ACCORDION SONNET
by Eric Stern
And another accordion gets sold,
bellows billow out now to the wide world
squishswoosh squishswoosh pullpush pushpull they fold
push out the air, babe on chest, sighs unfurled.
Until the fingers articulate moans
skins finds buttons, awkwardly pushes in
Hand slides slips sallys on keys, long white bones,
gropings glorious orgy sound and din!
you make it sing, the reeds warbling, steel birds
the wind goes in, the song comes out, hands move
marching buttons below bellow tone’s words
it’s sex it’s shooting stars it’s river’s groove,
Squeeze in bellows, SNAP, put it in the case.
Close the lid, song gone, dead without a trace.
My friend, Melissa Favara, asked me a few months ago to participate in one of her 1000 Words events. Melissa chooses four authors and each week sends them a prompt. Here are the rules she sent us:
Your weekly piece should be very close to 250 words.
You may write each piece in the genre of your choice; you may write in
a different genre for each piece; you may write entirely disconnected
pieces, or pieces that hang together in a theme or plotline–writers
have succeeded wildly doing any/all of the above.
I will provide a phrase and several words as the prompt: you must use
the phrase and all of the words, but feel free to change person,
number, tense, or grammatical role as you like. I remember “nail”
particularly as a word people had fun with.
Keep the month’s theme, BEGINNING, in mind as you write. Sort of near
the front of your mind.
What an interesting challenge! As a young writer I used to do similiar excercises, the idea being to trick my mind into writing. If my focus is on incorporating the objects ino the text then all other worries (”Am I brilliant”, etc.) go out the window.
Here then are the four prompts, followed by my reponses. One is a song and I’ll enclose am mp3.
PROMPT #1
It is difficult to learn that you know nothing about
and the words
pry
erase
wing
table
and flurry.
My first was response was a short story. Often when Vagabond Opera is travelling I feel as if we are travelling salesman, going from town to town, staying in hotels, drinking beer. I wrote this very short story in the airport near Boulder, I think, after our plane was delayed (please remember, by the way, the words of your high school teacher: don’t confuse the author with the narrator):
Salesmen
What they sell isn’t as important as a coyote streaking through the Denver grass; this is a once-in-awhile and they know that, their green-bottled beers presently erasing the memory. Their last night is the start of something.
The cap sweats brown metal down its teeth. Skip pries it off with a lighter, flicks it to anywhere. He wants the others to finish the bottles before the beers warms up.
The hotel ice machine is dead, the clock wrong-12:00, 12:00, 12:00-auguring an eternal red-blinking midnight.
Skip’s call home is very short. A flurry to begin an ice storm.
Across the narrow aisle the unkempt bed blooms forth the unkempt Bob Saunders (one hand on the remote, the other wresting cheetos from the crinkly bag table-side) talking with his wife.
To each other their spouses are rendered close to anonymous, interchangeable-she, the wife.
Carl outside looking to the low lights of the airport still crisp-shirted, snatching drags.
Wanna watch the Olympics?
Your call.
Whatever. I think they got a Mohammed Ali special on.
Then Carl saw the coyote switching back through the high grass a swath of brown grass too, so that the coyote swath rippled through itself.
Carl calls Skip over and Skip proffers appropriate reverence by pausing before his next sip, mind crooked already.
Bob calls from the room.
We really gotta drink all these?
There’s a fucking mystery
Carl leans into the rail
The ice machine?
The ice. The coyote. Airplane’s wings keeping it floating.
It’s easy to learn that you know nothing about airport wildlife, the hotel’s ice machine. More difficult to learn that you know nothing about Rachel, your wife.
PROMPT #2
The phrase:
Instead, it made a horrible sound
and the words
inconspicuous
cheery
charred
fork
and
thirty-four.
I wrote this song in a hotel room. It was nice because all I had was my accordion, pen and paper, no music software, no manuscipt paper, even. I suggest listening to it and NOT reading the text until afterwards:
It’s an incospicuous evening
not a cloud of a cloud above
and the power lines draw their pistols
and the blue sky is a glove
and the blue sky is a glove
Everyone is eating hunger
his heart is charred beyond belief
and it trembles in a leaf
he steals the pocket from a thief
and he’s thirty four
somehow it happened
but he still behaves like thirty three
and he’s thirty four
his heart is trembling in a leaf
he pulls an alley from the pocket
and on that alley there’s a flat
and in that flat there is an isn’t
she left him for a Belgian rat
his table is another coffin
his fork, exhausted lies supine
so cheery fellows get in line
he wants to drown yours in his mine
the hat swallows the head
the overcoat eats the body
and it crouched by the door
with a trunk and umbrella
that kissed his cheek instead
they glistened with the rainwater
that smeared the streets with hints of leaves
‘til the river drank the leaves
and your bones cold to your boots
back to your bones
he wanders into other novels
and finds he can’t discern the plot
he takes his drinks of rather nots
his cards play him he draws his lots
The evening flowered into springtime
the taverns singing, “Welcome in!”
his life can sing another round
instead it made a horrible sound
and he’s thirty five
somehow it happened
but he still behaves like thirty three
and he’s thirty five
his heart is trembling in a leaf
PROMPT #3
Phrase: If I had crushed it then, there, before anything bad had happened
and words:
slack
tranquil
deform
piercing
and
five
I had been reading about Walt Whitman’s volunteering in the field hospitals during the Civil War. I imagined a young wounded soldier and the letter he wrote home about the tender old man:
Union Soldier on Walt Whitman
There’s rain on the blackberry bush. Somehow the season is over and the inklings of cold begin, I cover myself and know that the enveloping green will be heavy with water, then ice. North has ceased to be a direction. Five points, and the Bowery are far away. The old man tends us in the hospital. He brings us cards and soothes us our deformed spirits our sometime broken bodies, and by the grace of the Creator the piercing cries of the wounded are sometimes made tranquil, but there are always more and then more soldiers here.
Mother, forgive me, for your gentle soul reprimands my wayward ramblings. I know that the smaller sin begets the larger, and had I crushed it then, this feeling, before anything bad had occurred, might I walk more upright in the eyes of God and had we, our nation, crushed our smaller sins, might we have walked upright instead of in this great punishment of blood and bodies?
No matter, mother, no matter. I am lain on the field here and the gentle old man relates his musings and is fond of ours; his brother, George Whitman, was wounded on the cheek, his pallet laid next to mine, but even as Geroge has departed his kind relation remains, bequeathed almost, a comfort to us through the Winter.
Your other sons, my brothers, I do not see, for Jonah departed his mortal body at Shiloh and Gideon fights still. The war does not slacken. But a gentle man eases our discomfort.
PROMPT #4
You can never turn off the tape when you need to turn off the tape
benign
compound
fleet
err
and nimble.
I wrote this poem in Seattle then finished it in Portland:
The auto(erotic) mobile fails Northwest inspection
1
The pears so drunk they fell out of trees
(some leapt)
and Seattle pressed against a window
streaking it with wet grey fingers,
and the women
are peeled away
one
by
one,
leaving a lonely life,
penis savagely in hand,
(skin cloaked snake)
drinking pornography,
exluding all other ogrophys,
so that every barista and thai waitress
every (but wait, pause for the
real breath and blood
that is their architecture
and your mother has a vagina)
rain-soaked street eater,
the nimble bicyle messenger
the fleet-footed tourista
brushing the memory of earth against your full mouthed skin,
your wife
are bottles of oblivion, the bed is your only lover
she presses and wraps her white-sheeted arms about you
2
Paging masturbation!
Please remove your cloak of invisibility
and wear
a poem
from now on,
or a fragment of stride,
those old piano rolls remain sexy,
they don’t err,
clicking the piano’s teeth,
and her fingers spit out Fats Waller,
(I know, I know,
fantasy is a benign compound, part handjob
part fucking,
as harmless as an Annie Sprinkle lecture
and even prettier, where you can pause and rewind,
but, my son,
you can never turn off the tape when you need to turn off the tape,
and there you are woman
…she has
green eyes…
under you
you thinking of last night’s www.ebsite),
Pike place market
Wednesday at 3
a peach sidles to my lips
the box coloured ground yields seagulls,
as I imagine the girl
with the camera eyes pulling my cock.
I wonder
if seagulls jerk off
Melissa’s Next 1000 Words event is May 4th, 2009 at Maiden in the Mist in Portland at 7 PM