The Water Collection

For Posterity

~Augustus Snodgrass

I used to dive off cliffs;

Head first,

arms wide,

Plummeting down 

towards rocks 

and river.

My head hitting first

and then the water holds me

as I go down 

then up,

fast

because my breath is gone.

But one time,

I tripped.

My toe caught.

The nail ripped;

red ran down my foot,

which was flying 

as I fell.

The river out of reach.

last minute

reflex,

I kicked forward.

I hit the water.

I stopped jumping.

But you said I’d have no stories to tell my kids.

You said it was for posterity.

The river is beautiful

but I don’t trust the cliffs

I don’t dive

I don’t throw myself off anymore

I wait 

cautious,

looking down

calculating.

And then,

I jump:

feet, torso, head.

A free thought from TT

On Being Happy
by Tracy Tupman


The Way to be Happy
is distilling happiness from little things
said he, and paused for emphasis,
like a bullfrog after a particularly mellifluous croak.

Not wanting to ruin a first date,
I didn’t mention that ‘distilling’ was pretentious
and clashed with his infinitive ‘to be’
but politely said Like what.

He remarked Oh the sun on this
and the scent of that.
And while I like warm sun on a carpet
and know cut grass has that smell,

and do not mind territorial birdsong,
nor fire chewing wood in the cold,
nor color, nor most things quotidian,
he is wrong. In point of fact,

I will be most happy when I see at last
the really big stuff: whole cities dropped into the sea
the Hero waiting, wreathed in cloud
and many nations rising from the dead.

Serious

Belonging
by Samuel Pickwick

You belong, 

I whisper to him in the dark

To me, Daddy, and God.

Sometimes I wince

Saying that last name.

I don’t trust Him enough

to own my son.

What if He takes you away?

I worry into his small soft ear.

Would You take him from me?

I look at him, 

so perfect, so human - 

And remember Who gave him to me,

Who entrusted one little life to me.

You belong,

I wonder aloud as I gently lay him down,

To me, Daddy, and God!

How can I pretend

To be in charge of life and death,

even his?

I open my hands

Trusting God our Father

to give, to take away.

Because of Valentines

To an unknown soccer player

    By Augustus Snodgrass

I don’t know your name,

only a red and white jersey

with no name on the back.

But I know 

you have something.

It’s the way your faux hawk looks 

when you leap

 in front of huge defender 

and barely head it 

into the top right hand corner

or your purple cleats

that out run

every other player 

on the turf.

I watch 

as you step off to get water,

high-fiving your best friend

(who has already introduced himself by the way).

And I sit 

knee propped 

and iced,

wishing I was just a bit braver.

From The I'm-So-Bored-Notebook

Pickwick,old chap, I found these in the back of the old notebook. Remember those days? Freezing and half asleep, the only thing keeping us awake was how hard we whisper laughed at what we wrote. 

Ode to Disputatio

By Samuel Pickwick

We don our black robes-

sheets of thin ice that envelope

our bright scarves and sweaters.

Today we are receiving

nucleotide knowledge; or

are the dense words really 

just missing our ears.  And instead

settling down into the folds

of darkness, where they can

rest until they begin to

leak out, where we hung

our robes in the closet.

And that is why, every

once in a while, a brilliant thought

pops  into our minds, the robe

has rubbed off on our favorite blue sweater.

Ode to Some Girl's Hair

By Augustus Snodgrass

A black head sits in front of me,

covered in dense curls,

thick and lustrous,

shining in the Disputatio light.

Black snakes coiling dangerously

close to my fingertips.

They hang from the theatre seats

but I resist the apple 

and fold my hands upon  my lap.

The Water Collection: A Sampling from the Snod

The End of the World

Maybe it’s because

we found freedom,

when we moved from bunk beds

into twins,

leaving our older sister 

alone

with no one to boss.

And, we made plans

to stay up 

all night

with our play mobile.

And now,

we jump off cliffs.

Feet first for you,

a fall for me,

timing our jumps

with the ocean surf.

I don’t want to jump.

But you do,

throwing yourself off without care.

Trusting the sea to catch you,

while I pray 

that it does.

And, we climb rocks,

bleeding from our feet.

And I think, 

we might 

actually

be 

crazy.

Inaugural Blogural (AJ)

An old and unedited poem from last year, just because I'm too excited to wait 'til I have something worthwhile!

Insomnia

Similar to the goatee

as popularized by mephistopheles

or a tattooed neck

fate's mustache limits employment

opportunities.

No one would hand over car keys

for instance

or sign a name calmly

for a notary public

with a mustache like that. 

But tonight, as fate leans

over my kitchen table

(she will sleep no more,

he croons)

I can't help but observe

that, in his line of work,

fate's mustache

could not be done without. 

Snippet (SP)

To get this blog kicked off - a snippet from a story I was writing (for NaNoWriMo) a few years ago. It's from the middle-ish of my story. 

-SP

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sometimes being “just worried” can cloud your whole day, put a dark grey shadow on everything. It reminds me of a class I took in eleventh grade, which I guess was just last year but feels so much longer ago.

It was a watercolor class - and you have to understand, I’m not much of an artist, but somehow color really affects me. I love color and not in the way that a designer would and paint everything super bright but more just how you can put a drop of black in baby blue and instantly everything turns shady, or how a drop of red turns everything warmer somehow. Anyway one day we were all supposed to be painting a beautiful scene of a bright summer day in Holland or somewhere all European. So I started off all right and thought I was doing great, when I made the mistake of looking at the easel next to me where Michael, our resident artist was painting yet another masterpiece.

And when I looked back at mine I was sorely disappointed. The sun looked like a neon tennis ball and even I couldn’t tell that my windmill was in fact a windmill.  So rather than just showing my teacher and letting everyone know once and for all how terrible an artist I am I make a fast and furious decision. I grabbed a wet brush and soaked it in grey and without hesitating spread it across the page. All of a sudden my warm summer day in Holland had turned stormy and dark. Right then my teacher came up to me and, looking over my shoulder, gasped with what I thought at first was horror but then when she called the class around to see I realized she was actually pleased with my mistake.

“The sign of a true artist,” she said that day, “is unimpeded creativity. Do what you want, not what you think you should do, not what you think other people want you to do. You don’t have to be original. You have to be you, and most importantly the creative side of you.” Apparently I was the true artist of the day. 

Anyway God must be a true artist too, he must, because He can cause a whole day or a whole week or even sometimes a whole month to get cloudy and dark just like that. I wonder if my art teacher would say that God is a true artist. 

Again, anyway I’m worried. And as I think about it, I’ve been worried for a long time, and I’m not sure about what. Now it’s worrying me that I’m worried.

Aren’t worries just like that? They come in bunches, sort of, like one worry multiplies into two then four then eight until finally it all blows up then goes back to normal. Doesn’t it seem like everything gets worse before it can get better? 

I roll back onto my side, letting my pillow flop out flat again. Outside I can still see the moon glowing but it seems to have moved slightly to the side. Or wait, maybe I’m the one who has moved. I always forget these things - obviously I wasn’t the best at Physical Science. Do we move, or does the moon move? I ponder this question. Does it matter which one is the one that moves? I don’t really think it does because I can’t tell one way or the other anyway. 

Another worry hits me now. Am I weird? Strange? Quirky? Is that okay? Does it matter? And that worries me too. Lately I’ve been asking ‘does it matter’ about lots and lots of things: school, God, life. I punch my pillow down in a sudden burst of sleepless frustration.

One time I went up to our pastor after church service and timidly asked him if I could meet him sometime about religious questions. He looked surprised but said sure, how about tomorrow? All that night I scribbled down questions and then crossed them out, again and again, trying to get at just what it was that I had a problem with about God. The next afternoon when I walked into his office and sat down I had boiled all my feelings into one question: How do you know that God loves you?

Not very original, I know, but really. I believe in God, because I can’t even fathom existence without Him, but come on. How do we really know for certain that He is a being who actually loves? And loves me in particular? Really pastor?

I didn’t say that - that would be rude, but I wanted to. When I finally asked him my question his eyebrows shot up halfway up his forehead like he had never even thought of that, and that was how I knew my mission was going to be fruitless. He first said something about how I should have the faith of a child because I still was a child, and I shouldn’t be messing with big adult questions and about how only God knows the answers to some things and humans weren’t meant to know. And finally he ended with “God loves you because you are a good girl. Aren’t you?” I left right then.

I haven’t gone back to church for a while now. After he said all those things and made me feel like a silly little girl, which maybe I am but I really am trying not to be, I just didn’t feel called, as he would put it, to go back to Southview Bible Church, where Gram had been the pianist and Great-Grandfather had been a deacon, long long ago.