The Old Gods (A Poem)

The old gods sing
in our bones still, humming through
skin, buzzing
at our teeth and along
our lips, their names
hardly forgotten

when the old rage comes, the jealousy
of immortals watching the living stumble
toward Death, rushing there, laughing,
sowing pain along the way. We feel the devil's horns
sticking through, hell's heat stoking
our skin - we want more
than mortality allows, than immortality
too. And yet,

there at sunrise, there along the river's
edge, the waves folding
over themselves, the seagulls taking their way
out over the waters to beyond
clouds and horizons; and there

in our towers and skyscrapers, lifting
off from our islands, to look down on our works
and see just beyond the sky, beyond
the land we're meant to walk and work,

there is the unspoken reverence of worlds
growing in the night, dreamed and built and lived,

and in us below, offering
our meager love to the hungry, to
the poor, caring

without boundary, without reason, only
of ourselves, our words, our thoughts made
visible into lives and cities.

We offer our tribute and receive
the old blessings, sunsets and sunlight,
tracing a finger along the skin
of a lover, our old Gods
of hunger, of pleasure, of love, singing
in our bones - it is time
for worship.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/23/11
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It's funny - in a lot of my older poems, you can clearly read the e.e. cummings influence in them. Now with this one, I can't help but see how much Mary Oliver's been influencing me, except without all her talent at describing nature.

I love the idea that there are gods older than God, that there are ancient forces working as the undercurrent to everything we know, but coming out in simple facets of our lives. So I wrote this poem about that, and I honestly didn't expect it to have this wide of a scope when I started out. This is one of those poems that definitely got figured out and explored in the process of writing it - I had no expectation for that last stanza to ever happen, and it's maybe one of my favorites of the poem, and possibly of any I've written. I also feel like I could've stolen it straight from Mary Oliver.

So those are this week's 3 poems. You can almost see a progression in them - Blue, to the Blues coming like an ancient force, to these Old Gods ruling over everything. I'd love to say that I planned that, but as with most of writing, it was all by accident. Hope you guys enjoyed reading one or all of them, comments/criticisms are always welcome. Ciao!

Your Blues (A Poem)

Your blues are coming from far off,
from the old towns, the country fields,
by backroads, too far back to find your way from,
dirt and dust in their wake, willed strong
with menace, with sickness, searching
a long time now for you, here
with your bourbon and your guitar, your soul
and your sins, lost,

while your blues are coming
from so far off, coming to be heard
from your beaten instrument, your sore fingers, your voice
ragged with your bitterness and your aches
running deeper than your bones and coming
from the Devil knows where,

your blues coming to relieve it all
from you, to preach it into the night, gospel of your heart,
to get you lost in it, confused in melody and emotion,
lost in the instinct of rhythm, in motion, your fingers
sliding along your biting strings to play
songs that can't be written, songs played in the dry heat

when your blues, from far off,
with their harsh and cool tones, come to be sung
with everything you've lost, whatever you have
left, whatever hope
had the nerve to stay.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/23/11
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I've always been obsessed with the Blues for some reason, I don't know why. But the necessary ingredients for this poem were: a break-up, and watching the TV show Treme. It started off with just the first line, this idea that the Blues, instead of being something we feel from time to time, are something that come for you. I'll probably put this poem through a couple more revisions, it can use some more physical descriptions to give it a harsher feel, but for now I'm pretty satisfied with it. I guess my Blues came.

Blue (A Poem)

blue, still dark
with night, through your window
in the morning
when you haven't slept, blue too dark
to see by, blue shadows
and tired thoughts without the solace
of dreams, caught in blue
darkness, dark blue growing
to blue to light blue, birds
blue outside your window with bright
blue notes, blue morning
to watch rise with blue
thoughts, your empty
bedside, your strange life, day
in and day out blue sky
without rain, endless blue, solid
blue, blue canvass in the morning blue
brighter and brighter, blue
on blue, until eyes close
into darkness, morning
lighting it red, your
blue morning broken by
a white cloud

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/15/11
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The poem pretty much describes it all - I came up with the idea after a night of intense insomnia where I didn't get a bit of sleep ("the morning when you haven't slept") and noticed the sky getting bluer and bluer with sunrise. I was already planning my blogpost on the Blues on my other blog, so I guess I had a lot of blue on my mind. It was interesting thinking of how Blue means so many different things to us, how the Blues are painful but fun at the same time, how dark blue can look like black but appear distinguished while light blue and sky blue are calming and cheerful.

Anyways, I thought it was a cool idea, I wrote the poem, and now you've read it (hopefully)! It was pretty fun to write too, you can kind of tell I started going crazy with just the sound of the word "blue" by the end. Almost hypnotically beautiful, right?