I have the perfect title, then for my poem. If it were a poem, then, this, my title for this morning would be set against that mackerel sky. It would be a poem about the tug within me to swim off, without restraint, without care, set against the fascination with the land-bound creatures among whom I live. It would be about my sisters sitting on the rocks luring sailors to their deaths. That a voice is an unbearable price to pay, but at the same time our voices are terrible, are dangerous. It would be a poem about sometimes feeing trapped, sometimes not feeling my true self. About loving nonetheless. It would be about loneliness. It would be about sisterhood and inheritance, about motherhood. And it would be full of the sensuality of having every inch of sleek skin caressed by gentle waters, about the sting of salt and feet scraped raw by sharp rocks. About light perceived filtered through water’s murk so that light becomes a place and shadow a playground. It would be about shedding limitations and fears and following one’s nature, about the power required and the power created to restrain oneself to cradle the small and helpless, about recognition that one can wait, that this is all temporary. It would be about the fisherman’s hut, the flinging of nets, the hope chest, battered, the folded fur at the bottom, neglected, musty. This poem would contain the cry of gulls overhead and the ceaseless roar of waves, and the loss of voice within that roar, sound bleeding into sound. It would be about the rediscovery, the shaking that skin out and stifling the cry of recognition.

(And maybe “silence” is just narrative’s fracture, that place where straight talk can no longer go, and lyric’s geysery eruption from the breach? You know how that goes. That moment in the musical/opera when people have to stop talking/reciting and burst into aria, because prose won’t contain the emotion any more.)

A poem that has these lines in it:

My truths misplaced. I try to remember what I was thinking, what it was I needed to tell you.

My hours misplaced. My voice misplaced.

And the selkie-skin image. And trees and what they become; and the inevitable smoke. And probably the shoes and the sake bottles too. And definitely the jeweled spider web.

Okay DONE kibbitzing now.

and do you know there is a Pokemon character with a tree growing out of his back? http://pokebeach.com/scans/diamond-and-pearl/17-torterra.jpg he’s one of the strongest Pokemons there is. I drew him for Everett last week, exactly when you were writing this post, I imagine.

I am finding much poetry in Pokemon these days. Torterra’s attack is “leaf storm.” there’s another, Bidoof, whose attack is “self-abandonment.” it either does damage to the defending Pokemon, or to itself, based on the result of a coin flip.

so many of my coin flips are coming up “tails” these days. I need a new attack.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

What she said.

<3