Mountain, Water Water, Mountain

Waterfall at Mt. Rainier National Park

Mountain, Water Water, Mountain

mirrorworld
sleek skeen
even the cannabis store 
straddles the street               
                under the raven              
                           gulls’ renegade shadow
                 tell me the name for
a puddle 
           unpuddling

My gosh! 

Outside is
a comicbook sound —
speech bubbles of 
squelch squish squeamish
and bike tire spit.

life imitates light
light imitates life

At last, reaching the sky, 
a finger into night, void 
black, retracted at the putrid 
ooze and then a pinkening:

some celestial chemical reaction as if 
this rain 
incessant and blanket
was vinegar
cloud-clad Olympics and their baking soda peaks
Icarus and Prometheus 
sat around a Bunsen burner
in togas turned lab coats
and other modern pleasantries

---

As Sufjan Stevens says “It’s the same outside.” But when the clouds DO break… those sunrises.

This poem took a bit of a journey this week. It might be boring, but I find the process of a poem (does it ever really end?) fascinating.

Ready? 

A few months ago I wrote a poem called “Slop at 29”. It was a particularly muddy week and Slop29 was (is?) my younger brother’s Club Penguin username. 

It read as follows: 

My gosh.

Just look outside.
It’s a comicbook sound. 
Speech bubbles of squelch, squish
squeamish - even in galoshes. 
Poor man. Bike tire spits rhymes, 
a word for each vertebrae of his spine. 
Flung and final. Frank and fainting.
Imagine if upon, at last, reaching the sky, 
you stuck a finger into the black, retracted at the muddiness
of our Sistine Chapel.

As you can see I kept a good chunk of it but didn’t love where it wound up. Then, a few weeks ago, I wrote this line “mountain/water water/mountain” which I liked as a doodle of western Washington.

I put those two in a room together and got the first half of this poem which plays somewhere between abstract sonority and actual syntax. Then the second half surprised me. I was looking out my window at an early morning puddle that had the reflection of light in it “life imitating light.” When I reversed it, “light imitating life,” I found a new momentum. 

This turn propelled the back half of the Slop poem into a new tone home that, I believe, landed in a more accurate emotional center. Something funny, but serious — like romping through a puddle. 

Slop29 is visiting me this weekend. This one’s for Slop.

With gratitude,