So, I'm posting my calisthenic as an improv for this week because, well, it's an improv, but also because I think it's one of those instances where *I* know what I'm talking about, but my readers may have absolutely no idea--so, I need help. I think that now that I can revise it without having to stick to the form of Csoori's peice, I may take the same subject matter, a few phrases from here (because most of the language, I know, is stale), and completely rework the poem as a free write later.
Improv off of Sandor Csoori’s “A Thin, Black Band”
Since I don’t drown on it,
since I don’t leak at the lip-slit to press diphthongs with diphthongs,
since syllables cram in before my softened endings,
and I am as harsh between the alveolar liquid retroflexes,
as the block party of a Pennsylvanian in the cookout of a Virginian:
I can’t hear a steady, trampled craft trapped for a paused moment
before my criticism.
It tries to rise, side steps, once again rises,
as if a soldier’s thick perished tongue slapped
it from straight to shy.
I won’t hear it, too, among the region’s restored landmarks,
in the slanted, falling words,
of the great-grandfather’s cozy cotton-vowels,
or near flag’s in the father’s truck, in the high-schooler’s bumper sticker,
paralyzed in the sugar of the tea.
Taxi-silence tenses within me, the silhouettes’s currency,
like when history is turned off.
Startled, I listen about, and haltingly I begin to track
that the clamber, too, is tensely sweet,
and it won’t unreign my years here
once heard.
The tea drains, drains upon the restored table,
slurps neighborly greetings and bake sale fundraisers,
absorbs lashes from the educated.
And that potluck culture stalks there, there too, about
the bloodied church’s steeple,
it fools my eyes, lures them after it,
like a recipe of grandma’s mother that cannot be translated.
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