TARPAULIN SKY POETRY: Elena Georgiou, In-Class Assignment

ELENA GEORGIOU

V1n4
Fall 03

In-Class Assignment*

GEORGIOU

REVIEWING TENSES AND VOCABULARY

Do you remember the first time you fell in love?

Yes, she was sitting, cross-legged, on someone else’s floor.
I stood, just inside the door, wordless.

She did not look up for a long time.
I waited. When she did, I looked away.

I could not forget the deer behind her eyes.
The next day, she galloped from London to Paris.

I waited for millions of minutes for her to bring her face back.
When she spoke her voice was low.

She was an American. I was surprised she could whisper.
She was also an African. She had a hyphen between her continents.

Attraction: When you feel attracted to someone,
which of the following parts of the body catch your eye most?
(10 corresponds to the most attractive feature, 1 to the least):

Eyes								x
Hair								x
Neck							x
Legs			x
Shoulders		x
Back						x
Teeth	x
Lips								x
Chest/Breasts			xx
Belly							x
Feet					x
Hands							x
Skin				x

(Afterwards, compare your answers to those of the other members of your group.)

We all said 10 for eyes. Teeth scored lowest—one 1, two 2s,
and a 5. (Professor, you might want to add knees to this list)

What was the person like?
(Describe physical features and personality)

Her hair was alive; it sang songs about birds and lions.
She was shiny, lotioned. Her arms had once been wings.

When she spoke I had to lean close to hear her.
(I gave thanks for whispering.)

How you knew you were in love: describe your symptoms.

When the length of her body sheltered the length of my body,
it was the first time I’d not felt homesick.

ANTICIPATING VOCABULARY

Symptoms of Love:
Circle the symptoms you display when you are in love.

	* You feel like the telephone is an instrument of love.
	* A jalopy becomes a transcendent chariot.
	* You feel like leaving the city to build a stone house in the wilderness.
	* War feels distant.
	* Time feels concurrently urgent and unimportant.
	* You feel like tears are a tangible representation of God.
	* Poverty feels simultaneously real and unreal.
	* You can’t eat.
	* You discover a portal that leads to the magic inside the alphabet.
	* You can’t sleep.

(Professor, I thought hard about this and circled all of the above.)

Similes: Love is like . . . Love can be compared to many things. With the other members of your group, create similes with the elements suggested below:

Love is like . . .

an element of nature
a geographical area
a season of the year
food or drink
furniture
an animal

snow
a canyon
autumn
watermelon juice
a chest of drawers
a seahorse

Share your similes with those of your classmates
and use your ideas to create a love poem.

If you expressed your feelings, how did you do so?
If not, why not?

I did not. I could not. She was married.
I thought Some Enchanted Evening was song not experience.

But, for six days, my telephone kept making me dial her number
to count the rings before she picked up.

On the seventh day, my car made me drive to her home
to study the geometry of her knees.

Dear Professor,

I found it difficult to work with my group on this assignment—we could not agree on how many elements of nature and geographical areas to include, and none of our food choices overlapped, not even chocolate. I did not want to continue fighting with my group, so, below, is a love poem I wrote using just my own word choices. (If this does not satisfy the class requirements, please let me know.)

Sincerely,

When Love Happens

watermelon is cut into a canyon of snow

melting red collects in drawers

in your autumnal chest pregnant seahorses

weave umbilical vines—a botanical net

—we’re caught.

* an adaptation of Professor Alicia Ramos’s syllabus
Department of Romance Languages, Hunter College of the City University of New York

	Elena Georgiou lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry and creative writing at Hunter College in New York and Goddard College in Vermont. She is the author of Mercy Mercy Me (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and co-edited, with Michael Lassell, the anthology The World in Us (St. Martin's Press, 2001) She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship, Astraea Emerging Writers Award, and Lambda Literary Award.
	Elena Georgiou's recent work appears in The Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Bloom, Spoon River Review and elsewhere.