Writers
Posts tagged Dominique
Poem: Conversation with the Corporate Manager
0Dominique Larntz * May 8, 2012
Conversation with the Corporate Manager
“It’s broken.”
“Well, what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you try this? Did you try that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call him? Did you call her?”
“Sure.”
“Did you follow the procedure?”
“The procedure is unclear.”
“What could be unclear about it? It’s right there in writing?”
“You could read it two different ways.”
“Weren’t you in last week’s conference call,
when corporate said we would read it the way they say?”
“I think I recall.”
“You should remember. That’s what we pay you for.”
“What do you want me to do about this broken thing now?”
“Fix it.”
“Can I use my corporate credit card?”
“Of course not! There’s a freeze on credit card usage!”
“How do I get a replacement then?”
“Fill out an equipment request,
and I’ll run it up the food chain
to see if I can get it approved
by my manager
and my manager’s manager.
Once I get it approved
we have to order it from our special
vendor in Costa Rica.
We have a contract with them.
Finally, what’s the cost
of the replacement part?”
“Two dollars.”
Poem: Grace
0Dominique Larntz * May 3, 2012
Grace
A cat purrs
not only when she’s
properly petted,
but when she’s
deeply threatened.
My heart flourishes
not only within the wet
landscapes of youth,
but during these desert years
when the next visit
to a full well
is uncertain.
Poem: Transplant
0Dominique Larntz * April 30, 2012
Transplant
The dry soil absorbed me as quickly
as the drops of Lady Gray tea
slopped from the side of my cup
while I leaned the opposite way
to feed the lemon thyme Shauna
gave me for my birthday–
the perfect fit to replant
in the stands we made
just outside our front door.
My eyes kaleidoscope
on the radiance
of the escaped sky.
In its heated airways,
Summer is sending its missives
each day now, announcing itself
by thrilling our skin into moistening
and making intimate embers
where we are bare.
I know Summer will bring baking heat.
I will tend the garden,
tend myself and my frailties,
the skin that burns too fast,
the sense a transplant has
that it wants to wind its way
back down to sea level
and find a way home to the ocean.
I am as impermanent
as anything else
and the desert
is one of the most
skillful teachers
to plant the idea
that we all root
in foreign soil
for a while.
Poem: Arrival
0Dominique Larntz * April 12, 2012
Arrival
On this birthday, death exhales his musings
into my carotid pattern and I wonder
if it is as stable as ever. I am in the middle–
this precipice point where I have let go
of the potentials of birth and I have begun
to embrace the vague details of death.
I care less and less about celebrating
the day of my entrance into this body,
but the fact remains that it is still marked.
I know the date, the time, the year
and the desert place in which my small fist
leaked out into this mortal blossom.
The date of my demise is unclear.
I might celebrate it in some sort of heaven,
dancing between layers of golden scarves
in a semblance of whatever my spirit
will know to be naked abandon in the afterlife.
There may be appreciation
for this sort of visceral joy.
We may gasp ourselves
into death with a breath
we do not yet know.
We might work ourselves to death
because we are in some sort of
prolonged gestation,
reaching to grow into something spectacular
through life-school–
so that death is another birth.
In the womb of death’s wooing of me,
I am comfortable with the outlines of my mortality today,
stretching into the sky with fingers
that are large to my pupil but tiny to the moon’s eye;
exploring with legs that are huge
compared to the models of my culture
but small compared to the waves of an ocean;
kicking with hips that rotate open
to uncover a chakra base
tunneled into an earth
to sustain me for a long curious life
that for the sun is only the time span
it takes to glance around at its planets
and assure itself they are still there.
Today, I am thinking about people I care for,
primarily the people in my blood family.
I can feel them in the pulse at my neck as I breath.
They are as close to me as my carotid artery
and as far from me as the nearest stars.
I have been writing them secret love letters,
knowing I may leave first.
I hope they arrive.
Poem: Invocation
0Dominique Larntz * April 2, 2012
Invocation
By now we glimpse blossoming colors
opening into the sweet morning air.
May you delight in their dazzling array–
even in this desert, while the dew
sticks to your shoes as you walk from
your front door to your car door,
if those are the only moments you have
to observe them today.
May you rejoice as Winter’s dormancy transitions to renewal.
May you love as the flower opens–
fully, sun-facing, extending trust.
Time again for rebirth, fragrance, eggs, and colors.
May Spring enter your life wholly.
Poem: Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
0Dominique Larntz * February 20
Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
When aggression supplants moral conscience,
we discover alien life right here on this planet.
O secretly, haven’t you wondered if the enemy
isn’t a different species? Our media croons
to this part of our evil soil, watering the seeds
of our hatred because they say it sells. Our
sellers say that selling is what supports us
because making money is how we survive.
Our money makers make money out of nothing
and then make nothing out of our soil and water
leaving us destitute when before all this aggression
at least we had soil and water. O poison, at least
we have the sun even if our species spits its last
breath in aggression, opening its own stomach
to prove it has been victimized.
Poem: Flu
0Dominique Larntz * February 19
Flu
Taken in the morning,
my vitamins and peppers crown
the feeling of this congestion
with interlaced leaves of fire throat
and coppery chest woven between
a bouquet of nose linens
I wish I could unfold
and wash clean.
Poem: Waking Tune
0Dominique Larntz * February 10, 2012
Waking Tune
I love to listen to the morning–
the rush of thoughts in my mind
like a tide that builds quick footsteps
and then quiets into silence
in the shower.
Then the coffee grinder
along with the bird that shouldn’t be
here just after Candlemas.
I wouldn’t expect him until Spring.
Poem: Injury Roadsong
0Dominique Larntz * February 9, 2012
Injury Roadsong
Take your hand
and the rest of yourself
and hold me here
where I am mortal.
Tell me again
that you know
the same truth as I.
In youth, we have glimpses
of our singularities.
However, these injuries of age
engage a handsome brake
in our soul’s engine, giving us
our own acceleration rate
and there is no speed limit
imposed anymore.
I can finally slow down,
ignore the lines,
get off the road.
Poem: I Am Moss
0Dominique Larntz * February 8, 2012
I Am Moss
Tempted again to exacerbate my need
to reach heights I was never made to reach,
I would like to remind myself
that moss’s weathering process is what
made our earth’s atmosphere cool,
absorbing a planet’s worth of carbon dioxide
and cutting our temperatures in half.
In case I think I need to be seen from space
instead of cling to the solidity of rocks, let me
turn to the truth of what is right beneath me
and when I wonder why I can only breathe
at a lower altitude and why why I have to be
so low in this life when I would like to believe
I am as cherished as a begonia or a sequoia,
let me remember the security in being
close to the earth.
Let me hum quietly with
this feeling that forms
an intimacy with life,
more solid than a bloom
and more withstanding
than a tall tree trunk.
So it’s not attention I need to complete this mossy feat;
what I need is the transformation of heat into coolness
to form an atmosphere for evolution. We moss are making
the future environment with each of our small reactions
and our grounded and giving florescence.
Poem: Corporate Man
0Dominique Larntz * February 4, 2012
Corporate Man
He’s not thinking; he’s just working.
In the late middle of his shift,
he waves his hand and doesn’t look up
and a symphony of technology erupts.
He’s deeply inside his task
and does not appear to hear and see
the elegance or beauty or magic
in his newfound capabilities.
He doesn’t compute the trade-offs
from magical maneuvers like that.
He keeps the books abstract,
like the rest of the world,
while he depletes resources
without fully accounting for them
or understanding them
or listening to them.
After all, if you take them up
another taxonomy level,
aren’t cows and water
and silicon and human effort
all mere resources?
It’s that abstraction that allows
corporate man to lie to himself.
Pretty soon he will take off the smock
and the smirk that helps form the mask
that hides the constant limbic fear
that drives an existence spent
working working working
to dominate the efforts of others
so fully that he cannot even appreciate
total surrender so he has to kill off
even those who hold onto nothing.
Someday, that man will end his shift.
He will look up at the time, stretch and yawn.
He will gather up his things
and leave his workstation.
You have to wonder if he knows
what he’ll go home to.
Poem: Light Dreams
0Dominique Larntz * February 2, 2012
Light Dreams
In my recurring dream
I am a small angelic light
one of many embodied
at this time on this earth
to fulfill some purpose
maybe just to love a little
bit more today
Poem: A Little Physics of Preparation
0Dominique Larntz * February 1, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
A Little Physics of Preparation
The untied shoelaces of momentum
have me confused the past few days
as if I could run forward without
knotting up these sneakers.
There is a point in preparing
when you stop and crouch
to carefully tie your shoes.
If, instead, you slip your feet into
the rubber-soled foot skins
without taking the time
to loop over and under,
and to pull the ends together in a bow–
perhaps thinking momentum more important
than the feet doing the running
or the process steps themselves–
what clarity of experience you will miss
as you trip on the long untied strands.
Outfitted for excursion,
I am almost ready to go.
Poem: Simple Book Binding
0Dominique Larntz * January 31, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Simple Book Binding
Holes are made in the spine.
Push the point through
the outside of the fold
in the center hole
and then pull it inside through
to the top and count
the number of times
you have dreamed
of riding in a car with no driver
or of protecting others
from a mad killer on the loose.
Next tighten the thread
and pull the needle
through the center hole again.
Now push it into the bottom
and note the waking moments
when you screamed at a child
too near an electrical outlet
instead of picking her up
or covering up the plug;
or when you dated a boy
just to go to a spa and get
a 2-hour hot stone massage
knowing you didn’t like him.
Pull the thread back to the center
and knot the two ends together.
This is the simplest way
to bind a book.
Poem: Liar Butterflies
0Dominique Larntz * January 30, 2012
Liar Butterflies
I wonder sometimes
if the collective boom
of media lies
has the wing span
to cause the kind of winds
we saw last Spring
in this desert,
depleting our soil
even further
without any cause
for an increase
in water level.
Poem: Lung Cancer
0Dominique Larntz * January 27-29, 2012 * “Love Letters to My Body”
Lung Cancer
No one paid attention when I was getting dressed
so I put on my tap shoes and smoothed my finger
along the top convex toe after I laced them up
with a little girl’s satisfaction.
In the California desert hospital they
clack-tapped for each step I took
but my grandparents didn’t look once
at the shoes that were so shiny
you could hardly believe they were black.
Despite the widening volume
made by each of my footsteps
along the fluorescent-finished tile path,
the hallways and turns ended
in my great-grandmother’s hospital room,
as cramped and dark as a camera.
Lung cancer was somehow a conversation
my memory stumbled into focus.
Suddenly carpeted in my own invisibility
I had my first portrait of death, too warm,
and full of unopened windows
and plastic tubes I felt I should ignore
as if they were not there–
a stopping point I had not expected at all–
and dense panic in the breath of
my family’s unspoken grief.
An unmeasurable time later we left, and I pretended
this never happened. I did not ask
the thousand million questions a curious child
must have had after such a visit,
perhaps because a kind child
does not want to intrude upon growling adults.
I still don’t know if I felt unsafe
or if I did not know how to ask.
Perhaps there is a time for questions
and a time for toe taps–
and our best efforts to act just right
play very little part, despite
how we choose our shoes.
Now I can feel free to visit with these
serious pictures. The echo of spirited footfalls
linger in my memory sometimes
when I am as quiet and gentle
as a hibernating bear.
I can recall my eight year old girl’s
confusion at unexplained experiences,
and realize it would have been nice
to enjoy an adult narrator at the time.
Now, in middle age, I can project
what it might feel like to take a grandchild with you
on one of the last visits you will make
to your parent in the hospital.
What possible words could you tell a child
about the sacred bond between generations?
There are these inevitables–death and
hospitals and vulnerabilities–
that may shock and dislodge
a dancing, exuberant child
but they will not interrupt our steadier steps later,
when we place our toe gently and then our heel firmly
through the same age as our grandparents once walked.
Poem: Needling
0Dominique Larntz * January 23, 2012
Needling
Let us be free of being
fooled by form
as we fumble a frown
down onto the fate
that has been
plated before us.
That frown–our judgment–is
the very tool we learn with.
The bias cuts will stretch but
you may need to drape the pieces there
for days before you adorn them.
If you go with the long and cross grains
your movement will depend
completely on the weave.
So if you wish to stretch
beyond your judgments
try cutting on the bias
by finding the edge
and creating a new fold
before getting snippy.
Poem: Groupthink Question
0Dominique Larntz * January 21, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Groupthink Question
Hey letting go
how’s it going?
I am just shredding
the checks politicians
wrote with their
contributions to me
that I cannot cash.
I am only steeping
in a clove bath of sass
trashing some neighbor
who helped me
really developed me
but they forgot
to cover up their
fracture during
the dance.
So we jumped on that.
We keyed on that.
We held on to that.
Mistake.
Poem: From Pond to Wind
0Dominique Jones * January 20, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
From Pond to Wind
My pond heart
reflects on the effects
evaporation
will have upon it.
Rings from the stories of
hitting stones have
expanded and shallowed
and slowly eased.
Sure the silt could get
stirred up again;
the potential’s
always there.
But the wettest heart faces,
in its later years,
a change in state,
its turning from pool to sky.
And I wonder as I merge
with the air, how it will feel
for each drop to let go of a tide
and become the atmosphere.
Poem: Still Well
0Dominique Jones * January 19, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Still Well
It doesn’t come as a shock to me
that I keep getting visits–
less frequently–
from panic and the visage of pain.
Dressed up still
in their Sunday bests,
I have learned to preach
from them and to them less.
I’ve discovered I am not
descendents of theirs;
they just stop by from time to time.
Since they exist, however,
they are as welcome
in the holy structures of my soul
as any other entity.
I imagine grief sitting there
stiffly on a wooden pew,
smelling a little dampness
from my pond heart outside
and staring through the complicated
stained glass of my eyes,
trying to be silent
as a Summer afternoon,
to hear my
higher self tell it
all is well.
Poem: Regression Analysis
0Dominique Larntz * January 18, 2012 * “Love Letters to My Body”
Regression Analysis
There was a physical tension–
squeezed and dry from deep inside my cells,
where my body was precisely pinched.
This morning I awoke–
and I was so grateful to feel open again!
I relaxed further by asking life to
soak me with good feeling
until I had extra happiness overflowing
like a newly submerged sponge.
Last night I missed a wonderful few hours together.
Oh, we snuggled and smiled–but my outpouring
was only as nutritious for our souls as styrofoam.
Today I feel delicious again.
I made us breakfast and joyfully.
It could have been anything for anyone.
I can be with you only when I am with myself.
The difference is in me; not in what I am doing.
Poem: More Traveled
0Dominique Larntz * January 17, 2012 * “Love Letter to My Body”
More Traveled
The concert of contentment
plays in the chaos
of this day when there is so much
energy and so little focus.
So what if I don’t finish
and I travel a path
on which I help a few folks
and it is hardly noticeable?
And those fellows
do new things for me,
teach me a couple facts,
and I come back
to this same chair,
write a few more notes to you
and you hear some little phrase?
Poem: Breadmaker
0Dominique Larntz * January 15, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Breadmaker
I don’t know the reason
but there were many youthful years
when I could not be consoled,
and now all I need
in order to feel peaceful
is the hint that yeast exists
for the bread of joy to rise
from the core of my heels
to the crust of my hair.
The only gluten I can find
is your daily offering of love
that I have been
so lucky to discover,
kneaded faithfully
throughout the later decades
of this life that would be
unwise, bereft, and unbaked
but for the skillful addition of you.
Poem: Does Nothing; Everything Is Done
0Dominique Larntz * January 13, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Does Nothing; Everything Is Done
Part One:
I thought I was too late,
and it was a blight on our home,
and I kept apologizing to everyone
but instead it was effortless.
Nature had pushed everything back
this year–from the Spring gusts
to the late blooming tomatoes
that gave us their last fruits
in early December.
I only cleared out a little of the garden
before the freeze and a month
of heavy snows pulled a crisp sheet
overtop the vines and trellises
outside our door.
So my clearing task waited.
Now the desert has returned
to its bright dryness
and when I went to shear the plants,
they did not need to be cut.
They simply fell apart in my hands
like solid dust, and I knew that this
was the perfect time
to clean up the garden.
Part Two:
I piled the branches into bags
and they reminded me of the
passageways in my brain,
and I could see how some of the
energy of my youth had been spent on
fruitless seeds of hatred, eager and petty and
destined to turn as gray and brittle as these annuals.
Planted in the imbalanced nutrient bath
of our warring culture, these resentments
were inconsolable in my youth,
which was always mysterious to me
because I was reaching for reconciliation
as truly as any annual will reach
to find balance somewhere in its soil.
But with the dormant season,
nature offers transformation
in the roots and stems of ourselves,
leaving the perennial parts strong and vibrant.
I find the things I can release
surprisingly woody and weak,
in my relationships and in my life,
and it is at this time,
now,
that I can quietly and easily pluck parts of
my character that have always vexed me–
alongside the annuals–
on a gorgeous wintery, solitary afternoon.