Category Archives: bachelard

P-is-for-Piano

P – Bachelard – Week 7 Notes and Neurons and Me

“While in the fields

Of this eternal childhood

The poet walks

And doesn’t want to forget anything.”

Jean Follain pg 110 of The Poetics of Reverie

 

 

Notes and Neurons and Me

 

Notes and neurons playing behind sight, beneath sound, after silence, above stars

Playing on tire swings together

In the school yard right where I wanted to be

With my notes and my neurons

When we were all inside on days seeping with sunlight

Notes and neurons sometimes whisked me away

On sun-dropped days

To the school yard and the sky.

We played in the white sands

And the grey sands of stars.

Notes and neurons and I reborn

As butterflies

Swimming though sound

Crystallizing in forests of dendritic souls,

Painting trees into color, in the shade

Of the dappled sun

Waiting for the bell

When the day was done.

And when the bell rang out

We didn’t wait ‘til the last note was cast

To jump from the desks and fly

To Saturn’s balcony

To tease the little asteroids

Who thought themselves moons

As we circled, never caught

By the gravity of substance.

What good times we had ~ playing

behind sight,

beneath sound,

after silence,

above stars

~ notes and neurons and me.

H-Hawk

David Edwards

As poetry recycles Nurons

Week 7 reverie

 

“The whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor”

 

I’m waiting for Rose at Radiance. Someone lights a beeswax candle. The smell. The smell of a thousand beeswax candles! Can you imagine it? When I was living in England there was an estate in Summereset. Several times a year the owners would polish up the chandliers, bring in a string section and we would dance as a thousand beeswax candles glowed above us. “It was so splendid Rose , so romantic” Rose is not impressed. ” Just a vestige of Imperialism Colonialism” she replies. ” Perhaps, but it was charming. I guess I will be writing this one by myself.” ‘Why are you going to even bother to try and take it somewhere” Rose asks. “It’s an exercise in reverie” I explain. I start to write. She takes out a huge marine biology textbook. But she can’t stay out of the game. The song is coming fast and the book is tedious. “Lets see what you got” she says snaching my notebook. “Well it’s cute” she has to admit “But you’re six verses into it and you still havn’t mentioned the candles.” ” I cant seem to get the damn candles in there without breaking the mood I’ve created” Rose picks up the pencil

The violins like nightingales

The cellos soft and low

The melodies rise as above our eye

A thousand candles glow

Damn she’s good! It moves in both directions. Up and down at the same . And there’s that perfect interior rhyme, right on the third line where it’s supposed to be. ” So do I get some copywright?” she asks. “You contributed a whole stanza. Of course you do” I replly.” Dosnt really matter. No one will be interested. it’s archaic nonsense.”

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L – Week 7 Reverie

“A whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor. Lucile Delarue-Mardrus, the beautiful Norman poetess writes: “The odor of my country was an apple.””
(Bachelard, Poetic Reverie; 139)

My dad is an old truck
filled with tools, sawdust
and cigarette smoke.
My best friend indescribable,
like fresh laundry, sugar
and a rose or a lily
My mom like a warm bed
grass on a sunny day
and white cheddar popcorn
My neighbor lies in
hot chocolate with heavy cinnamon
and cookies
Lopez island wrapped in
the smoke of an apple pie
weed, cigarettes and liquor
I miss my car the most
vanilla, cigarettes, resin
and crème soda too
Barbara, my second mom
like fresh herbs, sage
pot-stickers and fire
I’m scared these smells
as they last longer
than those who they
represent

T-Reverie 3

“It’s time to get up Prena!” “You need to eat before we take you to school.”  Gas stove hums as I travel down the hall.  The chirping clock repeats grandma’s call.  Oils scent stirs with egg, as they fry in the cast iron skillet.  “I don’t like egg for breakfast, could I eat something else instead of it?” You shouldn’t be so picky, grandma sternly says in reply.  You need your protein so you can focus as the class-day goes by.  Your brother will learn to eat healthy, to grow big and strong.  This comparison, while unintended, made me feel I had done wrong.

You need to eat, don’t skip meals.  Grandma still repeats these words during phone calls to this day.  If I haven’t already done so, I tell her and eat right away.  The dish may be small, but I’ve performed the task she asks.  Usually it is cereal or a bagel sandwich with some fruit juice in a glass.  If it’s not her kitchen, voice, or clock reminding me, it is the prescription bottle label or hospital antibacterial filling the room’s air.  Vividly I’m reminded, of turns taken leading to trouble all because I ignored the scents of care.

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E – Week 7 Reverie

Waterfall, peaceful running water

But as a scent

Tight chest, pain, anxious

Mom nagging, mom nagging

Don’t pick that don’t touch that

Hungry, can’t feed myself

Chest pain, surgery drains

Tired, so tired, watching the clock

For my next dose of ibuprofen.

Comforted by how little pain I feel

My skinny white butt.

 

After surgery, everything smelled like

Waterfall.

Mom’s hands, me, my face.

Good scent, but not a fun time

And every time I use the soap I’m reminded

Bound chest, no air, no food, pain killers.

Throwing up over a tiny pink basin.

Not a pleasant time or scent,

My heart spikes,

Waterfall

COUNTERCULTURE

Bachelard Reverie #3

“Attached to an odor memory, a childhood smells good.” (140)

 

a reverie; a state of being much like daydream or musing.

  i was thinking of you.

i walked past that empty lot the other day,

there isn’t a house there anymore.

all evidence of you is negative space now. removed from the existence of time and all feasible reality recognized by my being. This separation creates negative space, once full it is now starving. 

The other day i rode the bus down by the place where we first met.

these walls hold secrets unseen by living beings.

In my house, shoved into the far corner of a drawer

is an article of your clothing, left behind.

Every time i open that drawer i can still smell

your cologne.

Clinging, lingering, screaming at my memories,

tugging at them to conj our the image of your face.

The depiction of you.

          This was one of your favorite shirts.

 

P(r) – Bachelardian Reverie #3

“Attached to its odor memories, a childhood smells good.”  (Bachelard, 140)

Pipe tobacco.  Scratchy brown sofas in every room, green wallpaper always made me think of Napolean.  The front room with the best bookshelves but not allowed to touch.  The secret back bedrooms.  Mixing clay, letting it run through my fingers and letting a thin layer coat my hands and harden.  A jar of candy orange slices, slightly stale, the crunch of sugar between my teeth.  Seashell soaps in bowls, too many for one room.  Petticoats in every color on a rack in the spare room, so many things we weren’t allowed to play with.  Erasers in every shape, puzzles, perpetual motion figures.  The stack of every Serendipity book, sitting on the floor with Bratty in my lap reading them to her on Saturday afternoon, one after the other, and that one picture book of Sleeping Beauty–even then I thought there was something a little off about that story.  She was too much a victim, the ultimate fantasy of a woman subdued.  Such a sharp contrast to the Twelve Dancing Princesses, in the beginning anyway.  Fairy tales again…

o is for ocean

O – Week 7 Reverie

 

 

 

 

 

“In memories it is always blue, slow, light. Why?” (Bachelard 127)

 

Franz Hellens:
“My memory is fragile; I quickly forget the contour, the feature; only the melody remains within me. I have difficulty retaining the object, but I cannot forget the atmosphere, which is the sonority of things and beings.” (Bachelard 135)

 

Water is home. Not just any water, but the extreme surge of flood and ebb where northern salt water meets muddy river water. The memory of the sea lives in my body as slow, deep, blue, resonant and illuminated. I am oriented towards the sea. I feel the magnetic pull of salt water at my blood, as if my connection to the pull of moon or the pull of the cosmos is stronger on the shore than inland. Our asymmetry concentrates all our sensory organs to orient forward and all my sensory organs orient seaward.

Memory: saltwater from my eyes matched and trumped by the salt spray of sea.
Memory: shore scents of kelp, receding wave, burst seafoam, distant-born wind.
Memory: luminous green waves as the clear flood water pushed against the east wind, the sandbars, the river ebb; confused seas, choppy waters, wave pyramids collided and burst, simply burst into air; saltair filtered through my curled-back eyelashes as I looked into the wind, looked with the sun setting rays, stinging.
Memory: eyes unfocused at the frothing white raging horses of the boat wake.
Memory: fullness, safety, relief of high tide; excitement, danger, awe at the early a.m. sisterhood of high tide and wind; expectation, magic, curves of slacktide hightide fish.
Memory: the sleep of the fish, the waterdreams of waterbodies held in the cradle of the hull; a return.
Memory: body in a body; salt skin girl enveloped by liquid light waves.
Memory: breath.
Memory: motion.
Memory: light.

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Y – Bachelard Reverie #3

“These memories of odors from the past are recovered by closing our eyes.” (136)

I had sensitive eyes.

I closed them when she cooked.

There were always lots of deep smells coming from our tiny kitchens,

smells like cheese, grilllled

smells of peas, soup I never enjoyed

smells of tomatoes, roasted by the sun, roasted by her pans

smells that got in my eyes and would push me out the door, begging for crisp air

air that soothed my eyes, relief from the oil that thickly smoked, filling our rooms, our clothes.

The payoff was always sweet, sopapillas drizzled in warm honey, mmm

bringing home the taste of trips to new mexico for time with grandpa.

Once they caused a fire,

the kitchen lit up like the orange summer sky

my heart jumped out of my throat,

my eyes lit up with fear

grabbed the baby and raced my young feet out the back door.

we laughed afterward for hours, on the warm concrete, swimming in the story.

Our sweet home sopapilla fire, catching the eye of our hearts.

 

I am re-introduced to the memories of my ethnicity when i close my eyes to the thought of the smokey oil wafting into my bedroom, belly warmed by the thought of mom in the kitchen, preparing our favorite foods.

This universe of warmth is forgotton, fogged by time, by distance. Becoming weaker and weaker is my voice, is my connection to this warmth.  But forever am I awoken by the smells of southwestern food when I close my eyes.  Finding a world of intensity melding into warmth, melding into happy bellies, melding into fire, melding into laughter with loved ones.

Home

The_letter_B

B – Reverie #3 Week 7

Word Count:168

 “Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos. Times when nothing happened come back.” (Bachelard, 119)

“The pure memory has no date. It has a season.” (Bachelard, 116)

 “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.” (Bachelard)

 *The poems correspond in order of the three quotes.

1)

the eruptions

of reverie,

the micro-pulsations,

cause our skin

to dream

of a time

when nothing

happened.

2)

I slip between a time of now and when

the days light lasted long into the night,

and the sun broke apart and scattered

across the sky and everything was possible

and nothing was done in the thick heat

of my body sticky with pollen and petals,

and the tangy earth-like sweetness of my

humid skin stretched over lazy summer

bones.

 3)

This house is old. I smell its old age in the cobwebbed history of its bones (old books, sun bleached photos, antique furniture, dusty wood, empty dresser drawers, lavender, loose wall paper). It holds a heat that warms the deepest part of me, a part of that pulsing piece thats hidden between my spine and rib cage. The cotton bub breeze carries traces of river and moves through lace curtains and through my mind, kicking up forgotten feelings, suspending me in this moment of pure memory.