Capolavoro
Another great prompt from "The Practice of Poetry" (I've copied it below the poem). I'm curious to use a more distinctly passive/active contrast in scenes next time.
Our bathroom is so small. but it’s right across the hall. My parents took me and my younger sister to Italy the summer before I got engaged. It’s close to our bedroom, which is also small. It’s a house from the nineteen-fifties and we love it. Everywhere we went, lights flashing from cameras held up because this was before smartphones were in every hand. But it is not spacious. We live pressed together. People carried cameras everywhere, in little black bags crowding the Mona Lisa to take a picture from ten feet away. I keep the bandages on a high shelf like they are a secret. Up the stairs of the Duomo and down again, step by stone step, my father in Birkenstocks and socks. My husband sits on the little stool our youngest children use to reach the sink. We moved our heads together in the Colosseum. I felt the shape of shells in the thrall-driven walls. His hands reach for me unraveling bandages where wounds are weeping. We walked down the streets in Florence my father in the lead, gelato in hand. He replaces them with bandages dabbed with salve intended to keep more infections at bay. It was so hot and the gelato was so cool and my mom and I would stop for espresso. He bends his head to the task. I tell him, embarrassed, “I guess this is the ‘For better or for worse’ part, right?” We drank our espresso with little batons of sugar and stepped away again into stony streets. He tells me, “This is the ‘in sickness and in health’ part. Then he uses surgical tape to hold the bandages in place. We drifted over the little bridges of Venice and gondoliers oared down canals at dusk.
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THE CUT-AND-SHUFFLE POEM by Jack Myers, “The Practice of Poetry” p. 114, edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell.
“Write out (in prose form, if you like) two completely unrelated and emotionally opposite six- to ten-line dramatic situations, depicting
a physically inactive or quiet scene, and
a physically active or emotionally charged scene.
Then, as one might shuffle the playing cards in a deck, alternate the first line or two from scene 1 with the first line or two from scene 2, then the second line or so from scene 1 with the second line or so from scene 2, and so forth, until all the lines from the two scenes are roughly dovetailed into a single stanzaic unit.”
I’m heading in for a second read. So good!
Thank you. I’ve never tried this. But I’m now keen!!!