigator waits —
         (dancing dolphins
         side the gurgling surf
         astride the swollen thighs
         of seaweed waves…
…candy apples and taffy twists
and caramel is a candy) —
with sleeping eyes
and fingled breath
and hands for firmly guiding.

seeing circles

Posted on by
2

The poem below by Billy Collins (one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails) makes me sad and angry and wistful and hungry.
I’m not hungry for sweets. I surely eat enough of those.

Rather it’s a soul-deep hunger for the solitude to watch circles become salt, to reach for and conjure the words that make magic of metaphor.

And so I am angry that with each passing year I have had to move farther and farther from that place where destiny can be designed. And I am sad because those years can never be recovered. And I am wistful, finally, because that is what comes of and with age and the utter exhaustion of being someone else’s keeper.

Design
Billy Collins
I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the arctic circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

Myrln Monday: ex memoriam

Posted on by
Reply

For a while before his death in April 08, non-blogger Myrln (aka Bill Frankonis), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and non-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.


ex memoriam
somehow it seems appropriate
my art lives in transcience
(theatre)
while friends, students, lovers
reach for permanence in written words
(poetry).
(theatre) leaves behind no marks:
Is there a moment and is gone.
struck, as we say.
(impermanence).
Appropriate because some say
there should be no memorials
(me)
mucking up the lives behind us
with our droppings
(bullshit)
all right, so why a paean to (impermanence)
In this (permanent) form?
well, sometimes letting contemporaries know
where you stand is necessary
(bluntness).
Or so cap’n billy if’n say.

major ear worm

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been there all week. I can’t get rid of it, no matter what other music I play.

Famous Blue Raincoat.
It’s haunting me.
As I’m immersed in music, I get this poem from and by Jim Culleny.
The Pumpkin Harvesters
Jim Culleny
In town the café’s coffee buzz
seeps into the street from under the door
as a tender singer moans her song
not as in the old days
(as in rockabilly and rhythm and blues before)
but with power chords
and a fresh monotony
My dad preferred country tunes
and hearing Little Richard first time
stopped where my big-holed 45 spun
and in his best blue-collar voice said,
“You call this shit music?” and I did
as we twirled off each other about then
and went our separate ways awhile
until a fresh dew froze on the pumpkin
in a new late game and the harvesters
off across the field sang both
Coldplay and Hank Williams
as they came.
As we sorted through his CDs, we rediscovered just what an eclectic taste in music in once-husband had. From Willie Nelson to Anrdea Bocelli, with Moody Blues somewhere in the middle.
As for me, Hank Williams and Kitty Wells were my high school idols, which, I know is strange for an urban kid, but I hung around with guys who had a country band.
Gotta get rid of that earworm.

green doors

Posted on by
Reply

Green Doors

Fences are a good thing
and walls, too, as long as
you can see over them.
They lay the line, the bounds,
hold space and sanctuary,
designate, define the personal.
Doors are necessary to
fences and walls, access,
of course, both ways.
But I wonder what is it about
closed doors that draws his eye, stark,
silent green doors..
What is it about closed outside
green doors, and only one nestled
in the green of spring.
elf 5/08

Myrln Monday: Legacy

Posted on by
Reply

Myrln is gone, but his spirit remains with us in the power of his words, thanks to our daughter, who salvaged his collection of writings.

Legacy

My children:

I want to leave you something –
but what?
My images are either silver compound
or airy theater –
both without example or duration:
mere light reflecting a moment of existence.
I was, my children,
but how to prove that to you?
What will serve as evidence –
for what is legacy but proof
your forebears were something more
than momentary makers of egg or sperm?

There is only this:
I came from shadows,
and toward shadows I inexorably moved;
I dove (or sank) deeply into shadows,
skirted the light flanking them, reflected awhile
then wrapped myself in them.

(Wrapt myself in them.)

waf 1977

nostalgia runs rampant

Posted on by
Reply

I’m caught up in a wash of nostalgia these days, with friends I haven’t been in contact for a long while emailing photos with messages saying “Were we ever that young?”
And so this poem, one of Jim Culleny‘s dailies, reminds me of just how young I once was and how much has happened since.

In Memory of Radio
Amiri Baraka
Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)
What can I say?
It is better to have loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?
Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake’s hypnotic gesture of the week?
(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts…
I cannot, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I cannot even order you to the gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goddy Knight)
& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?
I certainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb.
Saturday mornings we listened to the Red Lantern & his undersea folk.
At 11, Let’s Pretend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do. Thank God!
What was it he used to say (after the transformation when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn’t throw stones?) “Heh, heh, heh.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.