tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1152569870621658721.post-58964927641304906062007-06-19T18:31:00.000-07:002007-07-22T07:28:02.731-07:00Game #2: Brett Price's apartment Brighton,<br />Cincinnati 5/23/07<br />WINNER: Cindy King<br /><br />BOMBASTIC CASTLE<br /><br />Of the minutest cricket<br />there was a joke.<br />Pretend that you don’t agree with me<br />this morning with a blue flame burning.<br />Nests with their birds, houses with their keys.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Lines:<br />1.Emily Dickinson<br />2. Robert Creeley from “The Joke”<br />3. Stan Rice from “Psalm 178”<br />4. John Wieners from “A Poem for Trapped Things”<br />5. Paul Eluard from “To Live Here” </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">title by Brett Price</span><br /><br /><br />***<br /><br /><br />MINUTEST CRICKET<br /><br />The trees facing wind, wind-waves towing nothing: leaves flagging, nothing to sign—<br /><br />This morning. Its blue flame burning clouds.<br /><br />Hotness overrunning horses overrun by dust, by—<br /><br />Roofs remark their hooves overlain with hooves.<br /><br />Despite the flame blue and shingles, the sand<br />notices the Milky Way the origami the doves, the oysters<br />sense the racks they boil on. Red, orange, yellow:<br /><br />temperatures like onion inside<br />onion. Thunder slices too close to a car.<br /><br />Pretend you don’t agree with the one quiet dust.<br />Pretend you didn’t see that blue crack burning.<br /><br />Nests full of cower, mansions full of feed.<br /><br /><br />Cindy's Note:<br /><br /><br />I didn’t want to touch the five lines – still don’t. They seem to come from some logic that essentially clings to the ether. I wasn’t even present to win. Ruth Wartman was guarding my bingo card for me: I was taking an important call down in the very tidy bedroom of someone I don’t know. This adds to the feeling the five lines are like a rock that fell from the sky. Then I wrote a first draft. It was all Latinate collaged with refrains akin to the ones in Rukeyser’s “Orange and Grape”. It ended with a statement followed by, “This is the joke.” But then, that poem looked too vertical, cut like an intractable and mincing landscape poem from 1989. Rumpus in a stale way. So, I started over. I stared out the window for a long time. I thought about big things, the cricket who’d been in my mind for a long time by then, how comfort and scale can blind anyone to a helpless quiet thing like a cricket (or a conscience).<br /><br />***<br /><br />Cindy King is currently recovering from an injury sustained while pitching fastballs on a Sony Wii. Her poems are forthcoming in <em>RealPoetik</em> and <em>Copper Nickel</em>.Bretthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07961833559437375231noreply@blogger.com