Tag water

* missing Corpus Christi

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment
mi sea wall es su sea wall...

mi sea wall es su sea wall…

The above image is from the Sea Wall in my hometown of Corpus Christi Texas.  It stretches up and down Ocean Drive, down past the Whataburger by the Bay, down into the palm-trees lining downtown.

Go a little further and you’ll end up at the old site of the factory I used to work at.  We made equipment for oil rigs.  We worked in open-air garages, so close to the water we could look out in the mornings during summer – hurricane season – and watch as little whirlwinds funneled up and over the water, appearing and disappearing against a peach sky.

This week’s poem is one of my own from that time.  An earlier version of the poem was published in Blue Collar Review.  What I feel I finally got right in the present version has everything to do with the word “hands” – how it opens and ends the poem, holds it in place, a young man’s angst funneling up and down in between.

It’s the holidays and I can’t help but get sentimental.  I look at photos like these and hear the water.  Straight up.

Here’s another view, followed by my poem:

cuanto quieres por el downtown?

cuanto quieres por el downtown?

Escape Ropes – Jose Angel Araguz *

Hands raw from setting knots
The few inches apart it takes
For a leg to imagine a ladder,
Ropes designed for escape from a fire
On an oil rig squatted on the gulf,
My mind would work out
Images of men with only the open water
To swim, to march across if they could,
To bob and pray for miracles.

Those knotted afternoons,
The sun made an oven of the warehouse.
The foreman stood me in the back
While other men sat on stools
And looked over, faces worn,
Fingernails yellowed from smoking.
There, I held my tongue,
Grunted against each wince,
And felt fire in my hands.

***

Happy escaping!

jose

* published originally in Blue Collar Review.

* Louise Bogan, an update & the friday influence

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Roman Fountain – Louise Bogan

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain’s bowl
After the air of summer.

***

This week on the Influence: Louise Bogan.

This poem takes me in right away with its music: word choice plays out the water in its w’s and r’s, and the fountain later in the m’s.  The pacing also adds to the musical element.  Note the choice comma in the fourth line “Reach to its rest, and fall” which mimics the flow of the water.

The stanza structure also plays out the concept.  The first two stanzas have their symmetry, four lines each, rhyming couplets. Then there’s the drive and rush of the last stanza, its rhymes a bit more scattered, the form there hidden and changing as water does in a fountain.

All of these things come together to make the poem an experience with several layers.  Safe to say: they don’t, ahem, make them like this anymore.  Or enough.

This poem took on a new life for me after reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (a novel every poet would be charmed by).  In the book, the main character tells a story about how he read Bogan’s poem to a crowd and how the reading of it aloud really affected somebody, to the point that the person, not a regular reader of poetry, came up to him and asked about “that fountain poem”.

This scene makes me think about what poems have had that effect on my life, have hooked into me and taught me something.  It is my goal to write something that will have people asking about it later, something worth reading.

**

In other news, if you take a look up top you’ll see I have added an official page for my chapbook The Wall.  On it is ordering information, some very kind words from Naomi Shihab Nye, and a photo from the day I received my copies.  I got to pick up my copies straight from the printer.  They came in a white box very similar to a cake box.  Sadly, no cake.

**

Here’s one more by Bogan:

Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell – Louise Bogan

At midnight tears
Run in your ears.

***

Happy running,

J