The Glass Frogs Begin

It's here! National Poetry Month  where  I feel not only justified in saturating us in poem and talk of poem, but compelled!  I am participating here on Intagliod and over at Sweetly Disturbed: there I will post in a single post/single day manner. As tradition dictates here at Intagliod, I will keep extending the poem in a single post so that I might see how it is running its rivery way down the page. Likely, by month's end, at some point, I'll hide the post, should the poem seem strong enough to try to find a home in print.

I have visited Robert Brewer's blog, Poetic Asides in order to receive my first day's prompt which deals with new arrivals and have written a little prosaic start to my:

Thirty Days of Looking at the Glass Frog

Coming into the light, a body

to grow no larger than an almond,

with nothing to hide. Clear-

bellied, the miraculous factory 

that runs them always visible, 

Their translucence against

a green leaf's a vanishing act.

Today: April, no fool's gold

to this sunshine, we're all 

about arrival.  The scientist 

who fell in love the species:

Hyalinobatrachium valerioi 

named his daughter Valerie

in their honor. 

2.

What It must be to filter light,

feel the trail it follows inside,

like intuition only warmer,

the knowing a glowing

such a little form

but standing, window

to the side, a lantern

and a teaspoon of starlight

how nightfall must fall

soft as cinder, the day

coating as slowly as dust

gathered on a piano. 

3.

Slowly, slowly the body

opens, a thorn’s puncture

here, the water glass tumbles

and a clear tooth opens

a scarlet throat in the sole

of the foot, or a possum

halfway across a highway

scripted now in elaborate entrails.

We are drawn and repelled

by what spells us out in organed-

particulars, taking the view in

a little at a time. The glass frog

belies such patience, giving us

what we want, never want

from what we love: to see

the musicbox-machinery

that runs those wistful singings.

To End the Day in Elegy

My mom's closest friend's son died yesterday. He was only two years older than I am and I grew up with him. That was a long time ago, but not long enough to be telling him goodbye, or his mother how wrong it is and how very sorry that I am or to feel that sinking feeling again when someone who was living so well and trying so hard to be good to his body is gone. It's never a fair thing, but sometimes it's more stupid than other times. Goodbye George Klonizos and to you Rita, godmother, second Mom, I can only send love and prayers from Ohio to too-too far Utah.   And these borrowed words:

The Comet

I re-named the comet but nothing stuck. What do I know of bone-
deep lonely, of the beautiful freeze, of running a circuit through the
stars until all landmarks are my own staring eyes: of families
in general, what do I know? Say I'm young. Say I am the aftertaste
of all my parents' grief, a childhood spent in the downwind
of chicken blood, recurring dreams of being left behind—my mother
kneeling by the VCR to watch a video of her lost daughter—
and this is Hell: believing you can be a lens and meet your
loved ones' eyes beyond the screen, smacking your pain against glass
like a doomed swallow The half-life of loss is forever.There is hope
we don't get over. When my son began to die, I did not record
his voice, but let him simmer, speechless, in my memory, while I tried
to gain the faith to think we'd meet again. I held his fist against my lips,
I closed my teeth around the juncture of his throat and chest, I said
you'll be the fire of the sun, and I will circle you until you draw me close,
until our nearness breaks me into pieces and you burn me whole.
I would have ripped his heart out and consumed it if I'd thought
that it would choke me: I would have been the eternal mouth.
Say I'm young. Say the speeding rock of my body is as bright
as any resurrection, and I have time to shake before I hit the earth.

Copyright © 2012 Emma Törzs All rights reserved
from Indiana Review