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.

* * * * *

Today’s prompt: SNOW

Some associations: snowed under (overwhelmed), ice crystals, flakes, snow cover, snowdrift, snowfall, blizzard, avalanche, poor radio or TV signal, interference, cocaine, to mislead or charm insincerely (snow job), White Christmas, pure as the driven snow, powder, let it snow, snow day, Snow White, snowball’s chance in hell, catching snowflakes on tongue, snow globe, snow cone, tickertape parade, snowman, snowcap, snowbound, snowbell, dusting

Poem:

Snow Blind

“The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run, and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow.” — Sylvia Plath

The rickety racket of the film projector,
the inexpertly spliced celluloid, clickety clack,
a racing train of time and image, hard gleam
of light bathing this moment, that moment,
but nothing connects smoothly, just light, just dark,
mostly dark, a sense of action obscured and flickering.
Felt, as that trace of last week’s dream, last life’s flash:
just a kitchen table, the soft spongy comfort of pumpkin pie,
the cold darkening sky.

The audience wonders:
Where’s the narrative arc, the big idea?
Dialogue, image, action overlap, a clouded mumble.
No calm voice-over to put it all in perspective, to sort the fact
from the fiction — if in fact there is any fact,
because it all seems fiction as it sputters and halts
across the screen, one scene as true as any other,
or as unlikely: the sudden tumble to the chapped blacktop,
after the quiet almost premeditated pie eating;
the superimposed twilight spent crouched in thick mint
under the deck. The scars on my knees now.

Across the unvarying screen, a hurrying sluice of suggestion,
atomised episodes, afterimage persisting, fading,
specked and spitting like muzzy snow.

©MMWms 2019

* * * * *