Tuesday Poem: Up
February 15, 2016
Up
To look up from cracks
to see two joined
fifty years by love,
cemented into couple,
completed by time;
To feel sudden sun’s lick
render you gerbera,
face stroked by light petal
eight minutes old
caressed by time;
To see dog raise hairy flag
of flesh and wag
a fan in smell-poem air,
simple and clear,
careless of time;
is joy.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this ages ago and can’t remember if it’s been published. Not on My List, so probably not! (My List is all the publications and awards I’ve had, and is a kind of memoir. But listier and with rather less angst.)
A simple poem with a bit of repetition for those who like that sort of thing. The dog in the photo likes the same line of poetry being thrown out again and again. We’d call it a stick.
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Tuesday poem: Heron’s formula
February 8, 2016
Heron’s formula
A lesson in trigonometry,
the white heron forms triangles
with legs as she inches forward
< obtuse, acute, obtuse >
and reeds write the shape’s third side,
grass and leg linked by my needy eye.
Each retraction from stillness
seems a matter of regret;
a fall from Greek statue
into hungry, stalking GIF.
Silent as a wish, she moves
towards the modest,
root-dwelling fish.
A split triangle
wedged into head axes down,
teaching the dumb water
a critical formula: working an equation
on softer bodies.
Heron swallows, then cries triumph,
and the noise is the croak
of a thirty-a-day frog
krarkkrarking imperfection —
a broken kaleidoscope of notes —
a pocket full of clashing change.
The breath of the eager teacher
who tried to show me the
dubious wonders of triangles,
to draw them on my brain,
swings into memory
with a scalene sharpness.
Sound conjures smell;
ear and nose separated only
by a stretched vinculum of years.
Angel microbes swarmed
in his every exhalation,
armed with gleeful mallets
for playing smell croquet —
sulphur tapped through nostrils —
blunt, yet sharp and jangling.
He could not know that
he was Alice with stink flamingos;
heroic feathers tickling
before, and after, each own goal.
How could I breathe and think
under such an unnumbered cloud?
A limp fish, I soon failed.
The elegance of herons
undercut by noise;
the perfection of mathematics
negated by disgust.
I paddle off, towards firm ground,
away from the sharp, white assassin,
and the chopped pools of recollection.
P.S. Cottier
This poem was just commended in the World Wetlands Day Poetry Prize, judged by Sarah Day, so I thought it would be nice for people to be able to read it. The winning poems are posted at the link, and very good they are too. The site itself is as cool as a rockpool and thrice as pretty.
This is an unusual poem for me in that it combines the natural world and memory and mathematics. I am innumerate, so the maths is the most freaky part. The poem recalls someone being turned off the so-called Queen of the Sciences for life. Sometimes the division between authorial voice and real author is pretty swampy.
Heron’s formula has something clever to do with triangles, I think. Personally, I am satisfied that the sail on the swanboat in the picture above is a most definite triangle. I passed Shapes at kindergarten with flying colours.
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Tuesday Poem (may involve link…)
February 2, 2016
http://plumwoodmountain.com/reading-the-frog-economy/
My poem ‘Reading the frog economy’ was just published in Plumwood Mountain, an online journal specialising in ecopoetry and ecopoetics. It’s a slippery wee beast of a prose poem, so hop on the webs (as in froggy feet, ha ha sorry!) and check it out, along with all the other poems in Volume Three Number One, as selected by Tricia Dearborn.
This frog is urging you to check it out,or he will turn into into Donald Trump, which would be somewhat less than ideal.
I do not understand this image…
Tuesday poem (or notes towards one!): A Great Perhaps revisited
January 25, 2016
A Great Perhaps revisited
the fantastic maybe
the I can’t believe it’s not heaven
the Ladbroke Lad’s uncertainty principle
the cliché feline done to death (and not done to death)
Rabelais lays down a beauty
the Artful Dodger’s silent handkerchief that never ends
caught in a pun, she giggled internally —
Pantagruellingly —
any more sir?
Baby likes ideas
So François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel, allegedly uttered the words ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps’ on his deathbed. One thing for sure is that he loved a good rude joke and a spirit of anarchic fun pervades his works. I am playing with puns and physics and farts and different ways of envisaging heaven in the above. Dickens is dragged in too, although I do not think that any of his characters ever farted, even on a deathbed.
Far too much for a Lilliputian poem, but I rather like glutting on ideas from time to time.
Next week things will make more sense. That’s a promise. Peut-être.
Tuesday poem: This poem is a birdbath
January 18, 2016
This poem is a birdbath
and it fills itself with bird,
the quick splash of silvereye
the suspicious sip of currawong,
unable to believe in non-carnivorous gift —
looking out for bigger beaks behind the bush.
This poem features no sudden cat, lurking,
a sonnet’s volta, waiting to rewrite the tone
from mild celebration to whiskered doom.
The water slops over the rim of
the poem.
The mess feeds the grass below, as do the birds.
Birds draw no firm distinctions between bath
and toilet. They revel, quietly, and the poem
expresses gratitude, for being, for being merely.
P.S. Cottier
Muse with beak
That one doesn’t really need much exegesis! Annoyingly, a wee glitch (as opposed to an enormous GLITCH) is preventing me doing a broken line…’the poem’ is supposed to appear under the rest of the line. But I’ll try and stay positive rather than cursing my computer or the platform which allows for these posts!
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In other poetry doings, Michele Seminara has recently had four poems featured at Rochford Street Review, and it was a delight to find that one was dedicated to a certain P.S. Cottier. Michele’s first book, Engraft, in which these poems appear, will soon be launched in Sydney, Wagga Wagga and Melbourne. You can read the poems here, and also find details of the launches there. I am thinking of going to Wagga.
Apart from being a fine poet and editor, Michele is also a blogger.
PS Cottier 