An octave of blackbirds
Handsome quarter notes
Minus one that flew away
Leaves a treble clef of power lines
Unresolved and incomplete
A yawn uncaught
Ruffling the feathers of some
Flagging their wings
Changing and reducing their value
Splitting four of them down to 256th notes
The smallest fraction of musical notation
Quarks of melody barely heard and rarely seen
Demisemihemidemisemiquavers
According to British musicians
So that now
Only three remain on the bottom line of the staff
Three solid single beats of E
No DO or RE
Only MI
Same pitch
Side-by-side
Enough to start a happy song
MI MI MI (me, me, me)
Jingle Bells
The first song played in outer space
Originally entitled
The One Horse Open Sleigh
A Thanksgiving song
Not a Christmas song
Or a college drinking song
Or a birdsong
A Thanksgiving song
Written and composed by James Lord Pierpont
For his Sunday school class in 1850
Celebrating annual sleigh races
In and around Medford, Massachusetts
I am pondering all of these things
(Wondering as I wander if the good church folk placed bets on their jingle horses)
After a generous splash of gin in my Earl Grey
Entranced
Beguiled by birds
When a snot green Buick lays hard on a screaming horn
Beeeeeeeep!
Startling me out of my skin
Shooting my hands into the air
(An embarrassing moro reflex which supposedly disappears after infancy unless there is an imbalance in the adult brain)
Window rolls down
Base voice bumpkin bellows
Cigarette bounces on moving lips
Untapped ash begins to snow
“Git outta the road ya dummy, God bless ya
You gonna git yerself keeled!”
Now
O’re the fields [I] go
Laughing all the way
——————-
Andrew Dabar
Christmas in July
I love how you describe the birds as musical notation!
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Thanks, Ingrid! Lately, I’ve been obsessing with birds on a wire. The other day the idea struck me that the whole scene appears to be a sheet of music and the birds individual notes. And so this strange poem was born!
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Strange but beautiful!
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😁😁
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Weird and a little hard for me to follow, but the cadence is lovely. Your comment above to Ingrid provided the “ah” moment needed for understanding and stringing it all together.
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Smiling. It’s definitely weird! I wasn’t going to post it but decided to anyway because this piece starts with a legitimate poetic idea that steers off the road after the influence of some gin (as evidenced by the daydreaming drunken observer stepping in front of a car). So there is “experimental” accuracy, I guess you might say. The last two lines are italicized in order to indicate the portion of the song’s lyrics pertaining to his safe and wise decision to walk the fields as a happy drunk instead of the shoulder of the highway or a sidewalk.
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Well, I’m glad he got away from the highway…an old family friend was killed years ago as he walked, drunk as a skunk, along the shoulder of a highway. A field is a much better place to be when drinking.
As writers, we need to go whatever direction the words take us…with sometimes surprising results. Yeah, it’s weird but it’s authenticity you, Andrew.
And by the way, I would rather watch paint dry than The Hallmark movie channel. I would overdose on sweetness.
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PS The title was influenced by an overdose of the Hallmark movie channel’s annual “Christmas in July “ marathon . . . which I had no choice but to watch during a stubborn bout of 2 a.m. insomnia at a motel while eating four cups of ramen noodles.
The experimental aspect was influenced (prior to the gin) by one Kerouac’s 30 rules for writing:
http://www.jellybeanselfpublishing.co.uk/1832-2
(Particularly #28)
“ Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better”
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I’m too old for crazy, Andrew, but you knock yourself out. Have fun with it. 😊
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Never too old for crazy!
And you are quite right, too much Hallmark is like eating 50 snickers bars in one sitting.
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I was thinking 100…😁😭
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Speaking of crazy at any age, Peter Straub! His writing is so beautiful but some of the weirdest I’ve ever read.
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I’ve read some of his work, and you’re correct on both counts. William Gay is another writer whose prose is beautiful and weird. His way of describing things is almost surreal. I just finished his The Lost Country, and a while back read The Long Home. They will stay with me for a long time.
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I’ve never heard of that author. I will certainly check him out straightaway. Thank you!
PS I read a short story by Peter Straub ( I can’t remember the name) but it was so weird! It was about this guy who was addicted to baby bottles and glued rubber nipples all over the walls of his house and other such fetish symptoms. When I finished reading, I felt like I might should seek some counseling!
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lol…I haven’t read that story. Reading Stephen King’s earlier work (starting in the 70s) inoculated me regarding weird and creepy and unsettling. But when I got to Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road”, “Child of God” and “Blood Meridian”, I needed a booster shot–especially for the unsettling. So far, I’ve only read the two books of William Gay’s that I mentioned, but intend to read more. Gay wrote since he was a teenager, but wasn’t published until he was in his fifties; publishers wanted him to cut the flowery language, but he wouldn’t oblige, so it took him longer to gain fame than it would have otherwise. He doesn’t have a large body of published work, but I intend to read it all in time.
if you wish to read about him and his work, here’s a good (but long) article.
https://therumpus.net/2012/04/a-world-almost-rotten-the-fiction-of-william-gay/
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I’m very excited to explore his writing! Thank you. Sounds right up my alley.
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