From slate blue to lavender*

From a MOOC I took once, I didn't remember the poem but I remember this process: And in fact it is something I should use more. Happy Poetry Month day three!

Exercise 2: M.E. Hope _ Repurposings_reduce/reuse/recycle

Some of these are darlings that have been cut over the decades, some are things that reoccur. Here are lines cannablized (repurposed) from other work followed by the draft of something new.

1) Like ether my warm breath
    on his neck pulled me to quick sleep
    sanctuary so wholly mine;
    his heart against my palm.
 
2) …and like a lost dog
    3,000 miles from home
    they come back,
    thin and bloody and just as familiar.
 
3) They scuffle across
    the floor & settle near his feet
    like subservient dogs.
 
4) The lamb shed was built 40 years before we arrived
     and through its thick walls, cradling sawdust, little passed;
     sound lay muffled on its dirt floor like a hostage.
 
5)  I am like the bee outside
     your hothouse window
     humming with patience
     for you to slide the pane.
 
6) where his steps are muffled
    in moon dust.

***Ex 2 Poem***

Memories like summer wasps tap at my window.
There are certain days of the year when a slant
of light, golden or olive green, will plant me
on a hay trailer at sunset. Sweat rills through alfalfa
dust on my arms and circles my neck, and for half
a second I’m there: the air, scented by cut hay
and gasoline, cools. The mountain rotates color
*from slate blue to lavender. A whistle sounds
from town as the mill marks shift change.

Our lamb shed was built forty years before we came
and through the thick walls cradling sawdust
little passed; sound lay muffled on the dirt floor
like a hostage. And here is memory again
caught up in the heavy dark, the accumulated
odor of straw and animal piss, ammonia and soured
milk, sheep drying after a snow storm or summer
rain. The iodine used for disinfectant stains time.
We slept here in lambing season, rotating shifts
each falling into the set up bunk, to the other’s
perfume. Even now, forty more years on, I catch a whiff,
Baby Love or Herbal Essence, and I am following my sisters (still).

But the hardest memory, the one that plays at the edge
like that lost dog, is of my father. Though he is gone from me
he exists, just like the old farm. Before sleep,
before dreams are allowed to collude with thought
I think of him, how when I was four he would hold me
tuck my head under his chin and like ether my breath
lulled me to sleep, a sanctuary wholly mine,
his heart tapping on my open palm.