Here's the napowrimo challenge for the day: "take one of your favorite poems and find a very specific, concrete noun in it. For example, if your favorite poem is this verse of Emily Dickinson’s, you might choose the word “stones” or “spectre.” After you’ve chosen your word, put the original poem away and spend five minutes free-writing associations – other nouns, adjectives, etc. Then use your original word and the results of your free-writing as the building blocks for a new poem."
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These kinds of assignments are always tough. What's my favorite poem? I have many. I think I'll take this one, though, from W H Auden, which was my favorite when I was 22 (for a while): "Musee des Beaux Artes." I'm going to concentrate on "white legs."
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White Legs
When everyone worshipped
the tan
I had skin white as paper,
thin as
the altitude of our city,
and the boys I wanted
to like me
laughed,
said
I looked like a ghost,
glow in the dark.
Wearing that skin,
I knew
I was somehow
invisible
or extra visible
walking down
Mexico City streets,
lying in a bathing suit
on our balcony
under the eyes
of construction workers
pouring concrete
on the half finished house
on the street above me.
I gleamed
like a star,
slathered
with baby oil.
The sun
dug into me,
seared me
a deep, radiating
red.
At school,
crackling
with shame,
Roy's death
(the nova
melanoma)
like a seed
in my teenage brain,
I bore
the hot weight
as I would
any other curse.
"Hey," Scott said,
and my heart
leapt,
"you look really
ugly like that."
And his words
melted
into my cooked skin
like another
white fire.
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