Henkimaa » Poems

Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You

Mel Green — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:42:10 +0000

Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You

by Melissa S. Green | crossposted at Bent Alaska

does anyone beat your heart for you —
oh yes I know there are some who
will quicken it
or slow it at their leaving —
but when you are alone at night
and sleeping, dreamless . . .
it is there . . . beating —
it will be there . . . beating —
till you die

does anyone beat your heart for you
does anyone live your life for you
do you cast a vote — plea for
intercession
do you hasten your death by forgetting

do you close your eyes and believe
what others say you see

[January 9, 1982]

About this poem

I spoke this poem today at the Community Building for Alaska workshop sponsored by the Alaska Community Foundation & Alaska Pacific University, after a morning’s discussion. It’s not possible to walk together in community as anyone other than who we are, carrying our own minds, hearts, souls.

I wrote this poem many many years ago, mostly in my head, one day walking across my home town of Columbia Falls, Montana, & thinking about people who seem to need to have other people tell them what to think, what to believe — or even to know who they are. But how can you know who you are, unless you discover it for yourself? How can others know you unless you are yourself? How can any other person have the arrogance or violence of spirit to claim better knowledge of you than you have of yourself? To do so is a violation of your very integrity.

This is the second time I’ve posted this poem on my blog. The first time was in the summer of 2009, during the height of the public hearings on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64. You can read here about the occasion of my posting it then.

Weird

Mel Green — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:05:02 +0000

Weird

Never knew a time when I was not

weird

this is different
I am tonight surprised to find I care
in a way I didn’t think I did about it

weird

they wrote in my high school yearbook
they said weird, you are weird
(and many added, stay that way)

I don’t recall a time
this was said unpleasantly
however small, there was always care there

now I care in a way I never thought I would
that my niece in a childhood game
said You’re weird and got upset
when I said Thank you

I treated it as a compliment, and always had

she said But you’re weird! as if
to say a repetition of it would
impel me to remember
it was not to be treated as a compliment,
an identity, a friend

there was always something in me
that knew the value of my uniqueness

different

I care in a different way now
than I ever thought I would
because my weird makes me unique
there’s something different that’s the same
as unique and that’s

outsider

I have often thought myself a loner — this is how I’m free

different

to be free — yet I am an outsider
and each time someone has told me
as caringly as you told me tonight

You’re weird

there is something

different

I never saw before
I see now with my
high
di-
lated
eyes
that each time I’ve been told
even by friends who love me
as you do
it leaves a little hurt each time
because the meaning of

weird

is unique, individual, different, free

outsider

and sometimes in my freedom
I am so lonely, and want so bad

to belong

[17 Oct 1983]

About this poem

From my bad old days.

Days are better now (overall). But I’m still weird.

Table 2 (poem)

Mel Green — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:05:55 +0000

Table 2, from the article "National Prison Population Growth: A BJS Report" in the Winter 1996 issue of the Alaska Justice Forum

Table 2

Between 1980 and 1994 the total number of people held in federal and state prisons and local jails almost tripled — increasing from 501,886 to 1,483,410.

— Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice

I am making a table. My hammer
is the keyboard of the computer —
tap tap — my nails are the commas
and decimal points that keep these legs
of numbers standing true.
The grain is the roundness of zeros and eights,
leaning spines of nines and percentage signs,
sharp angles of fours and sevens.
I will call this table (slightly
modifying its original name) Table 2:
Number of Adults in Custody
of State or Federal Prisons or in
Local Jails; and though it’s only
a copy, when I’m done it will be
a clearer, cleaner version of
the Bureau of Justice Statistics table
from which I copied it to include
in the Alaska Justice Forum.

But it’s not the ideal table.

Though I’m of that kind, a maker of poems
whom Plato had Socrates exclude
from his rational, perfect Republic —
an imitator of imitations, my work
one step from the carpenter’s table or bed,
but two steps from the idea of table
in the ether around God’s head —
for my day job I’m also of that kind
essential to the Republic. Sustained
by statisticians, I am a maker
of passionless tables that summarize
in numbers the reasoned philosophy
of this well-ordered State’s philosopher-kings.

But if this poem I make by night is a pale
faded imitation of the table I made by day,
the white spaces between my table’s columns
are paler copies yet of the concrete walls,
steel bars, control rooms, keys, and guns
of guards in towers. And its numbers in their
hundred thousands, the total in its millions
(seven digits divided by commas)
imitate in mere paper and ink the bodies,
the sweat and sheen and stink of bodies,
the rage and fear and anguish of minds,
the sorrow and grief and violent hatreds
of prisoners one mere step away:

embodying the closest approximation
of the ideal that waxes ineffable
in the ether around God’s head.

[April 15, 1997]

About this poem

Before 1990, most of what I knew about the American justice system came from fiction — books, movies, TV. Then I took a job as a publication specialist at the UAA Justice Center, which entailed amongst other thinks making lots of tables & charts on various aspect of the justice system. That’s the lens through which I became aware of the extraordinary growth of correctional populations in the U.S., especially due to the so-called “war on drugs” that began during the Reagan administration.

Sometime in about 2001, the U.S. surpassed the Russian Federation to become the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Here we are now (from an article in our most recent issue of the Alaska Justice Forum):

Figure 3. Rate of Incareration in Selected Nations (most current data available as of February 2011). From "Prisoner Reentry and the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act" by Deborah Periman, Alaska Justice Forum 27(4), Winter 2011.

Makes you feel all proud & patriotic, eh?

As for Plato’s Republic: Plato didn’t much like poets, because the poetic imagination weakened the power & authority of the Plato’s idealized philosopher-king. As James P. Carse writes in The Religious Case Against Belief,

Plato’s Republic is a completely rational and comprehensive system. It is threatened more by the poets than by its military enemies — in fact, it needs those enemies.

Explains a lot, that does.

For my part, most “philosopher-kings,” idealized or not, go off the rails almost from the moment they achieve power & authority. Give me a poet any day.

Vashti Speaks for Herself

Mel Green — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:08:05 +0000

Teakettle Mountain, Columbia Falls, Montana. The industrial area that the tracks lead to (at the mountain's foot) is Anaconda Aluminum Company (now Columbia Falls Aluminum Company), where I worked summers during my college years. I took this photo sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Vashti Speaks for Herself

But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command conveyed by the eunuchs. At this the king was enraged, and his anger burned within him. (Esther 1:12)

He said that? you heard him? The bastard!
I used to love him. Some ways I still do . . .
but honey, don’t believe all you hear.
He can put it on Larry King Live,
he can write it up in the Bible
for every preacher to preach,
it’ll still be a goddamn lie. . . .

Did you know my name means beautiful?
He knew it, too, first time he saw me
parked on my bucket, graveyard tired
with the rest of D-shift, waiting for the whistle
to blow us off-clock for that wild headlong hurry
to the changehouse and showers and gate.
All I wanted was clean, and home, and bed.

He was a C-shift man, walking in,
and I felt his eyes, and I felt them the next
morning and morning till finally he spoke.
Didn’t matter then my jeans had holes
from hot cryolite spat like brimstone
from between the devil’s own teeth, or that
my hair was dull and gritty with ore
and my shirt stank of eight hours’ baked-in sweat
and my skin, rough and red from pitchburn,
stung at his whiskers’ kiss.
Grime and all, he saw I was beautiful,
and I saw in him the same.

But no sooner did he stick his ring
on my finger than he wanted to yank
me clean out of my steeltoes, drop me into a dress
at some jewelry counter at six bucks an hour.
He told me a man’s work wasn’t for me.
I guess he thought union wages weren’t, either.
I guess he thought he should be enough for me.

He was the type said his home was his castle.
His was a trailer, east side of town,
all trimmed up in antlered heads
that rode home down the North Fork road every fall
under tarps in his pick-up bed.
He never bought meat— his freezer
was full up with moose and venison steaks.
Stay home, I bring home all we need, he said.
He thought he could rule by the depth of his bellow.
My lungs got real tired proving him wrong.

When he came home that night after eight hours’ swing
and two or three more at the North Fork Saloon
and shook me awake at 3.00 AM
to play pretty hostess to his buncha friends —
goddamn, I was working day-shift that week!
did he think I could work without any sleep? —
yeah, you betcha, I yelled, I said, That’s what you want,
then just shoot me and stuff me and stick marbles in
my sockets and nail me to your goddamn wall.

So yeah, he can say all he wants to about it
and look for a nice quiet good-looking wife.
But it wasn’t him that put through the papers,
it wasn’t him that opened the door.
He didn’t push me, and he didn’t dump me.
I rid him of me — and I rid me of him.

[February 9, 1994]

About this poem

This poem is centered in an aluminum reduction plant in my hometown of Columbia Falls, Montana, where I worked summers during my college years. But the poem’s characters are fiction.

Cryolite is a compound used in the reduction of aluminum, often found in the plant in its molten state. Ore is what we called alumina, or aluminum oxide, the product of the refining of raw bauxite. The plant’s function is to reduce it — remove the oxygen—to produce aluminum. It’s a white powder with much the same appearance and consistency as baking powder. Pitchburn is a chemical burn to the skin, looking and feeling similar to a bad sunburn, caused by exposure to hydrocarbons used in the reduction process. The
North Fork is the North Fork of the Flathead River, Flathead National Forest.

Mielikki

Mel Green — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:39:07 +0000

April: National Poetry Month. I’ll be (trying to) post a poem every day this month, some mine, some not mine. Today, one of mine — fitting in well with my recent preoccupations with matters of spirit & writing.

Mielikki

When they told me who to put on the throne
I said, no, I will not be ruled.
The gods they showed me were tyrants
who displeased me with their judgments,
their injustice, yes, their cruelty.

Tough, I thought, and rugged.
Above the law am I —
an outlaw, a renegade
from the unhappy Kingdoms of Gods
who would cast me to hell and damnation —
there was no compassion, no love:
I was alone.

Running and running, cold and lonely,
hungry and tired — I kept my mouth shut
and my eyes hated everyone.

I was a hero, hungry and tough.
I was a hero, subsisting on crumbs.
Walking through cities, rubbing shoulders
with the people, the subjects, the soldiers,
all of them, of the enemy.

I scoffed at them,
and I knew I was dying.

But messengers sent from my own land, my homeland,
you sent them with messages in their hands
that I slowly trusted to touch me.

And homes where they brought me,
where I could not fall to harm –
where they expected nothing, only asked
if I might come home, to you.

Who are you? the one who sits not on a throne
but runs hidden in the weather that surrounds me —
who follows but does not pursue me —
who knows always where I am when I
have shaken off everyone else —

who leaves secret love notes
in the heart of my deepest shame —
how do you find me when I, myself, am lost?

Today if I wake in wilderness,
in hot desolation, with cracked and dry lips,
I know you will give me comfort:
a cool stream from the dust,
the promise of peace
when I come home to you –
worn by travel, but wiser . . .
and always loved.

[June 11, 1984]

About this poem

This dates from the finding of my central “household god” — recounted in part in my 2006 post “A brief spiritual history” — the forest spirit Mielikki, who is metsolan emäntä: Mistress of Woodland. The name Mielikki combined the word mieli = heart, mind, consciousness, desire, etc., plus the suffix of endearment -kki.

Mielikki is also a central figure in my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, which I’m finally back at work on.

[Good! We've been waiting! — M.]
[Yes. Still waters run deep, but waters that are too still get stagnant. And grow algae. — V.]
[So says the Slackwater Man. — M.]
[When the helvetti you gonna write a poem about me? — L.]

“Anchorage Oil Town Villanelle” published in Cirque

Mel Green — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:53:00 +0000

Cirque, Summer Solstice 2010. Cover art by Janet Levin

On April 29 this year I headed downstairs to the Starbucks in the UAA Social Sciences Building to grab myself a cup of coffee, & there ran into my friend Marilyn Borell, with whom I went through UAA’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program in the late ’90s. Marilyn told me about something that had somehow had escaped my attention until then: Cirque, a literary journal created and edited by our friend Anchorage poet Mike Burwell, which had already published its first issue on Winter Solstice 2009. Further, Marilyn told me, Cirque was taking submissions for its second issue — with a submission deadline of the very next day. And so I submitted.

The Summer Solstice 2010 issue was published — you guessed it — yesterday, Summer Solstice (June 21).

You can find my poem “Anchorage Oil Town Villanelle” on page 37. I wrote this poem in 1997, eight years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, & submitted it to Cirque a few days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. But no one knew on April 30 how vast the resulting oil spill would be — less of a spill, really, than a hemorrhage. But it’s not just oil spills that are the problem — it’s the whole schlemiel surrounding oil & the corrupting influence of oil money. Which Anchorage, & Alaska, is square in the middle of. Just take a look at Wikipedia’s article on the Alaska political corruption probe — which broke into the news a good nine years after my poem was written.

I’m delighted to be accompanied by works by other poets & writers I know like Marilyn Borell, Anne Coray, Marybeth Holleman, Mark Muro, Jeff Oliver, and Tom Sexton — who taught the first poetry workshop I took at UAA in Spring 1994. I know my friend David Cheezem — another friend from UAA MFA program — primarily as a poet and coowner of Fireside Books in Palmer, but he’s also a fine photographer: see his contribution on page 42.

And then there’s all the great reading, illustrations, and photography from people all over the Pacific Rim who I don’t know.

To turn the pages, click on the arrow bars on either side. To zoom to fullscreen, just click on the page.

Cirque is a regional literary journal of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork, and photography for emerging and established writers living in the North Pacific Rim — Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon Territory, Alberta, British Columbia, and Chukotka. As such, it is in some ways a successor to Ice-Floe, an international journal of poetry of the circumpolar north co-edited (with Sarah Kirk) by another of my fellow UAA MFA graduates Shannon Gramse. (My poem “Field of Words” was published in Ice-Floe’s Winter Solstice 2002 issue.) Except, of course, that Cirque includes other genres beside poetry.

It’s a beautiful publication too. It’s available for viewing & reading online, as above, or you can purchase copies through Magcloud.

Stories mentioned in my Cirque bio

My bio in Cirque mentions two stories I wrote. Here’s where you can read them:

“Cold” — published November 2009 in Crossed Genres #12, the LGBTQ issue, and in the anthology Crossed Genres Year One. From the novel-in-progress Cold.
“Itch” — second-place winner in the 2010 Radical Arts for Women short story contest (Anchorage, Alaska). From the novel-in-progress Finer.

Metsän henki

Mel Green — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:04:49 +0000

At the beginning of this month, I’d intended to post a poem — mine or someone else’s — every day in honor of National Poetry Month. I fell down on the job. But today it’s still April. Besides, my friend Kathy asked me to post one. So here’s one.

Metsän henki

She stands outside & in me,
a flicker beckoning
at the inmost limit of vision
where the blind spot is insufficiency
of self-knowing.

She leans to whisper in my breath:
“Heed my green flow in your blood;
drink the wind; inspire
the medicine of trees.”

Leaves flutter, inviting.
She is visible in the dappled breeze
among the white trunks.
At the back of my mind she is visible,
backgrounding all.

[written in 2000; published in Teresa McPherson, ed., Transformations, Anchorage, AK: Radical Arts for Women, 2002.]

About this poem

Metsän henki (Finnish) means forest spirit. Hence, an alternative name for my central “household god,” the forest spirit Mielikki, who is metsolan emäntä: Mistress of Woodland. The name Mielikki combined the word mieli = heart, mind, consciousness, desire, etc., plus the suffix of endearment -kki.

Mass Extinctions

Mel Green — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:28:01 +0000

Topiary dinosaurs in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle

National Poetry Month continues, with two dinosaur poems.

Mass Extinctions 1

Who seek a lesson in Babel,
consider the next confoundment:
the bones of overweening man nosed
at by some nameless beast, as we
pick over blameless dinosaurs.

[October 25, 1994]

Mass Extinctions 2

A rip in the sky, a roar:
impact of a meteor –
shroud of iridium dust
on the dusk of Dinosaur.

What thick dust does now remand
to the sod and soil and sand
the heirs of Cretaceous dead? –
the human tread on the land.

[March 23, 1995]

About these poems

“Mass Extinctions 1″ is in a simple form called octosyllabic (eight syllables per line). “Mass Extinctions 2″ is in a Welsh from called an englyn cyrch. Both poems rely on well-known scientific theories about the several mass extinctions prior to the one over which we humans are currently presiding, the most famous being that of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Our turn next.

Stone Poem

Mel Green — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:20:35 +0000

Another of my own for National Poetry Month.

Stone Poem

These rocks are words: take them in your mouth
and bite down, crush them, gravel them between
your teeth till they are sand, then spit them out:
gritty consonants, dark vowels on clean

white paper, remnant of a broken tree
once rooted deep in dirt, now blank and pale
as sightless eyes or skin of leprosy
soiled with dust sieved by the teeth, a trail

of scales fallen from the eyes, of notes
drawn up in measured music. Given breath,
they rise up from the page in dancing motes
and whisper in our ears of rumored death:

We rocks, we trees will give rise to new words
when you are gone to dust and scattered shards.

[April 13, 1994]

About this poem

My first sonnet. As described in the introductory essay in my masters’ thesis (Borrowed from Wind, 1997) –

“Stone Poem”… is a Shakespearean or English sonnet, comprising three quatrains, each of which takes its own part in logically developing the poem, and concluded by the couplet’s one-two punch—softened slightly, in this case, by the off-rhyme of words and shards.

Elsewhere in that essay:

Words come from rocks, geese, grass, wind, not vice versa. Hence the reversal that suddenly took place, just before I printed out copies of “Stone Poem” for workshop, from “These words are rocks” to “These rocks are words”…. After workshop, half my copies of “Stone Poem” came back with the single, commanding note [from other students in the workshop]: “These words are rocks!” Which says a lot about just how strong is the received understanding of the “And God said, Let there be light” model of creation-by-the-word.

The Mountain

Mel Green — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:57:25 +0000

Downtown Anchorage with Mt. Foraker (left), Denali (middle), & fata morgana (right) in the background. Fata morgana are optical illusions particularly common in polar or other cold regions: there really aren't really any mountains north of Denali visible from Anchorage, except with fata morgana. (Clickthrough to my Flickr account for options to see a larger version of this photo.)

It’s still National Poetry Month. Here’s one of mine.

The Mountain

The Mountain gazes from my locker.
She is the beacon of home.
On a clear day she can be seen from infinity.

From a flying height when the land is covered over,
all but the great yellow eye is a blueness —
all but the great rolling white plain below,
from which she alone rises.
She reflects the sun most greatly.
She is higher than the others.
She is whiter than clouds.

On days when she broods in her cloudcast
pilgrims cry for her to show herself.
Some have died in their search for her vastness,
as have died on the flanks of many mountains,
seeking the high places.
She is the Weathermaker.

She is the Crown of the Continent:
none approach her but in awe.
She is elemental, ice and rock,
snow and wind. Those who climb her
are breathless with her magnitude.
From her summit they gaze in wonder
at the tangle of her mighty ramparts,
the shoulders of her sisters and brothers,
their snowy heads, their howling wind souls.

Spine of the land thrust up
by the grinding of continents, you signify
the might of the planet. You glow
like a lamp in the arctic summer.
Even in winter night do you shine.
You are never dark.

You are not my most loved mountain,
nor favorite, nor most familiar.
But Mountain, you gaze from my locker.
You can be seen from infinity.
I see you even from this far distance.

Great One, you beckon me homeward
as you stand watch over the land.

[April 27-June 7, 1990]

About this poem

Denali (aka Mt. McKinley) was the first sight I saw of Alaska when I first came up in 1982: it was poking up above the cloudscape my plane was flying over. I was here 5 years before a bad economy led me to move to Seattle. In 1990 I was in my third year of living in Seattle, with a job that sucked & a terrible homesickness for Alaska. I happened upon an Alaska Airlines brochure with a photo of Denali on it, and taped it on my locker: my light at the end of the tunnel to go with a countdown of the days left before I was outta there & on my way back to Alaska.