What is turtle blood?

Turtle blood is memory. Memory that would perhaps remain forgotten and undisturbed beneath the dusty layers which have buried it over the years. The name of this blog, “What Turtle Blood Tastes Like” is taken from a poem I wrote a few years back at the Katchemak Bay Writer’s Conference in a workshop taught by Stan Rubin. The workshop focused on the workings of time in poetry…”you write poetry in one time and then it is taken by the reader and interpreted in another time, a later time, or with a different pacing, measure, a musical time” “Time as a medium in which poetry exists…floating in time”. We read examples of poems in which time was juxtaposed and toyed with. One that really was fantastic was William Carlos Williams‘ “This is just to say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

And from this confessional poem came rushing memories like turtle blood and the following images which I jotted down hoping to re-use in a later poem, turtle blood, shell drum, lifting the stone and dropping it, the sick wet crack of mossy shell. I had heard Sherwin Bitsui reading a poem the day before in which there was a line, “What does turtle blood taste like”, which haunted me into the following day and helped coax my own turtle blood from the deep recesses. So here it is, a few revisions later…

 

What Turtle Blood Tastes Like

We believed no one could see us
beneath the willow temple
beside algae bloom swamp

can’t swim in there
without shoes on
snappers’ll get yer toes

I was the first to lift rock
high above my head
letting gravity, god and geology
rain down
on mossy diamond shell

sound like green wood
cracking
purple blood
and sickly tears

when its beaked mouth
stopped snapping
we threw it into the swamp
because it kept
looking into our eyes

___

Who’s behind this turtle blood stuff anyway?

This page has the following sub pages.

• Who’s behind this?