Um, your voice sounds funny.

Poems that maybe don't sound like I wrote them

Photo by Mikaela Ehrastom on Unsplash

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To be clear, I did. Both poems were written from prompts, which may have given me some freedom to play with diction. Both end up saying quite a bit that’s true about me, even if they say it in a funny voice.

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WHERE I COME FROM                                                                                  1996


I come from granite hills and red-clay rivers
from toughroot manzanitas
and the tang of pine spruce fir cedar
I come from wildflower topsoil
blooming a banquet of color in the spring thaw
withered brown when sun melts the summer sky.

I come from the home of white-tail deer and jackrabbits
and crickets measuring the night
I come from country sky-guarded by redtail hawk
night-patrolled by brown bears and raccoons.

I come from back-yards jewelled 
with hummingbirds and mimosa blossoms
I come from feral orchards, pink-stained white
buzzing with bees, prickly with berry vines.

I grew up in caves of secrecy
hollows in walls of the canyon of shame
I have hidden in forests following riddle-trails
that led to banks of red-clay rivers
waters of fury shouting for my death.
I did not dive in, I did not drown
but God I am so thirsty.

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MOUNTAIN MEG                                                                                         2024


Lives on the eastern slopes, they say,
just this side of the tree-line; sleeps days,
as mountain lions do, lounging along the limbs
of pine and cedar. Come night, she’ll wade
the creekbed down past camp or cabin;
your dogs will never wake when she comes sniffing
around the kitchen fire, tearing a mouthful
from the loaf of bread. Your livestock’s safe,
but best not leave a chainsaw or a rifle out
where she can find them; red creek-mud slathered
deep in tooth-chain or bore is the least
of your worries if you do, the rust
from a douse of big-cat piss won’t scrape off easy.
Come to graze, come to fish, she’ll watch
and let you be; come for her trees,
her wild things, she will trash your nasty toys
and then trash you. Don’t try her.

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[You can listen to an audio recording of these poems using the little widget above the photograph.]

“Where I Come From” was written during my Failed Novelist period, when I was adrift after a long-time project came unstuck and spent a lot of time making prompt-scribbles in my notebook just to keep a pen in my hand. I was startled to rediscover the rough draft of this particular scribble, several years and notebooks later; I didn’t exactly remember writing it, but whoever did write it had clearly been standing next to me while I grew up.

“Mountain Meg” was a fruit of the impromptu poem-a-day group that I was part of here on Substack, as an April observance of National Poetry Writing Month. One day’s prompt invited us to create our own folktale creature/hero, something like Paul Bunyan or maybe Sasquatch. As with many of the prompts, I sat down thinking I didn’t have a thing to write … and suddenly there was Meg — part woman, part wildcat, part wilderness spirit-guardian. Righteous. Dangerous. And nothing like me, though I can’t help wishing sometimes that I was more like her. Rowrrrr.

The strangest thing about these poems is also the thing that’s most true about them: that the poet who wrote them, a long-time city dweller who’s erratically embodied on her best days, still carries so many sense-memories with her from the terrain of her childhood. No wonder my voice sounds funny, describing those memories; it’s coming from a long ways away.