creation by elimination

Austin Kleon is a person who writes poems out of newspapers and makes me miss my high school creative writing class. We actually might have done this once. But things like this, or the magazine collage poems we did whenever we had spare time, were some of my favorite things I did in that class. I guess maybe it's easier to write when you can pretend it's not you doing it and you're really just finding it already there?


Either way, I think I should try doing some of these with those free newspapers floating around the metro. There's also a tumblr for submitting your own poems and a book which I kind of want to buy for myself and about half of the people I know. But it would be weird to get everybody the same thing for Christmas, probably.

Related, and found through the above: A Humument, which I also want, and which is also on the internest for you to look at.

Chenonceau

An Italian queen paved the floor in monogrammed tiles,
and now I walk over the eroded remains of her name in my worn sneakers.
In the spiral staircases the half-loosened soles catch the dip
where the king would have stood, where his feet and mine
took pieces of dust as souvenirs.
They never refinished the painted floors--
the gold cowers in the corners, backed up against walls,
defending itself against time--
but the front tower is shrounded in canvas
printed with its own image, and if you look hard you can see through
to the scaffolding bones where they remake, remake.

Now it is october and the vines on the arbor over the terrace
are going yellow and sparse,
and I am thinking from beneath them that this
is how it should be.
I am wearing yellow and still the smaller fish flee from my shadow
as I walk by, and this is okay,
the way the water climbs up the white bricks and descends again
with a grain or two of stone to remember this day.

Maybe someday the rain will come in the windows
and collect in the hollows of someone's initials,
run down the stairs in arcs and turns, a spiraling, carved-out throat,
and catch in the basement,
fish weaving through the window bars.
I think of the swallows' nests hanging lobed and papery
under the lips of the high towers--
will the pigeons huddle in the rafters in Louise's bedroom?
Will they nurse their children on her tears,
knit the crowns of thorns into nests of tapestry fiber?
Someone has scraped their initials into the sand in the garden path,
and now they are gone, and so will be their signature,
and they do not mind this.

it was ten years

One year the Japanese beetles came like prisms,
oil-slick beauty crowding over the thistles like dark pearls
at the edges of our property.
They dug out the unused field--
bulldozers, not beetles,
though the effect could have been the same--
and red dirt came from under the alfalfa and dried in the sun,
studded with all those glass-backed beetles,
blue-green and violet and voracious.
(I was ten years old.)

I watched them as I dug stones out of the earth
barefoot and reddish, crouching in the open dust,
and they wove over and around each other
with immunity and iridescence.
And here is what I knew:
that this was only once.
Years would come and there would be plagues,
blue beads settling over our property.
They would devour our tomato plants and cluster over the peaches,
and we would kill them by the thousands
in those plastic bags on the clothesline.
But now was only once,
in new deserts with cement curing and nails scattered
and nothing planted yet,
and this time they lived
so we could see them.
(It was ten years ago now.)