The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Wed 2/11/2009)

[RetroLounge]

Pier Life

This morning on the municipal fishing pier
the homeless are filming a movie on the stairs

called lunch, featuring dried fish. I only mention
the marines because there are so many of them.

In the water, surfers in black wetsuits sit on boards
that blur blue-green among the reaching kelp.

A cormorant surfaces beside the line the surfer
ties to his ankle to keep track of himself.

It seethes in the small waves. The surfers seem like men
at desks. They steer into the wave to stay deep.

They are almost asleep in their boards.
In this quantity and at this distance

they look like several foreign alphabets.
A wave goes blind over their heads.

The next wave pickpockets them to shore.
It is deep enough to freeze, cold to drown.

Water gulfs around the pilings, brushes my shadow
against barnacles that remind the pier of its decay.

The cormorants climb out of the dark cellar.
If you were delicious, they would dive after you

with powerful small webbed feet or leave only a feather.
The problems of language are mostly solved

in the fish's gutting on the public sink, and thrown to sea
lions by the old woman with a fierce embarrassment for a hat.

A little girl staring at a mackerel cut in half and bloody-boxer
face runs to daddy I'm scared. She reminds me that terror

has a place here, in the beginning, among the strange messages.
An angler throws out a line and seven hooks shine like carnival beads.

The ocean may not have a center but here are its margins.
Soon this poem will be over and I'll go back to the car,

wheel baby across the difficult tracks,
the ice in my soda barely melted.

Ed Skoog

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Ed Skoog’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, NO: a Journal of the Arts, Barrow Street, Willow Springs, The Literary Review, and other journals, and are forthcoming in New Orleans Review and Ploughshares. He has received scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. His chapbook Field Recordings was published by Seattle’s Lit Rag Press in 2003. A graduate of the MFA program at University of Montana and former fiction editor of Cutbank, he has taught at Tulane and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, but now lives in southern California, where he is chair of creative writing at Idyllwild Arts Academy

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:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

1. Ed Skoog is cool. nt

[RetroLounge]

3. I see he's currently in-residence at Hugo House

in Seattle.

Cool!

:hi:

RL

[blueraven95]

2. ...

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

4. Good Morning

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

5. ~

:donut: :hi:

[RetroLounge]

7. Hello

:hi:

RL

[Chorophyll]

6. That was pretty well awesome.

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

8. ...

:hi:

RL

[swimboy]

9. I really enjoyed that one, pal.

Many thanks. :hi:

[RetroLounge]

11. Hey my Friend!

Good to see you!

:hi:

RL

[orleans]

10. nice poem. here's mine:

night sounds


a car door slams shut

.....train whistle

..........wind chimes

...............the house creaks and settles.

..........it is a ticking clock that keeps a beat,

.....reminding me to go to bed.

the heat comes on.