Sample Poems by Nola Garrett
Landscape with Six Plastic Flamingos
Like childbirth, this crisis is of my own choosing
made one passionate Saturday morning six
days and nine months ago when words
alone were useless. My searching for
relief from the self’s dictionary with another
has come to this nexus–a pink sestina—
though mid-labor it seems the sestina
like a pick-up football team has done the choosing.
Will they throw me the ball? Am I just another
skinny, neighbor kid chosen because six
against seven are not enough for
a game? My team calls me Snake Lips, words
that hurt because they’re true. My words
slither around in the dream that is sestina,
a kind of pink story I make for
the man who landscapes with plastic flamingos, choosing
not art, he says, but what he likes. Six
constitutes a flamingo quorum—another
small scantling for maintaining another
sort of peace. His flamingos and my words
could be anywhere, curving out in six
directions, void and cold—the mind’s sestina
a chaos. It’s the glory of choosing, choosing
anything, that frees and shapes us for
our lorn, featherless flight. I look for
words. They’re sea shells—here’s one, here’s another—
fix, coral, rampion, charismatic, tame, wing—choosing
some for shape, some for sound. These words
toss, jostle, ping, loop, unravel until sestina
pinks them. They’re integrated, six
flamingos browsing, no longer at sixes
and sevens, knees bent the wrong way for
humans, though just right for a sestina
about the mind’s plastic shore: another
landscape of blood, salt and words
that fancies pink, artificial birds choosing
flight—another sestina for six words’ choosing.
Gong
Though I speak with the tongues of men
and angels, and have not charity, I am become
a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
I Corinthians 13: 1
I am what I am says the gong
not meaning to sound like chatter
of strangers near your soul’s center
while fear of me follows where I go
like feathers disturbing your rest
and the brass-colored sky I have come
to believe is evening has come
a little too soon like a gong
left in the shivering wind to rest
while its maker stops to chatter
with postmen and angels who go
about their business and center
themselves in his light the center
that holds so fast I wish he’d come
to finish what he began and go
with his copper-green hands from gong
to gong hammering our chatter
and our dimpling questions that rest
in rings like old trees giving rest
within their imperfect centers
to birds and squirrels that chatter
and churr their warnings when you come
too close to their homes rigged with gongs
hung from wrinkled limbs that go
to the trees’ secret doors where stairs go
down through the roots to earth to rest
in the glimmering places where gongs
and water whisper the centers
of stories saving the ends to come
later around the fire’s chatter
while poking the coals of old chatter
of what might have been if you’d go
not alone but together to come
through the rumoring thunder to rest
every night in the brass-bound center
of the mysterious laughter of gongs
False Aralia
My uncle says I look mean
in my fifth grade picture. Best
gray dress. Takes no shine to my lace,
he says, I used to hide my ugly neck.
It was hard to hold still—look false
so long—calm as Aunt Martha’s aralia
plant. Used to be my Mom’s aralia
she kept safe from mean
things. You know, dogs, spilled beer, false
moves. Strange plant. Does its best
in the shade. Holds its neck
straight wearing its quivering leaves like lace-
edged steak knives arranged upon a lace
cloth on a table near an aralia
and a few violets, stretching their necks
towards the sun where someone wouldn’t mean
to stumble over a rocking chair. Best
not to think about that sweet, false
smell of Uncle’s cigarettes. His false
laugh pinning me like a brooch to my lace
rag self. Swelled up finger thing busting
through my shadowed aralia
place all mean
wet shudder his hard breathing on my neck
where blood and air make my neck
a bridge between my false-
bottomed body and where my mean
thoughts after a while grow lacy
here on the porch by the aralia
that used to be my mom’s own best
place where she said she did her best
thinking. She’d smooth the neck
of her guitar, flick her cigarette past the aralia,
and seemed somehow to twist her false
notes into lace,
airy stuff that helps me think past meanness.
A Cadenza for Arnaut Daniel
The invention of the sestina is usually attributed
to Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1190)
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
This time with my writing hand I enter
your words, Arnaut, leach through your fingernails,
slip into your six-sided mind to tap your soul.
(My fear is almost a nuclear rod—
so much potential.) I remember my uncle
drunk, his fumbling into a chamber
a bullet; I heard the click of an empty chamber,
felt his spit hissing, Bitch, heard him enter
another. Yes, you were right to choose uncle.
Did you touch with your thumb each fingernail,
too, counting your syllables out, the rod
of each line making and breathing your soul?
Warily, I examine your word, soul,
ashamed mine might be a vacant chamber
or worse—penciled where cliche has trod.
You wrote of a soul’s persistence. I enter
your song of pain and devotion—nails
and all—a part of your ordinary of uncle
and sister, candle and night. My uncle
could be absolved, a few prayers free his soul.
These many years I have preserved him nailed
in memory, though sealed in death’s chamber.
What if I just forgot him? Would he enter
heaven or hell unchanged by plea or rod?
Why not let oblivion be his rod?
I’ll strand him nameless like the uncle
who threatened your love, who entered
your poem but left unknown; for now my soul
follows your words into your chamber,
the poem you built with your heart and fingernails.
Holding my pen, surrounded by fingernails,
I write these lines across your words, your rods,
my candles, as I wander your chamber’s
maze. I greet your love, nod to your uncle's
dark ways. I find the portal where your soul
must have sometimes rested, then entered:
Nola sends her song of the uncle-nail
for the pleasure of Arnaut, her rod when soul
and honor enter sestina’s chamber.
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