I’m using daily prompts associated with Inktober (artists doing ink drawings) to spur poetry this month. The poems flow from the prompts, though it may not be obvious (at all); and sometimes the poems are revisions of earlier poems that came to mind when I mulled the prompt. If there’s a photo in the post, it was chosen after the poem was written. I’m “showing my work” by offering some of the words, phrases, associations that came to me for each prompt. The poems may or may not have anything to do with gardens, gardening, or “nature” as it’s commonly considered. To see all the poems (once they’re written), check the Inktober landing page.

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Today’s prompt: RING

Some associations: hoop, circle, wedding ring, enclosure, encircle, mob, chime, signal, phone call, doorbell, ringing in one’s ears, ringing in the new year, “ring the bells that still can ring, present your perfect offering,” halo, ring around the rosie, 3 ring circus, alarm bells, ring false, rings of Saturn (saturnine: gloomy, morose, sluggish, grave) … 

Poem:

The Mingling Sea

The flutter of night as it gives way to morning in my mind,
phantoms slide like shadows and yet some mark remains,
some near narrative that floats my waking self
on rolling water, each slight wave an impression,
an indentation, I’m floating, dragging my hands languorously
in the mingling sea, verging on memory,
then a sudden tap of name:

Addition? Who calls a dog Addition?
Apparently I do, at some depth.

I’m content to float, to be lifted and lowered indulgently
as sleep dissolves, recalling dimly
and briefly brightly a scattering of interiors, incomplete
phrases overheard like vibrations
tuning me into the blind world below, instinctual,
or perhaps I have it wrong,

tuning me into the glaring world above, bedazzled,
the surface where the sun burns dream’s shapes
into salt water, agitated, dissipating, and the horizon
stretches as it always does
endlessly away, toward time and the busy land,
while I float, sighing,
not quite remembering what the dog has to do with it,
not quite ready for the blinding shore.
 
©MMWms 2019