Starpoet Newsletter Vol. IX, No. XX

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2008 C. E.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midpoint May well drenched by spring

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between hayfever and death 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seconds like hours,
My body drifts,
Unhinged from time,
My mind files the moment
For future reference.

 

I watch the light
Shift east to west
Above the clouds
And the gray cold rain.

 

My thoughts move
Through slow molasses glass,
Grasping for anchors
To hold me fast to reality.

 

Deconamine, Benadryl,
Rizatiptan benzoate,
Free of pain,
I struggle to release myself
From the pit.

 

Like some ancient sun
Turned red with age,
I cannot re-ignite
My former glory,
The best I can do
Is this.

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

discontinuities

 

 

 

 

  

 

6 A. M., three
Time disconnects,
re …

 

The flow is disrupted,
Corrupted,
Senses barrenly overloaded,
Grasping at slivers,
Eddies of reality
Teasing my consciousness.

 

The poet struggles
To provide structure
To the formless.

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me love is one of a thousand elements in fiction. Love in a novel is like salt, and I use it like salt to heighten plot and character in uncountable ways. In fiction, as in real life, love is tangled with anger, with compassion as in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (which obtuse critics mistook for pity), spirituality, adornment, fashion, parent-child relationships, shifting concepts of physical beauty, sacrifice, seduction, bodily sensation, fantasies, dreams and plottings, metaphor, lies and fumbling truths, poetry, virginity, possession, semen, philosophy, loss, fading color, tristesse, pregnancy, heredity, clan power. It runs the gamut of meanings from mad obsession to basic biological lust to a fondness for delicacies as Ignatius J Reilly's love for the soft drink Dr Nut in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

 

- Annie Proulx 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the waken poet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pen, dry of ink,
Finds itself gathered
With the crumpled,
Discarded Kleenex
And the come-ons from
The common mail catalogs
That connect us, spam to spam.

 

The poet, her muse vanished,
Disappears without a word,

 

Without even recycling
Her greatest hits
Late night on cable
Between the CSI reruns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

too much sneezing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the limousine comes
to move my ashes
And scatter me on
a westerly breeze,
I shall no longer care
or give a damn,
Having, at last,
reached perfection,
With all my best work
well dead behind me,
No longer worried
whether my mascara has run.

 

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- Annie Proulx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

into the great unknown that swallows us

 

 

 

 

 

I have seen a ghost,
Or perhaps it was an angel,
Or maybe just the wind
Rustling silently off focus.
The anticipation was breathtaking.

 

Tomorrow, as we know tomorrow,
May not exist
In a form we will recognize,
A great swirl rotates counterclockwise
To and back,
Spewing stars and calendars
Gaily from its twisting arms.
Choosing the moment is everything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

my very first

 

 

 

 

 

The first person die I ever saw
Was a middle aged woman in Sacramento
Whose foot slipped from brake to throttle
And crashed her Buick into a concrete wall
A quarter block ahead of where I stood
On the sidewalk with my mother across the street.
We were shopping. It was spring. I was ten,
Perhaps less than, but I remember. Still. 
My mother wouldn’t let me look but I saw the crash.

 

The first person who died I ever knew,
Was the husband of an older woman
-- Gilbert was the name –
Whose house down the block
I would stop in on the way back from school.
They were my neighborhood grandparents,
I was their neighborhood grandchild.
We would talk, they’d ask me questions,
I’d answer and ask them and talk some more.
One day, while I was at All Hallows, he died.
A heart attack I’m told.  The first person ever
To vanish suddenly from my life.  I was seven,
Or perhaps five or six, but I remember
And remember crying in bed that he was gone.
Later I would stop by his house, talk to his wife,
A widow still mourning and the neighbor’s kid,
I knew it would never be the same.
It never is.

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sappho-Shakespeare-Whitman-Thompson,
A line running through us, ego to ego,
Working writers all, in constant motion,
Child to poet to epilog and old age, 
Where death awaits us all
Until the next one takes us further.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a dash of starpoet

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starlight above the cloudbank,
Unseen below the rain,
Imagining Orion rising,
A temporal spatial exercise.

 

I prefer to send golden ships
In search of worlds unknown
Than sulk inside life’s rude unfairness,
Curled up, withdrawn, undone.

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

the past and future meet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the Lord was flesh inside my body
And I but seven and dressed all in white,
Every face around me was gay or recollected,
Floating three feet above the altar rail
In ecstatic contentment:  each of us,
For the moment, the beloved of our savior.

 

Children of the sorely wounded Christ,
We were well taught in our belief,
Experiencing God’s presence within our young souls,
if not in our raptured vision, our hearts afire
With the unsurpassing sweetness of His love
While our parents and the nuns watched over us.

 

Stick on stick, coal on coal, I waited for my ignition,
But the revelation only grew more tenuous
As I escaped the white and black power of the nuns;
I grew until I was no longer seven, and each communion
Was but one more added to the list, one more silent retreat
Without the Lord moving my world or adolescent body.

 

But when I was seven, He was within me,
Or so I thought with little else to compare Him too;
Now I find His existence quite suspect, Thomas’s proofs
A true believer’s rationalizations that carry no weight;
My first communion was a moment to be cherished,
When, in my innocence, I was one with my God.

I even have the photo’s somewhere in a cardboard box
In a trunk in the basement along side my family bible.

 

 

Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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