Saturday, July 9, 2011

yotsumono

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No. 4

heat wave
reading a classic novel
that bores me

a little family
fashioned out of clay

this is the last time
I’ll give in to your request
for fried eggs

she takes a drag
off my last Pall Mall


melissa, willie, melissa, willie


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6 comments:

bandit said...

kannonbirakai - 'last' is repeated in V 4.

I changed my verses slightly ...

Melissa said...

oh...how did we miss that? I think we were tired by the end...

I still want that little family.

bandit said...

I remember the "little family" now - an old Texas lady, Mrs. Lottie Trude, was my nanny, I guess you call it, when I was just a little boy.
She would carve "little" people with faces from green apples that would wrinkle with age, their bodies clad in overalls and house frocks handmade. And, of course, all types of clay figures. True American folk art with American themes. I believe some of the figures were made from the red earth found in that area of Clay County, Missouri, some of it from before WWII.
That's why I describe it now more accurately as "little". The actual memory didn't come to me until now, after we composed the yotsumono.
That clay was something else. She had a garden patch in the back of her acre lot. In the height of summer, the heat would often bake the earth and cause it to parch and crack in deep fissures the color of umber and brick red. Still, though, the walnut trees flourished, eventually dropping their unripened fruit all about, with that hard green skin with the pungent aroma like nothing else that would stick and cloy on your fingers long after you handled it.
Those long, hot summers seemed never to end, full with warm, fragrant breezes and the katydid's droning calls.
The use of the word "last" may be more a stylistic point of contention more than anything. Besides, ageku may have content relative to the poem as a whole.

Pasadena Adjacent said...

Thats effective Bandit, Interesting relationship between the light emitting basement blocks. We have a bit of that in Los Angeles although without tornados we don't have much need for basements. I think such buildings were made by midwesterners. Purple glass. The color one of the oxides turn when glass ages.

Pasadena Adjacent said...

I stand corrected. what I was thinking

bandit said...

We can only hope to match Chicago someday ...