Directions For Losing Your Way E-Book

Dorrie Iten-Gilden

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 58

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Directions for Losing Your Way is a series of poems that veer from being as light and breezy as a flammulated owl, to the dry lugubriousness of "To my Most Unbeloved Pet Lymphoma. They are rich in humor, in word-play, in sensuality, in song. They are short on the factual based, the erudite, the cerebral . Unbounded by any particular poetic form, tradition, or national/religious/sexual consciousness, they seek to delight and deepen the senses on a many- faceted journey into the head and heart of a woman, as she spirals inward to find the "aim, the heart, the crux, the core" of loss and discovery.

Leseprobe

A special thanks to Irene, Nan, Rosemarie, Ben, Shoshana, and my writer friends from Rebus.

Dorrie Iten-Gilden

Directions For Losing

Your Way

© 2024 Dorrie Iten-Gilden

Coverdesign von: Irene Abraham, www.ireneabraham.comDruck und Distribution im Auftrag der Autorin:

tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Deutschland

ISBN

Paperback978-3-384-37271-0

e-Book978-3-384-37272-7

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Für die Inhalte ist die Autorin verantwortlich. Jede Verwertung ist ohne ihre Zustimmung unzulässig. Die Publikation und Verbreitung erfolgen im Auftrag der Autorin, zu erreichen unter: Dorrie Iten-Gilden, Im Seehof 30, CH-8610 Uster, Switzerland.

Table of Contents

Compass Orientation

A Poem is like A Good Brassière

Rocky Point, (Puerto Peñasco, Mexico)

Gargoyle in the Sun

A Purim Multiverse

Song of a Nursery Witch

Hummingbird

Anagrammatica: The Riddle of Existence, or Rid the Exiled Foe Scent

Origami me

An Exaltation of Larks

The Gardener’s Shadow

April Fool

Touching Tongues: Homage to Maxine Kumin

The Clownfish

The Bouillon of my Bullion

Camera Obscura

Living on the Edge

Vector Navigation

Directions for Losing Your Way

Just Go Strange

Grass Seeds

Insights

The Under- Toad

Cuckoo in der Migros

Words on Awakening

Poem on Horseback

In Answer to a Question Unasked

The Now That is April

Between

Admonishing Pessoa

Black Coral, ( à la Dr. Seuss)

To a Warty Gourd

Flying Syllables: A Butterfly Cantata

Steps

Dead Reckoning

Hands

The Only Bridge

Me Fecit: You Play It

Mothering: a Complicated Gerund

The Panne* on Panweg

Pleats

Wording the Thing

Unwording the Thing

Knowing the Thing

A Face in the Crowd

Love Forever Whatever Comes

Love Forever Whatever Comes: Part Two

Sonnets To Self

Sonnets to Self, (cont)

Womantree

True Navigation

Seven stones

The Mushroom Kingdom

In Spring Humor

A Blush of Birds

Drift Structure

Framing the moment

Memory Plate: A Stitch in Time Saves None

Kite Theorem in Corona Time

A Paean to the Brain

Keep a Stiff Upper Lip

Hapless New Year

Wicks:

To my Most Unbeloved Pet Lymphoma

Kafka and Peonies

Panopticism,

Introduction

Directions! Instructions! Why do I deplore them? Follow, follow, follow! Probably because I can’t follow them. I mean here, the little niggling stuff; how to put a coffee table from IKEA together, or instructions from a damn computer. Maps flummox me, often as not. But we need to navigate these “bifurcated woods of the world.” Animals do it. But daydreaming, feckless humans? Me in particular? The Goulds, in “Nature’s Compass,” outline several common strategies for staying on course. These include compass orientation (maintaining a constant bearing in one direction); vector navigation (stringing together a sequence of compass orientations—and dead reckoning (calculating a location based on bearing, speed, and how much time has elapsed since leaving a prior location). Each of these strategies requires at least one biological mechanism, something like a compass, something like a map, a decent memory, the ability to keep track of time, and an information-rich awareness of its environment. Well, if I have such an internal compass, or map, or «decent” memory, it’s news to me. But if I can’t “find” my way, maybe I can explore the art of losing my way, of spiraling into whatever territory I wish to explore and edging in sideways—through poetry. In this way, I can, perhaps, find the “aim, the heart, the crux, the core” of experience, memory, desire. Even when I can’t tell my comp-ass from my ass.

I hope you enjoy losing your way—and finding it—along with me.

October, 2024, Zürich.

Compass Orientation

A Poem is like A Good Brassière

A poem is like a good brassière.

Lightly stretched across paper, it holds,

supports, takes dangling pendulous

forms and shapes a point or two.

No roseate conclusion necessary,

but a peak at the end might do.

Lace and ribbons are frivolities.

Worse are padded metaphors, falsies

to poetic truth. Spongey, dishonest,

they barely survive laundering.

Made of natural matter, fabric of

every day, a poem should be porous,

made to take in sun or rain;its strictures

light elastic, so meters can be stretched,

rhymes done, or left undone.

It’s also a question of taste. I prefer

a bit of discipline, lightest of wires.

Meters stretched like gauzy silk;

leaving me free to plunge, cleave,

delineate, or draw my points together.

Cupping is essential. A poem shouldn’t

pinch or squeeze; concentric rings of

image and idea massaged outward as

gently as rain nipples water.

Best would be a living bra;

subtle touch of one who handles words

like bread, kneading as they rise,

redolent of yeast, honey,

sharing fragrance of the newly baked.

A poem is like a good brassière.

But no good poem girdles.

Metaphors can be too tightly drawn.

1993

Rocky Point, (Puerto Peñasco, Mexico)

nothing new under the sun

but condos and R.Vs.

driven by Huns

from northern plains

who herd their ware

flank on metal flank

and stare unseeing

at the sea

in the sky fly dinosaurs

disguised as cormorants

while on the shore

strata of blind

conquistadors

hurl kites and balls in

swirls of sound and sand

old is the teenaged Mexican

mother plodding on shards

of shell her hand closed

on the hand of her son

bandaged on a wound deeper

than skin deeper than bone

her small girl sullen and tight

as stone opening a fist to

beg like a reluctant jaw

to speak the oldest word

older than words the shore's

conversation with the sea

sound waved in folds so tight

that only the “seaman's ears”

(those swirling buttons on a

snail's front door) can hear

right and understand

having opened their valves

to the centuries

now trusting the rest

to the sands

1992

Gargoyle in the Sun

Under these blue gratuitous skies,

ghosts well up in lieu of clouds,

and rain down shadows, shades;

rootless memories at first that graft

themselves in time to mind's slow bend

and build a cathedral in the sun.

I sit inside, nooked somewhere,

a small gargoyle above an arch,

and give my ghost her run.

Spirits need space to stretch their

limblessness, arroyos to roll in,

canyons to cross, gullies of dried

red clay, to play.

Flotsam of other spaces, times,

flash in the tail of rabbit and deer,

dart behind a prickly pear,

frazzle in the air.

Nooked, knees clasped to chin,

fingers grasping pen,

hunched memories uncurl.

Was I an Indian girl?

Played croquet with devil’s claws?

Fought the white men with their guns?

Their cattle drank our grasses dry,

Our river, gullies now, a path

where bicyclists have fun.

Pot shards beat about my head;

I sort the broken bits and seek

a river bed for ghosts to settle in,

letting shadows taunt.

Needing to be haunted by,

and just as much, to haunt.

A Purim Multiverse

The pigeon coos, “Which Jew are youuuuuu?”

“Which Jew are youuuuuuuuuu?”

This is the season of masks and unmaskings

of carnivals and cover-ups.