Playing in the Projects

My first project poem patterned after an exercise passed on by my faculty mentor, Richard Garcia called TWENTY LITTLE POETRY PROJECTS, Jim Simmerman -- From The Practice of Poetry, Bhen & Twichell.

~*~


DREAM HOME

I use animals to teach men.
Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, à Monseigneur le Dauphin

Two banana planes float west of the Howard Hughes Promenade.
Two crows will shift the rain when it arrives,
like scissors cutting through cold wax, leaving no split,
air the same as before, less dense one moment, snapping
back the next, resilient to their touch.
Lark watched the hillside homes for movement.
Those cool engines of defiance, they stay their ground
abiding earthquake or flame, little gods of immunity.
Two crows laugh, mindful of their place.
La Fontaine’s echo in sharp silence:
Je me sers d'animaux pour instruire les hommes.
Lark thought she would gouge the balloon,
empty hot east into cool west, unstop the fetid drain.
She would build a dream house on a wet hillside,
pad it with sensuous rose and sturdy rosemary,
caulk it with tea leaves, primitive moss,
furnish it with foliage, silky palomino manes.
Neighbors would go bananas over this heterotopia.
She heard their pointed eyes: “What gives?”
Another plane peels back the horizon, nosy
for altitude, barely missing two crows.

16 Dec 2006