Mating Rituals
a "Words with Friends" poem
I’m working on a manuscript—Words with Friends. Rather, I’m attempting to make poems amid the rubble of my basement, as the drywall dust settles and saws whir and nail guns bang. I have only been able to use the basement as an excuse since March.
Meanwhile, the words sit in Word, the names of their owners in parentheses.
For those who don’t know me, I’m a poet who can no longer write a poem from scratch. I can’t just decide I’ll talk about a Hercules beetle; someone has to give me the word rhinoceros to help me get there.
I have turned this weird writer’s block into a game. On Facebook, I solicit one word from each friend who wants to participate. It’s kind of like when songwriters ask you to shout out words, and they put them right into a song, then and there.1
Sometimes there’s a word that throws in a wrench (on this one, I struggled most with “the pope”), but I manage to get it done.
Even though I have all these pages of words in Word, I stole the words collected by my progeny from some of the students they’ve taught. Here are the words given by some fourth-graders:
Rhinoceros
Mushroom
Charms
Fast
Quizzical
Flourishing
Unbound
Delicate
Falling
Vermont
Cute
Socks
Flaming
Cataclysmic
Civil
Echo
Non-absolute
Extortion
Basketball
Pang
The pope
Thy
My job now is to use all the words, one in each line (in any order), to make a poem. Since this had an odd number of words, I contributed “Hercules” to bring it all home at the end.
Without further ado (and still during poetry month):
Mating Rituals A beetle with rhinoceros-like horns, The Hercules can lift a forest’s weight In leaf detritus, mushrooms, and decay. Male beetles charm their mate by wrestling: Who pins his foe the fastest wins the girl. The quizzical Dynastes tityus, When flourishing, can go almost an hour Before they come unbound and have a smoke. The female squirts her eggs out, delicate, And falling right where she herself got laid. Now somewhere in Vermont, the grubs will hatch But she won’t stick around to call them “cute.” Some men have wooed me wearing smelly socks, Served flaming baked Alaska with two forks, Expecting cataclysmic Os in kind. And though it may sound civil, it is not, The truth of which is echoed by us all. A woman’s right to choose non-absolute, We’re often, by extortion, made to grow A basketball-like belly for nine months Then wait for painful pangs to birth our babes. “For joy, thy child is born into the world,” The pope may say, though much more fitting is “I hope you have the strength of Hercules.”
Willy Porter is a master of this and every other songwriting-, singing-, and guitar-related craft.