Teaching Slant Rhyme

I have always wanted to write a poem in which lavender
rhymes with vendor or scavenger but mostly cadaver,


but the image--imagine a literary journal's response--
seems inadvertently humorous--and there seems no nonchalant


way to pair them, to rhim them, as my students
say, which is a marked improvement


over their DO NOT RHYME policy
and their almost comic cacophonies


composed confidently through alliteration,
and when they get it, it becomes an addiction--


one kid rhims porridge with dirigible,
another, having fallen in love with Prufrock's dreariness


and his own cleavernss suggests fellatio and go,
and another student, in eatnest, asks what's fellatio,


and I try not to laugh, to let
another student


say it, but no one does--a blow job,
I blurt, having reached an all-time teaching low,


and another, seeing I am losing control
suggests go and polka dot


and they go down the cananendwordbetwowords path
and come back to craft,


which kind of goes with Pabsts, which one argues
is not that bad a beer, and so the impromptu


debates on the vurtues of PBR,
which one declares sells well in this recession--or so he heard


on CNN--a connoisseur, he also notes the virtues
of Natty Light and when asked for a 50% rhyme for virtue


he says river, rivet, turtle, true--here I should note that I stole
the percentage concept from an old


mentor who does not like to be called old. But never mind.
What do you say to a twenty-year-old who hears Kevlar


and thinks larva, lava, valley, ale, and just because
he can adds vulva and uvula and pauses dramatically for guffaws?


I'm sorry, kid, but you're going to be a poet.
and poet


is an orphan,
a word for which there are no pure rhymes, like orange.


I'm sorry you have a gift for words.
I'm sure your parents would have preferred


even geology over writing,
but here you are spiraling


spite, rips, lipid, dalliance, nascent, land
          and pyrrhic, hiccup, puce and pedal.
-Leah Nielsen

And I Hope His Guardian Angel Puts a Gun in His Hand

[Mr Oliver and his Bridge - Zeb Andrews]

I hope my little brother puts a call in today
I hope he don't forget where he came from

I hope he never has to deal with wrongin' someone'
cause I lived with many ghosts when I was younger
and I will live with many ghosts until I go
-M. Ward, Right in the Head

Were You a Carnivore Before You Saw Him? You Are A Carnivore Now

He is famous for being always on time; he arrives at his destination in
one second flat.* In one minute flat. In one hour flat**

         *How? We suspect that he lives in an atlas, where all distances
         are collapsable.

               **"Flat" is not the word. Say instead, there is a limited
               amount of him, like water, and it seeks its level.

Is he "made of paper"? No, he is papered like a hallway. Is he "made of ink"? No, he is a ghost who had ink thrown on him during a fight, and as a consequence is now visible.

The purpose of a shadow is: to put "popeye" where he is not.
Shadowed he stands, like a stencil letter, always next to himself.

Lives where? In voices: hills and valleys. Lives all in the alphabet as if
it were a rowhouse. Lives at the peak of the tallest chalk hill.

         Correction: "I do not live in a world at all," "popeye" says
         indignantly, and tightens the equator around his waist.

-Patricial Lockwood, When We Move Away from Here, You'll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung

Felt Knowledge

My father has always been a naturalist, never an environmentalist. He believes in the cycles of nature, in the inadequacy of our “green” movements, in the inevitable—natural, even—effects of man on nature. He only cuts felled wood or dead trees, but he believes he has a right cut the live ones if he wants to. The difference is that he doesn’t want to. He has a need to name, know, and understand them; to conquer them through labels and learns their secrets. He has taught me to learn their secrets too. I can still feel his warm hand around mine, his gentle voice pointing out trees and rocks. Even now his love of nature is let loose in the wild abandon of a child. He scrambles over rocks, holds sticks into the water to watch to the flow, taunts my sister into crossing the rapids on a narrow log, and lifts his face to the sky with a gentle smile—one I know is mirrored on my own face. He loves this place. He introduced me to it when I was seven years old, taught me to love it and appreciate it. But he also taught me to understand it, to give things names, to know why nature works as it does. I take a picture of him, sitting atop a sixteen foot boulder, the sun filtering through the trees behind him. He smiles and the memories are crowded out by the sensation, by the felt knowledge of Dad, this force, this being that is so much a part of myself.
-from The Wild Forest: A Story of Lost and Found

All This Time

source-opener, metal-worshipper,
basket-body, garden limber

You win this round, I give—
Aztec, Toltec, train-wreck,

why do you not colossus me
how is it you Babylon me

Babel me, sun whisper
and steeple me

rain charm sky bed I wonder
at the dimness of your zero music

this is the chasm of breath
the wound cave

funny how you say I’m in “danger”
because finally I feel not in danger—

all this time I have been speaking
to nothing but wildness

and now wildness is answering—
-Chasm, Kazim Ali

In Lieu of Actually Being There...

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Here At Last I Can Be Lonely

[Breton Woman and Haystacks -Emile Bernard]

The sea’s utter lust eats at the shores of my skin.
Here at last I can be lonely.
The sky has spilled all its secrets
And the crabs have gathered them to their caves.
The horizon drags my own secrets out with the tide,
Out beyond the islands
To where the world tapers.
Here I believe the world has an end,
That if I swim out far enough
I’ll plunge with all the fish across the brink
And fall through thickets of stars.
Even the universe, they say, has walls.
Out beyond the twilight’s keeping a door lies open.
I’d like to stand there with my back to all the light,
Looking out,
Then take a step.
-Keith Miller, The Book of Flying