Snake Portrait

Arkansas summer, honeysuckle, hummingbirds, brush off the dirt.

Heat beats, water rush, snakes slink, lizards strategically retreat.

Lack of shiver, lack of care, spending all day in the sun of Arkansas.

Grandparent’s house, grandfather’s beer, grandmother’s red hair.

Scorpion, black widow, tarantula, brown recluse

up the walls, under the sink, in my parents bed, on the couch.

Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, hidden copperhead.

Rattle, violin [Learn], hour glass, red on yellow [Learn]

Water Moccasin; black as space, she is face to face with me.

Her darkness runs across the surface of the creek, fast like hot lead through skin.

Water Moccasin; magnificent artist of motion, she is face to face with him,

Grandpa and his Ithaca double-barreled shotgun and it shattering the wind.

Sisters, they panic at the scorpions in the dresser drawer, their black stillness.

Mother, she fears the copperhead in the path, she hates it’s deceitful kin.

Father, he respects his own servitude to the brown recluse.

Grandfather, he fears for me, for being incautious, for being young.

I fear a loss of the trees, the creek, A Change. I fear not what they bring.

I cry at the moccasin’s blood in the creek, I’m naïve.

I laugh at everyone’s screams when a tarantula crawls up the wall

And now a gaze of a snake reminds me of me.

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion: “Voice and Style” 1-28-10

pg 115. “When we listen to a person speaking, we hear a particular music unlike any other. The stamp of someone’s voice is as individual as a fingerprint; if we know someone well, we instantly recognize the tone, pitch, resonance of that voice whenever we encounter it.”

pg 116. “When we fail to produce this voice, the poem fails. The reader laughs when we want her to cry, or turns away disinterestedly when we passionately was his attention. The poem doesn’t communicate what we meant; the voice is garbled, confused, talking to itself”

pg118 “Doing a close analysis of any writer is a useful exercise that can teach you a lot about why you may like or dislike the poems-why they appeal to you, why they move you or make you cringe. Of course, there’s a mysterious element in poetry that seems to resist intellectual analysis, and this is good.”

pg118 “..,there’s an organic and irreducible energy in a good poem that can’t be logically accounted for. Call it the spark, the ‘blood-jet,’ as Sylvia Plath did, or whatever you will; you can take the poem apart and you won’t find it.”

pg 121 “Usually, image and statement combine in a poem (through there are memorable exceptions). Notice what balance is, and see if you need to strengthen one or the other.”

The Sky Rearranges

The Sky Rearranges

by Sean Roper

Seeds

spring wind

little blue bird of grace.

vicious love

tastes like

summer’s heat.

It rains.

It rains.

The storm change,

eyes of blue bird rearrange.

sky a payne’s grey.

grey with rage

Vertigo

Blue bird fall

fall from grace.

Fall with heaven’s hate

rearrange

rearrange

The Memory of a Place with no Windows and the Ceiling Walked.

The Memory of a Place with no Windows and the Ceiling Walked.
by Sean roper

This house is a home.

we lived under the house where the ceiling walked and stomped

in a town of drugs hidden in teapots with boarded windows and lace fences.

This house is, in spite of everything, my home.

There is one bedroom with a blanket for the door,

my parents sleep here with no closet but

Piles of our folded clothes on the floor.

A living room with one couch and one exit door,

a hallway, no that’s just the kitchen perverted

with the fridge that blocks my way.

my sister had the couch,

nearby I slept on a pallet on the floor.

no windows, no cable and the water liked to run cold

I was known to be dumb at school,

I didn’t know the jokes that I “Should”

from TV shows. My house, a prison

because of the drugs that danced in the streets.

So the school playground I laughed and I ran

Till my shoes were over worn and my pants tore.

This house is a home.

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion: “Simile and Metaphor” 1-26-10

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion: “Simile and Metaphor” 1-26-10

pg 94 “In fact, we live in a figurative world; our language and our thinking, our very perceptions, are metaphoric. We continually make comparisons and connections, often without even realizing that we are doing so, so comfortable are we with seeing in this way.”

pg 95 “The not-so-good poets leave it in. There’s a line at the end of Norman Dubie’s “The Funeral,” about the death of an aunt, that has always haunted us: “The cancer ate her like horse piss eats deep snow.” That’s a memorable image, one so apt and effective it resonates years after reading it.

Pg 95 “ Rocks stick out near shore like heads.

Help snakes in like a shed black suit

and I cannot find you.”

Pg 96-97 “Take the above example: in the first case you might use words like highway, headlights, metal, screech, crush. In the second, you’d have a different group of words: wind, space, fall, ripcord, and the like. Take advantage of the vocabulary that accompanies your figure; exploit it for its possibilities, so it adds energy and depth to your poem.

Pg 99 “different muscles take over. Afterword,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now

the man can hold underneath again, so that

he can go on without ever putting the box down.