poetry

Thank-You for Making Your Broken Bird World

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I bid adieu to my Facebook wall and all the people who live there (for as long as I can, I think).

It felt really interesting to wake up this morning. That strange convolution was no longer tangled up inside my skull, cloaking my brain. What a strange thing not to realize every day for seven years.

So, maybe, it’s back to communicating the way I used to. The poem below is adapted from a letter to a friend I shall miss daily now, because Facebook isn’t bad, it’s just there and it makes using words easier than maybe using them should be.

Thank-you for Making Your Broken-Bird World

(For Nancy Anonymous)
Your land of broken birds is a set of 
427 switches 
So delightfully random yet crafted
As if out of scented wax, feathers, 
Star crusts and weed flowers. 
The effect of reading them is the same 
Effect you'd get in a deep forest 
When you find a lever on a tree 
That you click up and down really fast 
To the point where you don't know if it's 
Your eyes fluttering open and shut, or 
The whole world is flickering and you're 
The only one that notices 
Anymore/anyway 
Because, of course, the biggest problem 
In life is getting so used to things that go 
On and off people take them for granted
Or let them become boring, like love, it seems now,
Which is why I stand with my hand on the lever
Tonight
And why your work is so important. 
This is what you have called 
A Broken-Bird World. Right?
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Tribute to Galway Kinnell, an American Poet

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment
Back cover of "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words"
Back cover of “Mortal Acts, Mortal Words”

I published a tribute to Galway Kinnell over at Medium.com last week. Kinnell, certainly one of this country’s most important poets of the last fifty year, died on October 28. Read the beginning of the piece here, then check out the rest at Medium.com.

The Mortal Sounds of Galway Kinnell: Some Last Lines, Medium.com

“what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?”

last lines of “The Bear,” from Body Rags (1965)

Galway Kinnell’s poetry is responsible in part for keeping me going in the early days of trying to take myself seriously as a writer. Kinnell died about a week ago at the age of 87 after a battle with leukemia. Whenever I am struck low by something big, or even something that won’t let me escape, like some ludicrous over-the-top rapture (these days I really love Taylor Swift and what the Hunger Games novels say about girl power … seriously!), I turn to collections of this great Irish American poet’s work — Body Rags, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, What a Kingdom It Was, or The Book of Nightmares. I don’t read his poems to lift me up or calm me down so much as to screw me all the way back in again. Life is hard. Pain is part of beauty. Death has immense meaning. Perhaps our fear of it should not be met with anger or rage so much as sorrow and love. Galway Kinnell had an acute ability to go into the tenderness of life’s most hardcore realities and light things up just the right way.

My college poetry professor, Gary Miranda, introduced me to Kinnell’s work. Gary would finish our Tuesday night classes reading us his favorite     Go Here to Read the Rest

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Something More

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Something More (for Marion, October 13, 2009)

An older man with dark features
And an older woman – long brown hair,
Luminous eyes, blue like
A cloudless autumn sky –
Sit in an old wood bed together.
As the audience, we are tired.
They have been speaking to each other
For many days now.
We did not know
For the price of admission
The time spent would be weeks
Here in this theater
Where management has served us meals
And brought hot towels
Down the aisles
And given us breaks for showers
And toilet runs.

The older man looks at the woman,
Says, “This is amazing.”
Slowly she smiles.

The stage fades to black.

We hear sheets rustle.
The slow, sensual wet sound of lips
On skin, whisper kisses,
A quiet chuckle
From the older woman’s throat.
Then silence.

We know this is the silence
Of two lovers,
The embrace
Of what some call true love.
But we also know now
There is something more.
There are just no words to describe it.

-dcb

© Copyright David Biddle, 2009