365 poems 9 & 10

Inert Perfection

 by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hot actor: Alex Pettyfer

“Inert Perfection, let me chip your shell.
You cannot break it through with that soft beak.
What if you broke it never, and it befell
You should not issue thence, should never speak?”

Perfection in the egg, a fluid thing,
Grows solid in due course, and there exists;
Knowing no urge to struggle forth and sing;
Complete, though shell-bound. But the mind insists

It shall be hatched ... to this ulterior end:
That it be bound by Function, that it be
Less than Perfection, having to expend
Some force on a nostalgia to be free.

Hot actress: Scarlett Johannsen.

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page

 by Cate Marvin




Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel
that streams through my dreams of battle. Another
apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in
and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,
can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to
our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime,
a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost
in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before
she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.
Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits
in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.
Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted
to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.
I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the
child pulls its witching wind between its opposite
handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is
its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When
you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to
let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in
to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you
that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.
Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.
I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You
pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day
that the planet circles the night we began. A child
is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.
Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

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A note: The actual point of this ongoing project is to come up with 365 poems that rhyme, and I thought long and hard about including poem 10 here, but finally opted to do so because while it's not set up with the rhymes at the end of lines the way we expect with "formal" poetry, the wordplay and internal rhymes still mark it as a poem rather than as prose-styling-itself-a-poem.

"Another apocalypse, and your weird blondeness,"

and

"down in a bunker, we hunker"

and

"Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits
in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far"

are all rhymes of sorts, that latter being easier to see if you wrote it like this:

Only your brain remains, 
floating in a jar 
that sits in a lab far off, 
some place away, 
and terribly far


And look at this, too:


Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted
to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.
I am no friend. According to them. Accordion

Rewritten, it could be:

Your skull no longer exists, 
its ash has been lifted
to wind 
from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.
I am no friend. 
According to them.
Accordion

So I say it rhymes.  The real test is: read aloud, does the rhythm take on a greater meaning? I think that's a good test for poetry: Is it better, read aloud? Great prose is not necessarily any more powerful when read aloud.  Great poetry, I think, is.