Datasets:

shahules786

/

PoetryFoundationData

like 2

Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele

I. Le Bonheur dogwood flakes what is green the petals from the apple blow on the road mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow as the whippoorwill, the night’s tractor, grinds his song and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux! Délires! What soul is without fault? Nobody studies happiness Every time the cock crows I salute him I have no longer any excuse for envy. My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass II. The Charge dogwood flakes the green the petals from the apple-trees fall for the feet to walk on the birds are so many they are loud, in the afternoon they distract, as so many bees do suddenly all over the place With spring one knows today to see that in the morning each thing is separate but by noon they have melted into each other and by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy. We are busy if we can get by that whiskered bird, that nightjar, and get across, the moon is our conversation, she will say what soul isn’t in default? can you afford not to make the magical study which happiness is? do you hear the cock when he crows? do you know the charge, that you shall have no envy, that your life has its orders, that the seasons seize you too, that no body and soul are one if they are not wrought in this retort? that otherwise efforts are efforts? And that the hour of your flight will be the hour of your death? III. Spring The dogwood lights up the day. The April moon flakes the night. Birds, suddenly, are a multitude The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything. Noise— even the night is drummed by whippoorwills, and we get as busy, we plow, we move, we break out, we love. The secret which got lost neither hides nor reveals itself, it shows forth tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations. Envy drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul —that they are not one— the matutinal cock clangs and singleness: we salute you season of no bungling

Charles Olson

Living,Death,The Body,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Spring,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

The Librarian

The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester, the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which (from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe. In this night I moved on the territory with combinations (new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader, my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts. My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop, there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then, I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me) before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf- house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son, I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years. But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country. His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I found him intimate with my former wife: this boy was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts! Black space, old fish-house. Motions of ghosts. I, dogging his steps. He (not my father, by name himself with his face twisted at birth) possessed of knowledge pretentious giving me what in the instant I knew better of. But the somber place, the flooring crude like a wharf’s and a barn’s space I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut! But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort. The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern The places still half-dark, mud, coal dust. There is no light east of the Bridge Only on the headland toward the harbor from Cressy’s have I seen it (once when my daughter ran out on a spit of sand isn’t even there.) Where is Bristow? when does I-A get me home? I am caught in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is Frank Moore?

Charles Olson

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Town & Country Life

Canto I

And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads; As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods, A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much; Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender, Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms, These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze; Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine; Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other. Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech: “Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? “Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?” And he in heavy speech: “Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle. “Going down the long ladder unguarded, “I fell against the buttress, “Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. “But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, “Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:“A man of no fortune, and with a name to come. “And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.” And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: “A second time? why? man of ill star, “Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? “Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever “For soothsay.” And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe. Venerandam, In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

Ezra Pound

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology,Heroes & Patriotism

Canto III

I sat on the Dogana’s steps For the gondolas cost too much, that year, And there were not “those girls”, there was one face, And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti”, And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini, And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been. Gods float in the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed. Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen. Panisks, and from the oak, dryas, And from the apple, mælid, Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices, A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake, And there are gods upon them, And in the water, the almond-white swimmers, The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple, As Poggio has remarked. Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars. My Cid rode up to Burgos, Up to the studded gate between two towers, Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out, Una niña de nueve años, To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers, Reading the writ, voce tinnula: That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz, On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered, “And here, Myo Cid, are the seals, The big seal and the writing.” And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid, With no hawks left there on their perches, And no clothes there in the presses, And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas, That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers, To get pay for his menie; Breaking his way to Valencia. Ignez de Castro murdered, and a wall Here stripped, here made to stand. Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone, Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall. Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”

Ezra Pound

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Canto IV

Palace in smoky light, Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones, ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows! The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare, Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light; Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving. Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees, Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate; Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows, A black cock crows in the sea-foam; And by the curved, carved foot of the couch, claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated Speaking in the low drone…: Ityn! Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn! And she went toward the window and cast her down, “All the while, the while, swallows crying: Ityn! “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.” “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?” “No other taste shall change this.” And she went toward the window, the slim white stone bar Making a double arch; Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone; Swung for a moment, and the wind out of Rhodez Caught in the full of her sleeve. . . . the swallows crying: ‘Tis. ‘Tis. ‘Ytis! Actæon… and a valley, The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees, The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top, Like a fish-scale roof, Like the church roof in Poictiers If it were gold. Beneath it, beneath it Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disc of sunlight Flaking the black, soft water; Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana, Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air, Shaking, air alight with the goddess fanning their hair in the dark, Lifting, lifting and waffing: Ivory dipping in silver, Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d Ivory dipping in silver, Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight. Then Actæon: Vidal, Vidal. It is old Vidal speaking, stumbling along in the wood, Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight, the pale hair of the goddess. The dogs leap on Actæon, “Hither, hither, Actæon,” Spotted stag of the wood; Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair, Thick like a wheat swath, Blaze, blaze in the sun, The dogs leap on Actæon. Stumbling, stumbling along in the wood, Muttering, muttering Ovid: “Pergusa… pool… pool… Gargaphia, “Pool… pool of Salmacis.” The empty armour shakes as the cygnet moves. Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil The liquid and rushing crystal beneath the knees of the gods. Ply over ply, thin glitter of water; Brook film bearing white petals. The pine at Takasago grows with the pine of Isé! The water whirls up the bright pale sand in the spring’s mouth “Behold the Tree of the Visages!” Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus. Ply over ply The shallow eddying fluid, beneath the knees of the gods. Torches melt in the glare set flame of the corner cook-stall, Blue agate casing the sky (as at Gourdon that time) the sputter of resin, Saffron sandal so petals the narrow foot: Hymenæus Io! Hymen, Io Hymenæe! Aurunculeia! One scarlet flower is cast on the blanch-white stone. And So-Gyoku, saying: “This wind, sire, is the king’s wind, This wind is wind of the palace, Shaking imperial water-jets.” And Hsiang, opening his collar: “This wind roars in the earth’s bag, it lays the water with rushes.” No wind is the king’s wind. Let every cow keep her calf. “This wind is held in gauze curtains…” No wind is the king’s… The camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs, Look down on Ecbatan of plotted streets, “Danaë! Danaë! What wind is the king’s?” Smoke hangs on the stream, The peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water, Sound drifts in the evening haze, The bark scrapes at the ford, Gilt rafters above black water, Three steps in an open field, Gray stone-posts leading… Père Henri Jacques would speak with the Sennin, on Rokku, Mount Rokku between the rock and the cedars, Polhonac, As Gyges on Thracian platter set the feast, Cabestan, Tereus, It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish, Vidal, or Ecbatan, upon the gilded tower in Ecbatan Lay the god’s bride, lay ever, waiting the golden rain. By Garonne. “Saave!” The Garonne is thick like paint, Procession,—“Et sa’ave, sa’ave, sa’ave Regina!”— Moves like a worm, in the crowd. Adige, thin film of images, Across the Adige, by Stefano, Madonna in hortulo, As Cavalcanti had seen her. The Centaur’s heel plants in the earth loam. And we sit here… there in the arena…

Ezra Pound

Love,Desire,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology,Heroes & Patriotism

Canto XVI

And before hell mouth; dry plain and two mountains; On the one mountain, a running form, and another In the turn of the hill; in hard steel The road like a slow screw’s thread, The angle almost imperceptible, so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise; And the running form, naked, Blake, Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs, Howling against the evil, his eyes rolling, Whirling like flaming cart-wheels, and his head held backward to gaze on the evil As he ran from it, to be hid by the steel mountain, And when he showed again from the north side; his eyes blazing toward hell mouth, His neck forward, and like him Peire Cardinal. And in the west mountain, Il Fiorentino, Seeing hell in his mirror, and lo Sordels Looking on it in his shield; And Augustine, gazing toward the invisible. And past them, the criminal lying in the blue lakes of acid, The road between the two hills, upward slowly, The flames patterned in lacquer, crimen est actio, The limbo of chopped ice and saw-dust, And I bathed myself with acid to free myself of the hell ticks, Scales, fallen louse eggs. Palux Laerna, the lake of bodies, aqua morta, of limbs fluid, and mingled, like fish heaped in a bin, and here an arm upward, clutching a fragment of marble, And the embryos, in flux, new inflow, submerging, Here an arm upward, trout, submerged by the eels; and from the bank, the stiff herbage the dry nobbled path, saw many known, and unknown, for an instant; submerging, The face gone, generation. Then light, air, under saplings, the blue banded lake under æther, an oasis, the stones, the calm field, the grass quiet, and passing the tree of the bough The grey stone posts, and the stair of gray stone, the passage clean-squared in granite: descending, and I through this, and into the earth, patet terra, entered the quiet air the new sky, the light as after a sun-set, and by their fountains, the heroes, Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello, and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities. The plain, distance, and in fount-pools the nymphs of that water rising, spreading their garlands, weaving their water reeds with the boughs, In the quiet, and now one man rose from his fountain and went off into the plain. Prone in that grass, in sleep; et j’entendis des voix:… wall . . . Strasbourg Galliffet led that triple charge. . . Prussians and he said [Plarr’s narration] it was for the honour of the army. And they called him a swashbuckler. I didn’t know what it was But I thought: This is pretty bloody damn fine. And my old nurse, he was a man nurse, and He killed a Prussian and he lay in the street there in front of our house for three days And he stank. . . . . . . Brother Percy, And our Brother Percy… old Admiral He was a middy in those days, And they came into Ragusa . . . . . . place those men went for the Silk War. . . . . And they saw a procession coming down through A cut in the hills, carrying something The six chaps in front carrying a long thing on their shoulders, And they thought it was a funeral, but the thing was wrapped up in scarlet, And he put off in the cutter, he was a middy in those days, To see what the natives were doing, And they got up to the six fellows in livery, And they looked at it, and I can still hear the old admiral, “Was it? it was Lord Byron Dead drunk, with the face of an A y n. . . . . . . . He pulled it out long, like that: the face of an a y n . . . . . . . . gel.” And because that son of a bitch, Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . . And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche… They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench dug through corpses With a lot of kids of sixteen, Howling and crying for their mamas, And he sent a chit back to his major: I can hold out for ten minutes With my sergeant and a machine-gun. And they rebuked him for levity. And Henri Gaudier went to it, and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture, And ole T.E.H. he went to it, With a lot of books from the library, London Library, and a shell buried ‘em in a dug-out, And the Library expressed its annoyance. And a bullet hit him on the elbow …gone through the fellow in front of him, And he read Kant in the Hospital, in Wimbledon, in the original, And the hospital staff didn’t like it. And Wyndham Lewis went to it, With a heavy bit of artillery, and the airmen came by with a mitrailleuse, And cleaned out most of his company, and a shell lit on his tin hut, While he was out in the privy, and he was all there was left of that outfit. Windeler went to it, and he was out in the Ægæan, And down in the hold of his ship pumping gas into a sausage, And the boatswain looked over the rail, down into amidships, and he said: Gees! look a’ the Kept’n, The Kept’n’s a-gettin’ ‘er up. And Ole Captain Baker went to it, with his legs full of rheumatics, So much so he couldn’t run, so he was six months in hospital, Observing the mentality of the patients. And Fletcher was 19 when he went to it, And his major went mad in the control pit, about midnight, and started throwing the ‘phone about And he had to keep him quiet till abut six in the morning, And direct that bunch of artillery. And Ernie Hemingway went to it, too much in a hurry, And they buried him for four days. Et ma foi, vous savez, tous les nerveux. Non, Y a une limite; les bêtes, les bêtes ne sont Pas faites pour ça, c’est peu de chose un cheval. Les hommes de 34 ans à quatre pattes qui criaient “maman.” Mais les costauds, La fin, là à Verdun, n’y avait que ces gros bonshommes Et y voyaient extrêmement clair. Qu’est-ce que ça vaut, les généraux, le lieutenant, on les pèse à un centigramme, n’y a rien que du bois, Notr’ capitaine, tout, tout ce qu’il y a de plus renfermé de vieux polytechnicien, mais solide, La tête solide. Là, vous savez, Tout, tout fonctionne, et les voleurs, tous les vices, Mais les rapaces, y avait trois dans notre compagnie, tous tués. Y sortaient fouiller un cadavre, pour rien, y n’serainet sortis pour rien que ça. Et les boches, tout ce que vous voulez, militarisme, et cætera, et cætera. Tout ça, mais, MAIS, l’français, i s’bat quand y a mangé. Mais ces pauvres types A la fin y s’attaquaient pour manger, Sans orders, les bêtes sauvages, on y fait Prisonniers; ceux qui parlaient français disaient: “Poo quah? Ma foi on attaquait pour manger.” C’est le corr-ggras, le corps gras, leurs trains marchaient trois kilomètres à l’heure, Et ça criait, ça grincait, on l’entendait à cinq kilomètres. (Ça qui finit la guerre.) Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000. I vous dit, bè, voui, tout sentait le pétrole. Mais, Non! je l’ai engueulé. Je lui ai dit: T’es un con! T’a raté la guerre. O voui! tous les homes de goût, y conviens, Tout ça en arrière. Mais un mec comme toi! C’t homme, un type comme ça! Ce qu’il aurait pu encaisser! Il était dans une fabrique. What, burying squad, terrassiers, avec leur tête en arrière, qui regardaient comme ça, On risquait la vie pour un coup de pelle, Faut que ça soit bein carré, exact… Dey vus a bolcheviki dere, und dey dease him: Looka vat youah Trotzsk is done, e iss madeh deh zhamefull beace!! “He iss madeh de zhamefull beace, iss he? “He is madeh de zhamevull beace? “A Brest-Litovsk, yess? Aint yuh herd? “He vinneh de vore. “De droobs iss released vrom de eastern vront, yess? “Un venn dey getts to deh vestern vront, iss it “How many getts dere? “And dose doat getts dere iss so full off revolutions “Venn deh vrench is come dhru, yess, “Dey say, “Vot?” Un de posch say: “Aint yeh heard? Say, ve got a rheffolution.” That’s the trick with a crowd, Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving. And all the time, there were people going Down there, over the river. There was a man there talking, To a thousand, just a short speech, and Then move ‘em on. And he said: Yes, these people, they are all right, they Can do everything, everything except act; And go an’ hear ‘em but when they are through Come to the bolsheviki… And when it broke, there was the crowd there, And the cossacks, just as always before, But one thing, the cossacks said: “Pojalouista.” And that got round in the crowd, And then a lieutenant of infantry Ordered ‘em to fire into the crowd, in the square at the end of the Nevsky, In front of the Moscow station, And they wouldn’t, And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing, And killed him, And a cossack rode out of his squad On the other side of the square And cut down the lieutenant of infantry And there was the revolution… as soon as they named it. And you can’t make ‘em, Nobody knew it was coming. They were all ready, the old gang, Guns on the top of the post-office and the palace, But none of the leaders knew it was coming. And there were some killed at the barracks, But that was between the troops. So we used to hear it at the opera That they wouldn’t be under Haig; and that the advance was beginning; That it was going to begin in a week.

Ezra Pound

Living,Death,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict,Heroes & Patriotism

Canto XXXVI

A Lady asks me I speak in season She seeks reason for an affect, wild often That is so proud he hath Love for a name Who denys it can hear the truth now Wherefore I speak to the present knowers Having no hope that low-hearted Can bring sight to such reason Be there not natural demonstration I have no will to try proof-bringing Or say where it hath birth What is its virtu and power Its being and every moving Or delight whereby ‘tis called “to love” Or if man can show it to sight. Where memory liveth, it takes its state Formed like a diafan from light on shade Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth Created, having a name sensate, Custom of the soul, will from the heart; Cometh from a seen form which being understood Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing, Descendeth not by quality but shineth out Himself his own effect unendingly Not in delight but in the being aware Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere. He is not vertu but cometh of that perfection Which is so postulate not by the reason But ‘tis felt, I say. Beyond salvation, holdeth his judging force Deeming intention to be reason’s peer and mate, Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend Often his power cometh on death in the end, Be it withstayed and so swinging counterweight. Not that it were natural opposite, but only Wry’d a bit from the perfect, Let no man say love cometh from chance Or hath not established lordship Holding his power even though Memory hath him no more. Cometh he to be when the will From overplus Twisteth out of natural measure, Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour Either to laugh or weep Contorting the face with fear resteth but a little Yet shall ye see of him That he is most often With folk who deserve him And his strange quality sets sighs to move Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame. Unskilled can not form his image, He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness, Neither turneth about to seek his delight Nor yet to see out proving Be it so great or so small. He draweth likeness and hue from like nature So making pleasure more certain in seeming Nor can stand hid in such nearness, Beautys be darts tho’ not savage Skilled from such fear a man follows Deserving spirit, that pierceth. Nor is he known from his face But taken in the white light that is allness Toucheth his aim Who heareth, seeth not form But is led by its emanation Being divided, set out from colour, Disjunct in mid darkness Grazeth the light, one moving by other, Being divided, divided from all falsity Worthy of trust From him alone mercy proceedeth. Go, song, surely thou mayest Whither it please thee For so art thou ornate that thy reasons Shall be praised from thy understanders, With others hast thou no will to make company. “Called thrones, balascio or topaze” Eriugina was not understood in his time “which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him” And they went looking for Manicheans And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugina “Authority comes from right reason, never the other way on” Hence the delay in condemning him Aquinas head down in a vacuum, Aristotle which way in a vacuum? Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu. Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana of a castle named Goito. “Five castles! “Five castles!” (king giv’ him five castles) “And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!” His Holiness has written a letter: “CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou…. ..way you treat your men is a scandal….” Dilectis miles familiaris…castra Montis Odorisii Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile… In partibus Thetis….vineland land tilled the land incult pratis nemoribus pascuis with legal jurisdiction his heirs of both sexes, …sold the damn lot six weeks later, Sordellus de Godio. Quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.

Ezra Pound

Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology

Canto XLV

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face, with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wallharpes et luz or where virgin receiveth message and halo projects from incision, with usura seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour with usura the line grows thick with usura is no clear demarcation and no man can find site for his dwelling. Stonecutter is kept from his tone weaver is kept from his loom WITH USURA wool comes not to market sheep bringeth no gain with usura Usura is a murrain, usura blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo came not by usura Duccio came not by usura nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usura nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted. Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis, Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit. Not by usura St. Trophime Not by usura Saint Hilaire, Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM They have brought whores for Eleusis Corpses are set to banquet at behest of usura. N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)

Ezra Pound

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology

Canto LXXXI

Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom Taishan is attended of loves under Cythera, before sunrise And he said: “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded catolithismo y muy poco reliHion.” and he said: “Yo creo que los reyes desparecen” (Kings will, I think, disappear) This was Padre José Elizondo in 1906 and in 1917 or about 1917 and Dolores said: “Come pan, niño,” eat bread, me lad Sargent had painted her before he descended (i.e. if he descended but in those days he did thumb sketches, impressions of the Velázquez in the Museo del Prado and books cost a peseta, brass candlesticks in proportion, hot wind came from the marshes and death-chill from the mountains. And later Bowers wrote: “but such hatred, I have never conceived such” and the London reds wouldn’t show up his friends (i.e. friends of Franco working in London) and in Alcázar forty years gone, they said: go back to the station to eat you can sleep here for a peseta” goat bells tinkled all night and the hostess grinned: Eso es luto, haw! mi marido es muerto (it is mourning, my husband is dead) when she gave me a paper to write on with a black border half an inch or more deep, say 5/8ths, of the locanda “We call all foreigners frenchies” and the egg broke in Cabranez’ pocket, thus making history. Basil says they beat drums for three days till all the drumheads were busted (simple village fiesta) and as for his life in the Canaries… Possum observed that the local portagoose folk dance was danced by the same dancers in divers localities in political welcome… the technique of demonstration Cole studied that (not G.D.H., Horace) “You will find” said old André Spire, that every man on that board (Crédit Agricole) has a brother-in-law “You the one, I the few” said John Adams speaking of fears in the abstract to his volatile friend Mr Jefferson. (To break the pentameter, that was the first heave) or as Jo Bard says: they never speak to each other, if it is baker and concierge visibly it is La Rouchefoucauld and de Maintenon audibly. “Te cavero le budella” “La corata a te” In less than a geological epoch said Henry Mencken “Some cook, some do not cook some things cannot be altered”’Iugx. . . . . ’emòn potí dwma aòn andra What counts is the cultural level, thank Benin for this table ex packing box “doan yu tell no one I made it” from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt “It’ll get you offn th’ groun” Light as the branch of Kuanon And at first disappointed with shoddy the bare ram-shackle quais, but then saw the high buggy wheels and was reconciled, George Santayana arriving in the port of Boston and kept to the end of his life that faint thethear of the Spaniard as grace quasi imperceptible as did Muss the v for u of Romagna and said the grief was a full act repeated for each new condoleress working up to a climax. and George Horace said he wd/ “get Beveridge” (Senator) Beveridge wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t write for the papers but George got him by campin’ in his hotel and assailin’ him at lunch breakfast an’ dinner three articles and my ole man went on hoein’ corn while George was a-tellin’ him, come across a vacant lot where you’d occasionally see a wild rabbit or mebbe only a loose one AOI! a leaf in the current at my grates no Althea______libretto______ Yet Ere the season died a-cold Borne upon a zephyr’s shoulder I rose through the aureate sky Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest, Has he tempered the viol’s wood To enforce both the grave and the acute? Has he curved us the bowl of the lute? Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest Hast ’ou fashioned so airy a mood To draw up leaf from the root? Hast ’ou found a cloud so light As seemed neither mist nor shade? Then resolve me, tell me aright If Waller sang or Dowland played Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne And for 180 years almost nothing. Ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent, whether of the spirit or hypostasis, but what the blindfold hides or at carneval nor any pair showed anger Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes, colour, diastasis, careless or unaware it had not the whole tent’s room nor was place for the full EidwV interpass, penetrate casting but shade beyond the other lights sky’s clear night’s sea green of the mountain pool shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space. What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance. “Master thyself, then others shall thee beare” Pull down thy vanity Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun, Half black half white Nor knowst’ou wing from tail Pull down thy vanity How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity, Pull down thy vanity, Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Ezra Pound

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology

from Canto CXV

The scientists are in terror and the European mind stops Wyndham Lewis chose blindness rather than have his mind stop. Night under wind mid garofani, the petals are almost still Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona, When one’s friends hate each other how can there be peace in the world? Their asperities diverted me in my green time. A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change Time, space, neither life nor death is the answer. And of man seeking good, doing evil. In meiner Heimat where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Ezra Pound

Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Sciences,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Contributions to a Rudimentary Concept of Nation

On the volatile nights of a winter nature corroborates with magnanimity a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business; thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful. In the weighty choreographies of a summer nature authorizes already with suspicion a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he finger-counts the casualties, he commits an infraction he slides his hands into his pockets, he avows and commits; thus analysis has shown that The Cuban is inspired. Let’s attend the improbable territory where with pasty mouths a Cuban and The Cuban engage in virile conversation we will learn there by what voyage, by what strange condition by what exchange we fall prey to so much ingenuity.

Omar Pérez

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

The Metaphysical Countrygirl

You, functional space variants in voltage, the only light Transitory effect of Love several different lights Sustain Sustain them you sustain them.

Omar Pérez

Love,Desire,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

Congregations

One fisherman alongside the other one seagull alongside the other seagulls over the fishermen.

Omar Pérez

Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

The Progression

When one isn’t enough, you need two when two aren’t enough, you need four with four the progression begins, moving toward a number that schoolteachers will call absurd. Question: How many men do you need to put up a house? Answer: You need absurd men when one isn’t enough and two can’t do the work of One. And how much money should we give these men to compensate them? You need absurd coins when one coin sliced in half and handed out isn’t enough. And how many words do you need to transform them? Absurd and absurd and absurd words when silence isn’t enough. This is what they call progression: Absurd men aren’t enough for putting up the house, absurd coins don’t make them happy absurd words can’t dissuade them.

Omar Pérez

Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Jobs & Working,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Love Song

I lie here thinking of you:— the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world— you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!

William Carlos Williams

Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Unrequited Love,Nature,Fall,Trees & Flowers

To the New Year

With what stillness at last you appear in the valley your first sunlight reaching down to touch the tips of a few high leaves that do not stir as though they had not noticed and did not know you at all then the voice of a dove calls from far away in itself to the hush of the morning so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it this is where we have come with our age our knowledge such as it is and our hopes such as they are invisible before us untouched and still possible

W. S. Merwin

Nature,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,New Year

Picasso

How can we believe he did it— every day—for all those years?We remember how the musicians gathered for him—and the prostitutesarranged themselves the way he wanted— and even the helmeted monkeyswith their little toy car cerebella— posed—and the fish on the plate—remained after he ate the fish— Bones—What do we do with thislife?—except announce: Joy. Joy. Joy—from the lead—to the oil—to the stretch of bright canvas—stretched—to the end of it all.

Tim Nolan

Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 8 a.m. --Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant’s old shirt. No, she insists, it’s an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she’s never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she’d gone to Iowa. It’s Iowa. --I didn’t know she was coming today. --She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then. --Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon. There’s an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post. --I don’t like you. I don’t like them. I don’t like them either. And Susan? She laughs. --Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter. --Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get “lucky.” --When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids? --Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones. posted by Susan at 6:46 AM 0 comments

Susan M. Schultz

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Before

The butterfly was there before any human art was made. Before cathedrals rose in prayer, the butterfly was there. Before pyramids pierced the air or Great Wall stones were laid, the butterfly was there. Before any human, art was made.

Avis Harley

Sophie

It’s like I thought it would be. Absolute silence. Just me and my poem. But, as I stand onstage preparing to start, I realize the audience is quiet because they want to hear me. Silence isn’t scary. It’s like Mr. Carey said, silence is my chance. And so I speak, slowly and clearly, and I don’t see the faces in front of me. I see the images of my poem, and I think only of what I’m saying and how much it means to me. My voice grows stronger and I don’t have to struggle to remember the words. I know them because I wrote them.

Steven Herrick

Night Luck

Night is deep in a dark box deep in a cushion of down nestled in tissue tied with ribbons Night is asleep in the dark Night wakes with curious paws wakes in a furry fog wrestles the tissue nibbles the ribbons Night is awake in the dark Night tumbles in velvet directions tumbles along to your bed sniffing your wishes wagging your worries Night is a friend in the dark

Heidi Mordhorst

Defrosting the Freezer

One container of spaghetti sauce Grandma made before she died. Two old pieces of wedding cake you couldn’t pay me to eat. Three snowballs from last winter slightly deformed, no longer fluffy. Four small flounder from the time Grandpa took me deep-sea fishing. Everything coated with a thick white layer of sadness.

Ralph Fletcher

Blueprints?

Will my ears grow long as Grandpa's? What makes us look like kin? Tell me where'd I get long eyelashes and where'd I get my chin? Where'd I get my ice cream sweet tooth and this nose that wiggles when I talk? Where's I get my dizzy daydreams and my foot-rolling, side-step walk? Did I inherit my sense of humor and these crooked, ugly toes? What if I balloon like Uncle Harry and have to shave my nose? How long after I start growing until I start to shrink? Am I going to lose my teeth, some day? My hair? My mind? Do you think I'll be tall or short or thin or bursting at the seams? Am I naturally this crazy? Is it something in my genes? I'm more than who I am, I'm also who I'm from. It's a scary speculation-- Who will I become?

Sara Holbrook

Are We There Yet?

My foot’s asleep, my seat is sore. You said “another hour” before. You say “an hour” every time. Your hours are much longer than mine.

David L. Harrison

April Gale

Oh, how the wind howls, howls the blossoms from the boughs; Oh how the boughs bend, bend and willow to the ground; Oh, how the ground wells, wells with blossoms blown to hills; Oh, how the hills sound, sound a whisper pink and loud.

Heidi Mordhorst

Autumn's Way

In their yellow-most goings, leaves of maple ride breezes to the ground. You can hear their sound each autumn afternoon as the crisp air cuts through the trees and hurries us along the golden sidewalks home.

Charles Ghigna

Remaking a Neglected Orchard

It was a good idea, cutting awaythe vines and ivy, trimming back the chest-high thicket lazy years had let grow here. Though it wasn’t for lackof love for the trees, I’d like to point out. Years love trees in a way we can’t imagine. They just don’t use the fruit like us; they want instead the slantof sun through narrow branches, the buckshot of rain on these old cherries. And we, now that I think on it, want those things too, we just always and desperatelywant the sugar of the fruit, the best we’ll get from this irascible land: sweetness we can gather for years, new stains staining the stains on our hands.

Nathaniel Perry

Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Gardening,Nature,Trees & Flowers

Brief Eden

For part of one strange year we lived in a small house at the edge of a wood. No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped overbriefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn to our leafy quiet and our brook and because, as we later learned, the place lay beneath a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaksor crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. By the time we’d watched them wing north in spring, then make an anxious autumn return, we too had pulled it together and we too moved into what seemed to be our lives.

Lois Beebe Hayna

Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Home Life,Men & Women,Nature,Animals

The Duck and the Kangaroo

I Said the Duck to the Kangaroo, ‘Good gracious! how you hop! Over the fields and the water too, As if you never would stop! My life is a bore in this nasty pond, And I long to go out in the world beyond! I wish I could hop like you!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. II ‘Please give me a ride on your back!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. ‘I would sit quite still, and say nothing but “Quack,” The whole of the long day through! And we’d go to the Dee, and the Jelly Bo Lee, Over the land, and over the sea;— Please take me a ride! O do!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. III Said the Kangaroo to the Duck, ‘This requires some little reflection; Perhaps on the whole it might bring me luck, And there seems but one objection, Which is, if you’ll let me speak so bold, Your feet are unpleasantly wet and cold, And would probably give me the roo- Matiz!’ said the Kangaroo. IV Said the Duck, ‘As I sate on the rocks, I have thought over that completely, And I bought four pairs of worsted socks Which fit my web-feet neatly. And to keep out the cold I’ve bought a cloak, And every day a cigar I’ll smoke, All to follow my own dear true Love of a Kangaroo!’ V Said the Kangaroo, ‘I’m ready! All in the moonlight pale; But to balance me well, dear Duck, sit steady! And quite at the end of my tail!’ So away they went with a hop and a bound, And they hopped the whole world three times round; And who so happy,—O who, As the Duck and the Kangaroo?.

Edward Lear

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Pets,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

The Jumblies

I They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea! And when the Sieve turned round and round, And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’ They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big, But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig! In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. II They sailed away in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they sailed so fast, With only a beautiful pea-green veil Tied with a riband by way of a sail, To a small tobacco-pipe mast; And every one said, who saw them go, ‘O won’t they be soon upset, you know! For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long, And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong In a Sieve to sail so fast!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. III The water it soon came in, it did, The water it soon came in; So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet In a pinky paper all folded neat, And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery-jar, And each of them said, ‘How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong, While round in our Sieve we spin!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. IV And all night long they sailed away; And when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song To the echoing sound of a coppery gong, In the shade of the mountains brown. ‘O Timballo! How happy we are, When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar, And all night long in the moonlight pale, We sail away with a pea-green sail, In the shade of the mountains brown!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. V They sailed to the Western Sea, they did, To a land all covered with trees, And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart, And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart, And a hive of silvery Bees. And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws, And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws, And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree, And no end of Stilton Cheese. Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve. VI And in twenty years they all came back, In twenty years or more, And every one said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!’ For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone, And the hills of the Chankly Bore; And they drank their health, and gave them a feast Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast; And everyone said, ‘If we only live, We too will go to sea in a Sieve,— To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’ Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Edward Lear

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Earth Cafeteria

Mudman in earth cafeteria, I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear. I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine. “White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.” (The other white meat is pork, triple X.) Rice people vs. bread people. White bread vs. wheat bread. White rice vs. brown rice. Manhattan vs. New England. Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob. “What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”* To eat stinky food is a sign of savagery, humility, identification with the earth. “It was believed that after cleaning, tripe still contained ten percent excrement which was therefore eaten with the rest of the meal.”** Today I’ll eat Colby cheese. Tomorrow I’ll eat sparrows. Chew bones, suck fat, bite heads off, gnaw on a broken wing. Anise-flavored beef soup smells like sweat. A large sweaty head bent over a large bowl of sweat soup. A Pekinese is ideal, will feed six, but an unscrupulous butcher will fudge a German sheperd, chopping it up to look like a Pekinese. Toothless man sucking a pureed porterhouse steak with a straw. Parboiled placenta. To skewer and burn meat is barbaric. To boil, requiring a vessel, is a step up. To microwave. People who eat phalli, hot dogs, kielbasas vs. people who eat balls. To eat with a three-pronged spear and a knife. To eat with two wooden sticks. To eat with the hands. Boiling vs. broiling. To snack on a tub of roasted grasshoppers at the movies. *Lin Yutang **Mikhail Bakhtin

Linh Dinh

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Conversion Table

A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower. A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline. A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot. “For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ll marry an outsider.” Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy. Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia. They like to kiss outside and piss inside. We like to kiss inside and piss outside. A mosquito has a mouth but no asshole. After three drops of blood, he falls asleep. He only gets up to bite another mosquito. He sucks and he sucks. Inside this balloon are ten thousand mosquitoes. In my left fist is a fossil of the first butterfly. In my right fist is a theory of why blood trickles down men’s legs. A man gains a drop of blood per day from eating. Each night, he gets up to slash himself Across the face and wrist. He must be bitten by ten thousand mosquitoes. He sucks and he sucks. Where would all that blood go otherwise? Once a month, a woman drops a teacup on the floor, A fine teacup with bones inside it. Vietnamese and Germans now speak the same language. Prussians and Bavarians cannot understand each other.

Linh Dinh

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

The Mind

The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.

Linh Dinh

Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys

[asking]

there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar. this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.

Barbara Jane Reyes

Living,Parenthood,The Body,Relationships,Home Life,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

[galleon prayer]

pilipinas to petatlán she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots spilling snakes’ blood virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree one day’s walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman’s dinghy dimensions washes ashore virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines virgin of ocean voyage peril she will herself born virgin of mud brick ruins; virgin of sandstorm echoes she is saint of commonplaces; saint of badlands virgin of jade, camphor, porcelain; virgin of barter for ghosts penitents, earthdivers of forgotten names praying skyward virgin of scars blossomed from open veins of fire she slips across the pacific’s rivers of pearldiving children virgin of copper coins she is bloodletting words, painting unlikeness virgin of anachronism children stained with berries and rust, their skeletons bend, arrow-tipped; smoke blurs eyes’ edges virgin of mineral depletion; virgin of mercury at other altitudes she remembers to breathe; a monument scraping cloud virgin of tin deposits extracted from mountains these are not divinations; there is goldleaf about her skin virgin of naming and renaming places in between

Barbara Jane Reyes

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

[the siren's story]

she wasn’t born in this city. she found its basalt greenstone chunks, seafloor forced skyward. it found her hands through mist and odors whirring pigeons’ clubfeet fluttering, toothless men’s paper sacks spilling elixirs, roots, shark fin tonics. heat swelling sewer steam rising, side street chess match maneuvers mystifying. it sought her whirlwind hair, grown seavine thick. songbird, adrift, nestling neon, she crafted snares for moths, butterflies, treasure hunting children tracing ideographs: sky, sun. patina spires, smirking dragon boys humming silk lanterns, flight of phoenixes through fish vendors’ stalls, corrugated plastic blackbird perches, jade-ringed gardens, needle-tipped shanties. it bulleted trees, lighting hash pipes; herbalists’ storefront canopies concealing leathered men, versed in languages of whiskered ghosts. it invented her dialect carving tongue: salt fables, yellow caution tape palaces. she lost herself in this city. it lured her, drank her air; honey voice’s precision, hybrid beyond memory. songbird, adrift, this city’s misplaced siren. migration patterns subterranean streams swallowed whole.

Barbara Jane Reyes

Living,Coming of Age,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

dear love,

you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire. new, sexy diagnoses have been added to the lexicon on your behalf (“charlie don’t surf,” has also been added to the lexicon on your behalf). in this home that is not our home, we have mutually exiled each other. i walk down your street in the rain, and i do not call you. i walk in the opposite direction of where i know to find you. that we do not speak is louder than bombs. there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match. let’s see this prayer ignite to high heaven.

Barbara Jane Reyes

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Desire,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Flowers

From golden showers of the ancient skies, On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars, You once unfastened giant calyxes For the young earth still innocent of scars: Young gladioli with the necks of swans, Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream, Vermilion as the modesty of dawns Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim; The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright, And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose, Hérodiade blooming in the garden light, She that from wild and radiant blood arose! And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends Through the blue incense of horizons, palely Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends! Hosanna on the lute and in the censers, Lady, and of our purgatorial groves! Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer, Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love! Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom, Formed calyxes balancing the future flask, Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam For the weary poet withering on the husk.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Desire,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology

Hérodiade

I. ANCIENT OVERTURE OF HÉRODIADE The Nurse (Incantation) Abolished, and her frightful wing in the tears Of the basin, abolished, that mirrors forth our fears, The naked golds lashing the crimson space, An Aurora—heraldic plumage—has chosen to embrace Our cinerary tower of sacrifice, Heavy tomb that a songbird has fled, lone caprice Of a dawn vainly decked out in ebony plumes… Ah, mansion this sad, fallen country assumes! No splashing! the gloomy water, standing still, No longer visited by snowy quill Or fabled swan, reflects the bereaving Of autumn extinguished by its own unleaving, Of the swan when amidst the cold white tomb Of its feathers, it buried its head, undone By the pure diamond of a star, but one Of long ago, which never even shone. Crime! torture! ancient dawn! bright pyre! Empurpled sky, complicit in the mire, And stained-glass windows opening red on carnage. The strange chamber, framed in all the baggage Of a warlike age, its goldwork dull and faint, Has yesteryear’s snows instead of its ancient tint; And its pearl-gray tapestry, useless creases With the buried eyes of prophetesses Offering Magi withered fingers. One, With floral past enwoven on my gown Bleached in an ivory chest and with a sky Bestrewn with birds amidst the embroidery Of tarnished silver, seems a phantom risen, An aroma, roses, rising from the hidden Couch, now void, the snuffed-out candle shrouds, An aroma, over the sachet, of frozen golds, A drift of flowers unfaithful to the moon (Though the taper’s quenched, petals still fall from one), Flowers whose long regrets and stems appear Drenched in a lonely vase to languish there… An Aurora dragged her wings in the basin’s tears! Magical shadow with symbolic powers! A voice from the distant past, an evocation, Is it not mine prepared for incantation? In the yellow folds of thought, still unexhumed, Lingering, and like an antique cloth perfumed, Spread on a pile of monstrances grown cold, Through ancient hollows and through stiffened folds Pierced in the rhythm of the pure lace shroud Through which the old veiled brightness is allowed To mount, in desperation, shall arise (But oh, the distance hidden in those cries!) The old veiled brightness of a strange gilt-silver, Of the languishing voice, estranged and unfamiliar: Will it scatter its gold in an ultimate splendor, And, in the hour of its agony, render Itself as the anthem for psalms of petition? For all are alike in being brought to perdition By the power of old silence and deepening gloom, Fated, monotonous, vanquished, undone, Like the sluggish waters of an ancient pond. Sometimes she sang an incoherent song. Lamentable sign! the bed of vellum sheets, Useless and closed–not linen!—vainly waits, Bereft now of the cherished grammary That spelled the figured folds of reverie, The silken tent that harbored memory, The fragrance of sleeping hair. Were these its treasure? Cold child, she held within her subtle pleasure, Shivering with flowers in her walks at dawn, Or when the pomegranate’s flesh is torn By wicked night! Alone, the crescent moon On the iron clockface is a pendulum Suspending Lucifer: the clepsydra pours Dark drops in grief upon the stricken hours As, wounded, each one wanders a dim shade On undeciphered paths without a guide! All this the king knows not, whose salary Has fed so long this agèd breast now dry. Her father knows it no more than the cruel Glacier mirroring his arms of steel, When sprawled on a pile of corpses without coffins Smelling obscurely of resin, he deafens With dark silver trumpets the ancient pines! Will he ever come back from the Cisalpines? Soon enough! for all is bad dream and foreboding! On the fingernail raised in the stained glass, according To the memory of the trumpets, the old sky burns, And to an envious candle it turns A finger. And soon, when the sad sun sinks, It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks! No sunset, but the red awakening Of the last day concluding everything Struggles so sadly that time disappears, The redness of apocalypse, whose tears Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

Stéphane Mallarmé

Living,Coming of Age,Health & Illness,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Men & Women,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire

The buried temple empties through its bowels, Sepulchral sewer spewing mud and rubies, Abominably some idol of Anubis, Its muzzle all aflame with savage howls. Or if the recent gas the wick befouls That bears so many insults, it illumines In haggard outline an immortal pubis Flying along the streetlights on its prowls. What wreaths dried out in cities without prayer Of night could bless like that which settles down Vainly against the marble of Baudelaire In the fluttering veil that girds her absence round, A tutelary poison, his own Wraith, We breathe in always though it bring us death.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Pipe

Yesterday I found my pipe while pondering a long evening of work, of fine winter work. Thrown aside were my cigarettes, with all the childish joys of summer, into the past which the leaves shining blue in the sun, the muslins, illuminate, and taken up once again was the grave pipe of a serious man who wants to smoke for a long while without being disturbed, so as better to work: but I was not prepared for the surprise that this abandoned object had in store for me; for hardly had I drawn the first puff when I forgot the grand books I was planning to write, and, amazed, moved to a feeling of tenderness, I breathed in the air of the previous winter which was now coming back to me. I had not been in contact with my faithful sweetheart since returning to France, and now all of London, London as I had lived it a year ago entirely alone, appeared before my eyes: first the dear fogs that muffle one’s brains and have an odor of their own there when they penetrate beneath the casements. My tobacco had the scent of a somber room with leather furniture sprinkled by coal dust, on which the thin black cat would curl and stretch; the big fires! and the maid with red arms pouring coals, and the noise of those coals falling from the sheet-iron bucket into the iron scuttle in the morning—when the postman gave the solemn double knock that kept me alive! Once again I saw through the windows those sickly trees of the deserted square—I saw the open sea, crossed so often that winter, shivering on the deck of the steamer wet with drizzle and blackened from the fumes—with my poor wandering beloved, decked out in traveller’s clothes, a long dress, dull as the dust of the roads, a coat clinging damply to her cold shoulders, one of those straw hats with no feather and hardly any ribbons that wealthy ladies throw away upon arrival, mangled as they are by the sea, and that poor loved ones refurbish for many another season. Around her neck was wound the terrible handkerchief that one waves when saying goodbye forever.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Heartache & Loss,Activities,Indoor Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Men & Women

The Ragpickers' Wine

In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls,Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls,But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams;He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws,Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause;Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy,He is drunken of his splendid qualities.Yes, these people, plagued by household cares,Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years,Each bent double by the junk he carries,The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris,—They come back, perfumed with the smell of staleWine-barrels, followed by old comrades, paleFrom war, mustaches like limp flags, to marchWith banners, flowers, through the triumphal archErected for them, by some magic touch!And in the dazzling, deafening debauchOf bugles, sunlight, of huzzas and drum,Bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home!Even so, wine pours its gold to frivolousHumanity, a shining Pactolus;Then through man's throat of high exploits it singsAnd by its gifts reigns like authentic kings.To lull these wretches' sloth and drown the hateOf all who mutely die, compassionate,God has created sleep's oblivion;Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.

Charles Baudelaire

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Destruction

At my side the Demon writhes forever,Swimming around me like impalpable air;As I breathe, he burns my lungs like feverAnd fills me with an eternal guilty desire.Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,Apearing in woman's most seductive forms,And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms.He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,Panting and broken with fatigue intoThe wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,And into my bewildered eyes he throwsVisions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,And all Destruction's bloody retinue.

Charles Baudelaire

Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure,The Body,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Table and the Chair

ISaid the Table to the Chair,'You can hardly be aware,'How I suffer from the heat,'And from chilblains on my feet!'If we took a little walk,'We might have a little talk!'Pray let us take the air!'Said the Table to the Chair.IISaid the Chair unto the Table,'Now you know we are not able!'How foolishly you talk,'When you know we cannot walk!'Said the Table, with a sigh,'It can do no harm to try,'I've as many legs as you,'Why can't we walk on two?'IIISo they both went slowly down,And walked about the townWith a cheerful bumpy sound,As they toddled round and round.And everybody cried,As they hastened to their side,'See! the Table and the Chair'Have come out to take the air!'IVBut in going down an alley,To a castle in a valley,They completely lost their way,And wandered all the day,Till, to see them safely back,They paid a Ducky-quack,And a Beetle, and a Mouse,Who took them to their house.VThen they whispered to each other,'O delightful little brother!'What a lovely walk we've taken!'Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!'So the Ducky, and the leetleBrowny-Mousy and the BeetleDined, and danced upon their headsTill they toddled to their beds.

Edward Lear

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Wish

Tune yr sandwich to the key of C Make biscuits in kitchen B Miss Scarlet with her lead pipe Waits behind the cupboard door Clubs one from the other limp Only to begin again innocent & nothing to do but gather into Legion gather into constellation Coming along then a spider its web Holds the walls together holds the floor Up gathers toward a central point Mean & distribution derivation To insert a thumb & see what sticks Past the earth’s crust cirrus And acidic enough to spoon fork but Chew & eat & swallow digesting the fact That nine wonders hope the clouds have Answers hope the clouds have

Bruce Covey

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics,Popular Culture

Self Help

A chicken soup for the rainbow lover’s soul. A chicken soup for the lover of chicken soup. A carnage of birds, a devastation. Chicken soup for the dried-up garden— It’s been a lousy summer sucking us dry. Chicken soup for the grocery list. Chicken soup for unwanted potatoes. Chicken soup for extinct animals. In the west, the sun sets upon chicken soup. With or without noodles or rice or barley, Or vegetables—canned or otherwise— Carrots and celery or egg drop chicken soup— Chicken eggs, of course—or the alphabet Or chili sauce. Chicken soup for chili lovers, For the spicy soul. Chicken butchered & boiled specifically for your cold. A chicken soup for the cold soul, A chicken soup for the sole of your shoe. A chicken soup for decision making: Does she love me? Or love me not? Knots tied with chicken soup. Chicken soup tied and sold in knots. 38 ways to tie your soup, to be tied. Chicken soup for the protection of others. A prayer to chicken soup, may it bring me A winning lottery ticket. Chicken soup For recovering alcoholics who still Need hydration. A hydrangea’s Chicken soup—to be loved like no other. A chicken soup for Barry Bonds— May he break Hank Aaron’s record. Stick a pin in the chicken soup & bet On its opponent. 30-Love. Match point. A chicken soup for winners. A chicken soup for losers. Chicken soup for those who tie or draw. The 60-plus occupations of soup. Chicken for Sue, born in the year Of the snake. The snake that ate An alligator and died. They both died. A chicken soup for the one who is eaten. A chicken soup for the one who eats Things other than chicken soup. Transcending the bowl. A meta-bowl Chicken soup for the transcended bowl. Chicken soup for the transcending soup. Chicken soup for the Marxist, steering Away from values associated with heirarchies. Chicken soup for the mud wrestler, The roller derby queen. Chicken soup For dairy queen, for the queen of hearts, For Lady Di and the paparazzi, For clean and dirty kings and queens. For kiwis with wings, for the royal Food pyramid. Chicken soup in January, it’s so nice To slip upon the sliding ice.

Bruce Covey

Living,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture

Flat: Sentences from the Prefaces of Fourteen Science Books

1. Mary-Frances applied continual pressure on me to start the job and helped in recording and editing. 2. Thanks to Sandra for her heroic typing, although this need not be taken to indicate her agreement with various points. 3. Peter provided information about the notorious perpetual pills. 4. As someone who gloried in seeing dogma overturned, he would have delighted in the irony of seeing arguments for the reverse. 5. And without their willingness to take on the chore of responding to our whims and fancies over a 3-year period, this book would have fallen short of its goals. 6. The production of this tome would have been unthinkable without the marvelous electronic tools that are now widely available. 7. However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self- contained fashion, so the serious student may skip Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory. 8. The late abbess of Shasta Abbey proved that looking through different windows into the same room is not a metaphor. 9. Nick, who is writing a book on oxygen, gave much appreciated data concerning that element. 10. The filmstrip format employed in Chapter 10 originated with Elizabeth. 11. I have been very fortunate in being able to use such penetrating minds. 12. In recent months, I have often felt like a small child in a sweet shop as astronomers all round the world have sent me the most mouthwatering new data. 13. Suffice it at this point to observe that I am not just talking about wallpaper patterns on shirts and dresses, although many of these patterns do turn out to have interesting properties. 14. I do not expect that many readers will want to be masochistic enough to want to read the book in order from cover to cover.

Bruce Covey

Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Language & Linguistics,Reading & Books,Sciences

Body & Isn't

I have a hard time making my mind take place. Every input adjusts the chemistry—water, peppermint stick, analogue. Kisses are circles. With eyes closed, every taste buds almond orange. Ceiling defines the segment; door, the vector. Exits & entrances. My location’s ribcage is beneath the changing spectrum’s breast. Heft of a wet peony, white & pink, drips its honey south. Conducted back, your body accelerates—biology of a taxi ride. Kept kempt, migraines at bay, tidy nails, & sneezes away. Sex through collisions—bridges jumped & limbs tangled. Or the chromatic staff arranging the spheres’ accidental spills. Frets & intonations strung across a tempered series of knots, Strung through the loops of our virtual displacement. But it isn’t wings or hooks or hooves or horns or see-through or white. Whether afloat in a boat or aloft in a plane. The way maps affect time. For a second I think I feel the fleeting texture of your skin. Lumbar & sacral nerves descend to exits beyond the end of the cord. Keep the blood in at all costs, even when the wind crackles its cells. The coming of electricity, half next time & half this: My five. My unending ache at the absence of you.

Bruce Covey

Living,The Body,The Mind,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated

Want

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove, three cords of ash, an axe; I want a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars: oats, coriander, thick green oil; I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders, linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt; she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl, steam rising from rice. She wants goats, chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want wind from the river freshening cleared rooms. She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies. I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s tenderness. Touch ancient as the river. I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox. She’s in her city, meeting her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together. We’ve kissed all weekend; we want to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Joan Larkin

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

Missing Carnival

O Venlo, Venlo, stedje van pleseer. This time her body made him think of countryside, some figure from his childhood, sun on scythe, wind blowing shadows across the shining barley, the milk-pail dented from use, the smell of leaf-mulch and leather in the tack room. Soon she’d take bus and ferry from London to Belfast, but first the fire in her bed-sit. Her fingers traveled too, down the raised purple scars along his vertebrae, the flannel sheets between her thighs, his hair trailing along her abdomen, the quill of a feather poking through seams of the comforter, the comforter itself. Those scars—he’d lied to her, his time in Nicaragua, thugs cut him coming from the fields. The bloodier fight was with his brother, slicing tines of a pitchfork plucked up along the flooded Maas. Everything reduced to trinket and anecdote, the beer and facepaint of carnival, street-dance and tuba, beyond the muddy English roundabouts, the brown and white waves, yellow lamps along Dutch highways, his work at the union office pinned beneath a glass globe paperweight—shaken it showered silver snow over the wide straw hat, red and green plow, the slouching body, a campesino from days before Somoza fell. He wondered if she were any better, smuggling French social theory into Ulster, encounter groups in the rec-centers of tower-block basements. She’d just gotten the news: her last lover died in a fire along the side of the highway, body broken in seven places, silver chrome, pearl and gold gas tank scorched, his bike crumpled beneath the husk of an overturned van. There wasn’t much to talk about. Afterwards she lay with her back to him and he sang her carnival songs in a language she didn’t speak, O Venlo, stedje vanpleseer. He thought of himself as the sun, kissing her neck at the hairline, turning grey cobblestones of the town-square silver, marshaling parades.

John Hennessy

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Shaved Head

Forget contingencies from weather and wind, my Helen’s head was shaved, the shortest bit of stubble growing in. With darkened arching black eye-brows, Betty-Blue mouth penciled red, jet patent-leather trench and high-heeled boots, she seemed more mannequin for Fashion Ave.’s penitent spread than enemy to brass at Camp LeJeune. Simply and grudgingly put, her talk was action. Invincible in Bell- Atlantic block and tack, she converted non-coms and saved CO’s, harped flint and skinned the chair of military courts through well-pitched cheek, prompt dispatch from the War Resister’s League. She looked good even on a bicycle, hemming left through traffic on Fourteenth Street, locking up on Lafayette or Grand. She doused for me to celebrate—marched right through human waste and Bowery puddles, stretched her legs over the last old-fashioned hobos up to East Second Street. Those ancient days, our vestibule was manned by crack-dealing Stan, a concierge of wit and improv, half his face scored by orange scars from hydrofluoric burns. He kept the place safe. But I had gone, cleared out behind a gang of kids from Bronxville high on catnip wins, shell-game victims. Left Stan my toaster, shelves, a wire bird-cage, and, for once, nothing to say. Except to ask if he could touch her skull. Even now it makes no sense. Her precedents I knew lurched out of focus: photos from France after the Vichy fell, Jeannes and Sylvianes who’d made Nazi moll; those Belfast girls last-ditched by soldier boys or peelers; two- toned Bergen-Belsen, bald sister to Fort Santiago. Then Squeaky Fromm, the other Manson moms, at Charlie’s trial. Extremes of Joan of Arc, or even Buddhist nuns. Hated, chastened— or chaste, at least. Not what you’d run (I ran) your fingers satisfied across, the stubble surprising, soft as mink or fox, and arch your back, as I did once she found me uptown, say yes I give again when she went down— and faster now, quick as the television dropped after dishes to the curb—or slipped gradually up, the seconds separating as slowly as but more exquisitely than ticks off expensive fifty-minute hours— and some community service—all gone, and just as easily forgotten the raft of former friends I’d cursed and floated off the island. Shaved head, her slender neck, dark shoulders—that was half— or less—her most convincing argument.

John Hennessy

Living,The Body

Mysterious Neighbors

Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. Some share eggs, some share expertise, and some won’t even wave. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign. Strange to think they’re in the air like lead bees with a fatal sting. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy, came back. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool. His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Checking a trap.

Connie Wanek

Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life,War & Conflict

Dead Man

Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night. —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We spend our lives trying to grasp the premise. William Blake is not, for instance, William Blake, but rather a 19th century accountant from Cleveland on the lam for murder & the theft of a horse. In the closing scene, he is going to die, & so is Nobody, his half-Blackfoot, half-Blood guide. Sure, this is a Western, a morality tale about a destiny made manifest through the voice of a gun & a hero whose mythic flight from innocence destroys him. But we all come to the end of the line soon enough. The obvious just seems wiser when Nobody says it. Time, it turns out, is the most common noun in the English language, as if by constant invocation, we could keep it at bay. Yesterday, I sat in another state on a large rubber ball in my brother’s basement bouncing my newborn nephew in my arms. His mother, on the phone with a friend, asks what we should fear more, the hobo spider or the poison that kills it. I want to whisper into his ear something that feels like knowledge: Once upon a time, there was nothing& one day, there will be nothing again. This is the faraway place to which his tiny weight calls me. If he could understand the words. I think, he would know what I mean, having only just sprung himself from that fine sea. Sometimes we coo to soothe him: Don’t cry, Little Bird. I know, I know. But only the roar of the vacuum finally calms him, for nothing sounds as much like the lost world of the womb as the motors of our machines. The root of travel means torture, having passed from Medieval Latin into Old French. As the action opens, Johnny Depp, shot in black & white, is already rocking into night on a train. And soon, he will begin his dying. This is not to say that the inky band fanning across the morning blue of a kestrel’s tail feathers has no meaning, or the first fingers of rust coming into bloom on the green enameled chassis of a Corona typewriter left in the rain. Direct observation, the naturalist Niko Tinbergen assures us, is the only real thing. Perhaps this is what I should tell him. Or that this moment, too, is a part of some migration. Every snow bunting composes its own song, & a careful watcher can tell one kittiwake from its neighbor by the little dots on the tips of its wings. The most used verb is also the most humble— merely to be. Nobody can teach to William Blake the auguries of William Blake. We are, instead, our own vatic visions, bumbling prophets. Our sense of ourselves as invented as film. Later, in an ocean-going canoe lined with cedar boughs, he will drift out into cold breakers, two bullets in his chest. But, here, in his small hat & wire glasses, he still seems sweetly comic. He holds up a letter; someone’s promised him a job. His fancy plaid suit makes him look like a clown.

Kathleen Graber

Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Photography & Film,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

The Synthetic A Priori

What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we any concern. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher & loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing, its shade deepens further his crimson smock. Tenebrosus: that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood that the obscured world only seems to us somehow even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s, displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats & wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week, someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch. It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion. The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then, to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes, an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him. A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark & wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs, driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother & the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief, to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again? Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home, waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school, I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent & unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other, there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible & impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort. It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself— breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots, peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board, making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves. Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night, the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been. Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off, hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks. In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

Kathleen Graber

Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Book Nine

One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? —Marcus Aurelius When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late: there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week, though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV. A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window, a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind & the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it; I can’t throw it away. Every change is a death, you tell yourself,turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself, I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me, but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves to blame: Wipe out thy imagination. We fill our hands when they are empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.

Kathleen Graber

Living,Life Choices,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Love,Classic Love,Desire,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Mulatto

Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say, Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.

Roxane Beth Johnson

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

What I Do

Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke. Get on the bus. Girls yell, Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields. Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in. Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch. The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant. You were fat! I yell. Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon. I was pregnant, what’s your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones. Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light. Get on the bus. Girls yell, Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat. Your father’s a nigger! I say, No, he’s a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge. Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb—long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.

Roxane Beth Johnson

Living,Disappointment & Failure,The Body,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Self-Portrait at Ten

A boarded-up house. Ransacked inside — broken glass and toppled tables, chairs overturned, books shaken for hidden money. There are mouths in dreams full of gold teeth, chewing bread and meat. The body is hollow as flame and will burn down anything if pointed straight. A bird flies in through the door, then flutters at the window. Although he is tiny, I am too afraid to help him escape. I’ve made myself another house. I hum to fill its empty rooms. I fold in like saloon doors closing, then swinging out, keeping out thieves.

Roxane Beth Johnson

Living,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Class

Blues for Almost Forgotten Music

I am trying to remember the lyrics of old songs I’ve forgotten, mostly I am trying to remember one-hit wonders, hymns, and musicals like West Side Story. Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on buses and in the car. I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs and my ghosted lovers. I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel the half-touch of others, can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I’ve lost. I remember the records rubbed with static and the needle gathering dust. I remember the taste of a mouth so sudden and still cold from wintry gusts. It seemed incredible then — a favorite song, a love found. It wasn't, after all. Days later, while vacuuming, the lyrics come without thinking. Days later, I think I see my old lover in a café but don’t, how pleasing it was to think it was him, to finally sing that song. This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness to die some. This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and then is done. Do I feel better remembering, knowing for certain what’s gone?

Roxane Beth Johnson

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Music

The Aunts

I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines,and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards.They will always be the ones who say “It is time to go now,” even as we linger at the door,or stand by the waiting cars, they remember someone—an uncle we never knew—and sigh, allof them together, like wind in the oak trees behind the farm where they grew up—a placeI remember—especially the hen house and the soft clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

Joyce Sutphen

Living,Growing Old,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Bearings

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash, a reaction sending out runners across her chest, a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back into fashion, their son coming back from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger spread down the long hallway of their house and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy, the mother decides to see the son again, and so our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth, all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot in this registered historic district (all of the houses bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories, run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon, cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue, in this yard no marker stone and under this stone their son’s everything, no double, no double

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Death,Parenthood,Separation & Divorce,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

The Forest of Sure Things

In this land the children tear their hearts in half. Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten can be had. If a stand of birches is found to be made of tin, the soil around them will bleed with rust. In this land children study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books any soldier who stumbles will not fall. No one will fall, a gift parents try not to make much of. At every meal some is set aside. In every garden a patch lies fallow. At parties there are whispers of illegal cheeses. Camembert, especially, is said to taste alive. And so the children learn to make room. To leave some. Nothing will come, but nothing will go. To love like this half must rattle in its pit.

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Philosophy

Wake

The casseroles just showed up. According to her sister a symbolic casting of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear— according to a friend she looked just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon, suitcase still in the trunk. She’d carried him dead for days. Out above the reeds a sphere of birds stretches and knots, rises as one brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger when it came filled every chair.

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving

Recording

The first person in recorded history struck by a comet slept on her couch across the road from the Comet Drive-In and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee, and woke her. Everything that hurts hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm . . . Here let the towers go, let them write his crossing, cursive, back and forth his name steadying our tongues . . . Famous, overcoat floating down without him, the idea that we stand where we mean to stand, 1974, a distraction from my parents’ morning commute. At 59th Street they split. The poems I was writing were no longer poems of their divorce, my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens, their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Separation & Divorce,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Amaranth

is an imaginary flower that never fades. The amaranth is blue with black petals, it’s yellow with red petals, it’s enormous and grows into the shape of a girl’s house, the seeds nestle high in the closet where she hid a boy. The boy and his bike flee the girl’s parents from the tip of the leaves, green summer light behind the veins. The amaranth is an imaginary flower in the shape of a girl’s house dispensing gin and tonics from its thorns, a succulent. This makes the boy’s bike steer off-course all summer, following the girl in her marvelous car, the drunken bike. He was a small part of summer, he was summer’s tongue.

Matthew Rohrer

Love,Romantic Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Trees & Flowers

Childhood Stories

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium and we all rose into the air, the same room where they demonstrated pow-wows and prestidigitation. But not everyone believed it. That was the most important lesson I learned—that a truck driven by a dog could roll down a hill at dusk and roll right off a dock into a lake and sink, and if no one believes you then what is the point of telling them wonderful things? I walked home from the pow-wow on an early winter night in amazement: they let me buy the toy tomahawk! As soon as I got home I was going to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.

Matthew Rohrer

Living,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Philosophy

Precision German Craftsmanship

It was a good day and I was about to do something important and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship. The Germans are so persnickety and precise, they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation of spring. They build the Panzer tank, out of rakes hoses and garden gnomes; they built me. And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink of mystery, always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip but my bowels behind. When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in, only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone. But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat, he was unaware as the blue window closed above him. The rest of us are limp and damp, I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.” I’m going to push it.

Matthew Rohrer

Arts & Sciences,Architecture & Design,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Pig-In-A-Blanket

I wake up, bound tightly. A warm, valerian smell cascades to my palate. I can only move my eyelids and toes. Heat sits impishly on my chest, at my throat, curtains of it brushing against me. Panic creeps out of my armpits. I can only move my eyelids and toes, and this constant fluttering lulls me to sleep. I awake late and move like a bee through the apartment, from station to station from the blue flame to the shimmering disc. From the stairs to the street, to the grocery store. To the meat aisle. To the cocktail wieners. To make pigs-in-a-blanket, to share them with friends. To sink into bed, to bind myself tightly in blankets, to flutter off into sleep, and then on past sleep, to be carried by admirers across a wooden bridge. Later I will burn this bridge.

Matthew Rohrer

Living,Life Choices,The Body,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Ceriserie

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out. Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it. Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds. Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf. Music: The unless of a certain series. Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything. Fire: The number between four and five. Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of. Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.” Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face. Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time. Art: That’s the problem with art. Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.” Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out. Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . . Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping. Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind! Sign at Jardin des Plantes: GAMES ARE FORBIDDEN IN THE LABYRINTH. Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.” Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum. The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city. Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania. Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann. To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.” Music: “Boys on the Radio.” Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges. Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds. The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech. Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return. Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la. Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible. Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have. Thus: I came to the city of possession. Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done. Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison. Later. The music lacquered with listen.

Joshua Clover

Arts & Sciences,Architecture & Design,Music,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Popular Culture,War & Conflict

“An Archive of Confessions, A Genealogy of Confessions”

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks. The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love. In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in Across the bluing evening. It’s the hour things get To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet. Yikes. It’s fine to be here with you watching the great events Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon In a baker’s life, always interrupted by the familiar notes Of a childish song, “no more sleepy dreaming,” we float Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom, Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn.

Joshua Clover

Relationships,Nature,Summer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics

Valiant En Abyme

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities, These pale window box poppies of the laughing class, Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight, Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot, Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel, Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance, Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled, All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling? Or just a change in the story over time, as for example howTous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation Redrawn and named again through the stars Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink, Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily, Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day Of the night and turned the world around it, We were good sentences and forgot where we started.

Joshua Clover

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture

What’s American About American Poetry?

They basically grow it out of sand. This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic. Welcome to the desert of the real, I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen. I do not think the revolution is finished. So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known, With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising, Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city, A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure, And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon. All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries, The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer’s music in their manes, The basic Los Angeles Dingbat, A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night. Every Sunday is too little Sunday, A living grave, the true grave of the head. In one shout desire rises and dies. Composed while I was asleep on horseback I drift, mainly I drift.

Joshua Clover

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics

And the Ship Sails On

He faced the sink, one foot up on the edge of the tub. She stood behind him, reaching around. In the mirror, her face rose over his shoulder like the moon, and like the moon she regarded him beautifully but without feeling, and he looked at her as he would at the moon: How beautiful!How distant! No smiling, no weeping, no talking. A man and a woman transacting their magnificent business with the usual equanimity. The man as a passenger walking the ship’s deck at evening and the woman as the moon over his shoulder oiling the ocean with light. Deep in the ship’s belly pistons churned and sailors fed the boilers' roar with coal. On deck just the engine’s dull thrum and a faint click as the woman sets her ring on the cool white lip of the sink.

Joel Brouwer

Living,The Body,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Home Life,Men & Women

The Exact Change

He slaughtered a six of Miller in thanks when his supposed schizophrenia turned out to be mere panic, fewer than half the syllables and “easily managed with the new medications.” Chanted that mantra when his piano teacher’s voice droned on like an undertow beneath Chopin hours after she herself had gone home to Queens and when stop signs seemed to say slightly more than stop, seemed in fact to convey highly specific messages to him and him alone suggesting he assume certain key responsibilities including twenty-four-hour telephone contact with his finacée “to make sure nothing bad happens to her” and the immediate emergency closure of the Holland Tunnel…Oh, come on, Doc! If this isn’t schizo what is? And after all it took so long to nose the rental car’s savage servility through New Jersey for Thanksgiving at her mother’s that by the time he arrived he can’t possibly have been the same person he had been when he left Brooklyn and is that not a kind of multiple person- ality? It took hours. And then it was awkward. Which could describe so many things. The gangly half-dismantled turkey splayed on its platter. Her stepfather's lecture on property taxes and tougher sentences. The seven-dollar jug of Chablis which would come up later while he held back her hair. Every good boy deserves fudge and he tried to be one and earn huge loamy slabs of it. He practiced his scales on the steering wheel as he breezed by stop sign after stop sign toward the tunnel, stopped to search for the exact change, then resumed rehearsal as she, deeply soused, snored wetly beside him smelling like something spilled on a rug. He keyed each étude over and over as though there would not be many more chances or changes which I typed first by accident but had the chance to change for which I am thankful. But what am I doing in here.

Joel Brouwer

Living,Health & Illness,The Body,The Mind,Relationships

Focus

Photograph found in the road: bejeweled hand gripping a limp dick. All parties suffering from lack of ambition. The hills of Tuscany won’t dapple with sunlight, and here it is nearly noon. She didn’t much want the leather jacket, the vendor didn’t really care to sell it, she hardly tried it on, he barely praised her beauty, then everyone wasn’t hungry and went to lunch. The rubies won’t glow. The delayed train shrugs on its siding. The penis appears at ease.Osteria, osteria, osteria, osteria. I knew many words but preferred to say the same ones over and over, like a photographer shooting four frames of the same subject, hoping for one in focus. This clearly among the other three.

Joel Brouwer

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film

A Time of Bees

Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. CAMUS All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch. Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders. Last June on the porch floor I found them dead, a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted, I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch, I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin? My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce sallies began, inspections, cracks located and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course watched, charted; books on bees read. I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch. Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again, as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech sleepers who live innocently in will and mind. It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch of heart takes place, or a great shift of season. November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land. But this spring the thing began again, and his curse went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride. It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid. And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand. It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged, such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers— dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares? They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said. But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed. We tell our funny story about the bees. At two in the morning we come home, and a friend, a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed, taking no note of these private catastrophes. He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand, we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes. Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind. The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand, I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod till all that grubby softness wants to give, to give.

Mona Van Duyn

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Sciences,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

In the Cold Kingdom

"The younger brother roasted a breast of Pishiboro's elephant wife and handed Pishiboro some, which he presently ate. Then the younger brother said in a voice full of scorn. 'Oh you fool. You lazy man. You were married to meat and you thought it was a wife.'" FROM A MYTH OF THE BUSHMEN Poised upside down on its duncecap, a shrunken purple head, True Blueberry, enters its tightening frame of orange lip, and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with Zanzibar Cocoa, while Here at the Martha Washington Ice Cream Store we outdo the Symbolistes. a fine green trickle— Pistachio? Mint Julep? Words have colors, and colors are tasty. sweetens his chin. In front of me Licorice teeters like a lump of coal on its pinkish base of Pumpkin. A Rauschenberg tongue fondles this rich donnée, then begins to erase it. Turning from all that is present in the flesh, so to speak, let the eye wander off to a menu, where it can start to ingest “Quite Sour Lemon sherbet topped with a stem cherry and chocolate sprinkles Swilling in language, all floating in bubbly cherry phosphate the bloated imagination is urged to open still wider and shovel it in, and served with a twist of pretzel.” In this world “Creamy Vanilla and Smooth Swiss Chocolate ice creams” can be “blended with chopped pineapple, dark fudge sauce, ripe bananas, whipped topping, cookies, roasted nutmeats and nippy chopped cherries.” the Unconscious, that old hog, being in charge here of the creative act. At about the moment my tastebuds receive a last tickle of Gingersnap and begin to respond to Orange Fudge, I look at you who have bought my ice cream cones for twenty years, Moving another new ice to the mouth we needn’t remember and look away it is always the same mouth that melts it. My mind assembles a ribald tower of sherbet dips, all on one cone, Apricot, Apple, Tangerine, Peach, Prune, Lime, and then it topples. You are steadier than I. You order one dip always, or, in a dish, two dips of the same flavor. In this hysterical brilliance of neon Come on, consumers, we’ve got to keep scooping it is twelve or fifteen of us to thirty ice creams. so that the creams shall not rise like cold lava out of their bins, numbing our feet, our knees, freezing our chests, our chins, our eyes, Open the door, quick, and let in two handholding adolescents. Coping with all those glands makes them good and hungry. so that, flying out of their cannisters, the chopped nuts shall not top off our Technicolor grave with their oily ashes. Listen! All around us toothsome cones are suffering demolition down to the last, nipple-like tip. How do we know where to stop? Perhaps the glasses and dishes are moulded of candy, and the counters and windows… Over your half-eaten serving of Italian Delight, why are you looking at me the way you are looking at me?

Mona Van Duyn

Living,Life Choices,Marriage & Companionship,Midlife,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Popular Culture

The Miser

I was out last night, the very picture of a sneak, dark and hunched-over, breaking and entering again. Why do I do it? And why, when I can afford serious residences, do I keep to this one room? Perhaps if I had not lost track of the difference between the real and the ideal it would never have happened. I hide here almost entirely now. When I go out, when I creep into those silent houses, I steal newspapers. An armload, no more than I can carry comfortably. Sometimes they are already tied up on the side porch or by the kitchen stove. Nobody misses them. They think each other or the maid has carried them out to the street. They say there is something intractable out there, the Law, the Right to Privacy, the World. In the days when my obsession was only a wound-up toy, squeaking and jabbering in my chest, I could have believed them. I sit by the window today (There is very little space left now, thought I have left corridors wide enough to walk through so I won't lose touch) holding my latest on my lap, handling them, fondling them, taking in every column. They are becoming more and more precious. My delusion grows and spreads. Lately it seems to me as I read of murders, wars, bankruptcies, jackpot winnings, the news if written in that perfect style of someone speaking to the one who knows and loves him. Long before they miss me, I think, the room will be perfectly solid. When they break in the door and, unsurprised, hardened to the most bizarre vagaries, begin to carry out my treasure, death's what they'll look for underneath it all, those fluent, muscled, imaginative men, sweating in their innocent coveralls. But I will be out in broad daylight by then, answering, having accepted utterly the heart's conditions. Tell them I wish them well, always, that I've been happy.

Mona Van Duyn

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Life Choices,The Mind,Love,Desire,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Money & Economics

On What Planet

Uniformly over the whole countryside The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; The autumn haze drifts in deep bands Over the pale water; White egrets stand in the blue marshes; Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena Float in the air. Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill We look out over fifty miles of sinuous Interpenetration of mountains and sea. Leading up a twisted chimney, Just as my eyes rise to the level Of a small cave, two white owls Fly out, silent, close to my face. They hover, confused in the sunlight, And disappear into the recesses of the cliff. All day I have been watching a new climber, A young girl with ash blonde hair And gentle confident eyes. She climbs slowly, precisely, With unwasted grace. While I am coiling the ropes, Watching the spectacular sunset, She turns to me and says, quietly, “It must be very beautiful, the sunset, On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

In the years to come they will say, “They fell like the leaves In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.” November has come to the forest, To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen. The year fades with the white frost On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows, Where the deer tracks were black in the morning. Ice forms in the shadows; Disheveled maples hang over the water; Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream. Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold. The yellow maple leaves eddy above them, The glittering leaves of the cottonwood, The olive, velvety alder leaves, The scarlet dogwood leaves, Most poignant of all. In the afternoon thin blades of cloud Move over the mountains; The storm clouds follow them; Fine rain falls without wind. The forest is filled with wet resonant silence. When the rain pauses the clouds Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. In the evening the wind changes; Snow falls in the sunset. We stand in the snowy twilight And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud. Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, Glimmering with floating snow. An owl cries in the sifting darkness. The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

Kenneth Rexroth

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Nature,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Delia Rexroth

died June 1916 Under your illkempt yellow roses, Delia, today you are younger Than your son. Two and a half decades – The family monument sagged askew, And he overtook your half-a-life. On the other side of the country, Near the willows by the slow river, Deep in the earth, the white ribs retain The curve of your fervent, careful breast; The fine skull, the ardor of your brain. And in the fingers the memory Of Chopin études, and in the feet Slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep. And the white full moon of midsummer, That you watched awake all that last night, Watches history fill the deserts And oceans with corpses once again; And looks in the east window at me, As I move past you to middle age And knowledge past your agony and waste.

Kenneth Rexroth

Living,Growing Old,Midlife,Parenthood,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Doubled Mirrors

It is the dark of the moon. Late at night, the end of summer, The autumn constellations Glow in the arid heaven. The air smells of cattle, hay, And dust. In the old orchard The pears are ripe. The trees Have sprouted from old rootstocks And the fruit is inedible. As I pass them I hear something Rustling and grunting and turn My light into the branches. Two raccoons with acrid pear Juice and saliva drooling From their mouths stare back at me, Their eyes deep sponges of light. They know me and do not run Away. Coming up the road Through the black oak shadows, I See ahead of me, glinting Everywhere from the dusty Gravel, tiny points of cold Blue light, like the sparkle of Iron snow. I suspect what it is, And kneel to see. Under each Pebble and oak leaf is a Spider, her eyes shining at Me with my reflected light Across immeasurable distance.

Kenneth Rexroth

Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer

Home Again, Home Again

The children are back, the children are back— They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack; The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad, Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.The city apartment is leaky and cold, The landlord lascivious, greedy and old— The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted, The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.The company caved, the boss went broke, The job and the love affair, all up in smoke. The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock— O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.And so they return with their piles of possessions, Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions, Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens, Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother Don’t say a word, but they look at each other As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack. The children are back. The children are back.

Marilyn L. Taylor

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Social Commentaries

Grand Slam

Dreams brimming over, childhood stretched out in legs, this is the moment replayed on winter days when frost covers the field, when age steals away wishes. Glorious sleep that seeps back there to the glory of our baseball days.

Marjorie Maddox

Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Winter,Philosophy

Punk Half Panther

Lissen to the whistle of night bats—oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys & armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’ monsters, surf of new world colony definitions & quasars & culture prostars going blam over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass neural desies for the Nothing. i amble outside the Goddess mountain. Cut across the San Joaquín Valley, Santiago de Cuba, Thailand & Yevtushenko’s stations; hunched humans snap off cotton heads gone awry & twist nuclear vine legs. Jut out to sea, once again—this slip sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad & Chicano-style undone wild. Rumble boy. Rumble girl. In wonder & amazement. On the loose. Cruisin’ shark-colored maze of presidential bombast, death enshrined archipelago fashion malls, neutered wars across the globe come barreling down on my Neo-American uzi mutations, my uppgraded 2Pac thresholds. My indigo streets, i say with disgust & erotic spit, Amerikaner frontier consciousness gone up long ago. Meet my barriohood, meet me with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket. No motha’, no fatha’, no sista’, no brotha’. Just us in the genetic ticktock culture chain, this adinfinitum, clueless Americana grid of inverted serapes, hallucinations of a nation, streets in racist Terminator coagulation. Get loose after the day-glo artery of a fix. Power outages propel us into cosmos definition, another forty-million-New-Dollar-Plantation Basilica, or is it tender chaos? My upside-down Kahlúa gallon oración drool blackish metal flake desires, the ooze of Dulcinea— Tepeyac stripper, honey from Tara’s open green fans. Tara? Tara, where are you? Tara of the blessings & weapons against illusion. Against administrator pig, against molester snake, against rooster corporate lust. Remember me? i am the black-red blood spark worker, Juana Buffalo’s illegitimate flight usher, back up from Inframundo. Quick ooze again, this formless city space i live in— my circular false malaria. Fungi Town says everything’s awright without your Holy Wheel, your flaming tree wombs, this sista’ bundle i ache for, the one i lost in a fast brawl for redemption at the gates of this Creation Mulatto Hotel, this body passage, this wonder fire from the chest. i stand alone on Mass Man Boulevard. Look east, look south. Bleary sirens come howling with vats of genocide & grey prison gang buses jam with my true brotha’ wetbacks. Pick another bale of tropical grape, another bushel of pesticide & plutonium artichoke. Cancer tomatoes the biggest in the world. Bastard word, bracero produce, alien culture— power & slime. Crawl up my back, heavy loaded on cheap narratives, Salinas doubles, Atlantis sketched on Gorbachev’s forehead: you, yes, you, gator-mouthed agent—like gila progeny. Let’s hustle. Let’s trade. It is 1:27 A.M. in da rat Arctic. What do i trade passion for? Language escapes me. Passion is smoke. i dissolve. It is in my nature to disappear. No sista’, no brotha’. No motha’, no soul. This shred iciness is all, a crazy register that destroys itself into Polaroid, into a glacial sheet of multicolored border walls. Let’s foam & spin flamey bluish tears for the Thing-Against-Itself, soul-less soul, this film word surface. Sing out, baby. Wobble & bop to town. Drag yo’ hands across my fine-tuned work train named Desastre en route to Freetown—engineered African shaman houses smell of licorice, Ebola & famine blood, of hair torn, of death owls & cancerous alcoholic livers, of babies sucking this deep night to come, then—a busted chink of afternoon copper light wakes us, yo’ sista’ rolls in with a bag of lemons for Evil Eye, for the seven-inch ache in her abdomen. Keep me in stride. You. i am talking to you, fool. Don’t just sit there stretchin’ yo’ face. Tell me why fire yearns for the heart. Write it down. Say it. Fool. Speak the names. Conjure the recitations from the coffee cup, the steel-toe, border-crosser boots. The grass rips up the morning snow lights, jagged & yellowish. My AIDS face is hidden. Your rot, my epistemology. i stand in pure light, a blaze of eyes & arms, volcanic & solar, autistic, anti-written, burned by mad friars & clerics, uptown octopi readers, my long hair falls as reddish honey, on a naked supple back, on breasts small & secretive. Mystery evades me. Shadows crumble. Without attention i locate the love void & yet, i know all is well. My blood rocks to a bolero out of rhythm, a firefly’s bolero that is, the one in the dog eye. Hear me warm up to the multi-night. Scribble poems & shout rebuke for the sake of scarred angels, for Tara, who guides me in her emeraldine, sequined night of lies. Hear me now, kin to the half-collie language that i keep & walk. Kin now, to the leaves that plunge to the floors; swivel whiteness without axis, tectonic blasts without mercy. Straitjackets float on the river infinity. Pink-skinned fishes stare back as they evolve into my shape, my babble stream magnetic juan-foolery. Arm wrestle me on the soccer lawn, kick me in the balls. The murder music is for everyone. The Last Mayan Acid rock band plays Berlin’s latest score: dead trade market systems for the dead proletariats, rip up from Bangkok to Tenejapa. Everyone is meaningful & vomits, everyone deposits a stench pail, into the Cube— Neo-America, without the fissure of intimate thighs. Cross over into fire, hunger & spirit. i write on my hand: the road cuts into a star. Go, now, go, fool. In your lyric wetback saxophone, the one yo’ mama left you, the Thing-Against-Itself strapped across your hips. Do not expect me to name—this Thing-Against-Itself. Play it. Screw it. Howl up to the Void, the great emptiness, the original form.Night Journal: Keep on rockin’, blues fish, the gauze of hte day into night. Out there somewhere, Dis-America, pick up a chrome bone, the shards of the last Xmas Presidential extravaganza. You, of course, fool. Swivel into the clear. Float over the greenish migrant barracks pocked with wire torsos, toes wiggle & predict our forthcoming delirium—there is a velvet panther shouting out OM in funk, there is a tawny word in the middle of the city thoroughfare, a planetary semi of lives slices the wet animal in half. i am that punk half panther. My fierce skull & mandible, formidable, my pelt is exact as witch quartz, a slashed leg tumbles down the highway, battered by every dirty, steel wheel. Face up to the sky, you, i said, to the brilliant gossip from the Goddess parade. Outside, outside. So. Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’— sliding’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness. From Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream, 1999.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Living,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Class,History & Politics,Popular Culture,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

Lost in the Hospital

It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen in tanks attached to them— A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigarette, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of his heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”

Rafael Campo

Living,Death,Health & Illness,The Body,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

My Voice

To cure myself of wanting Cuban songs, I wrote a Cuban song about the need For people to suppress their fantasies, Especially unhealthy ones. The song Began by making reference to the sea, Because the sea is like a need so great And deep it never can be swallowed. Then The song explores some common myths About the Cuban people and their folklore: The story of a little Carib boy Mistakenly abandoned to the sea; The legend of a bird who wanted song So desperately he gave up flight; a queen Whose strength was greater than a rival king’s. The song goes on about morality, And then there is a line about the sea, How deep it is, how many creatures need Its nourishment, how beautiful it is To need. The song is ending now, because I cannot bear to hear it any longer. I call this song of needful love my voice.

Rafael Campo

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore

Madonna and Child

By menopause, it’s not just estrogen my mother lacks. She’s lost her eldest son— that’s me, the one who’s queer—the doctor who once made her very proud. These days, I do my own wash when I’m home, I cook for her so she can take a break from all the chores she now refuses to assign to me. She sits, half-watching Ricki through her tea’s thin steam, her squint of disapproval more denial than it is disgust. She hears much better than she sees—it’s easier to keep out vision than it is to clear the air of sounds—and yet I know it’s age that stultifies her senses too. Enraged because she’s lost so much, I understand why suddenly she looks so stunned as from the television: “. . . Bitch, she stole my boyfriend, my own mother did! . . .” I fold a towel noiselessly. I know she thinks it’s garbage, sinful, crap—just as she thinks that taking estrogen in pills is not what God intended, no matter what the doctors say; or that I’m gay is plain unnatural, she can’t endure such pain. The oven timer rings. The cookies that I’ve baked are done. I’ll make another batch though she won’t touch them: given up for Lent. My mother’s love. I wonder where it went.

Rafael Campo

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

The Abdominal Exam

Before the glimmer of his sunken eyes, What question could I answer with my lies? Digesting everything, it’s all so plain In him, his abdomen so thin the pain Is almost visible. I probe the lump His boyfriend noticed first, my left hand limp Beneath the pressure of the right. With AIDS You have to think lymphoma—swollen nodes, A tender spleen, the liver’s jutting edge— It strikes me suddenly I will oblige This hunger that announces death is near, And as I touch him, cold and cavalier, The language of beneath the diaphragm Has told me where it’s coming from And where I’m going, too: soft skin to rocks, The body reveling until it wrecks Against the same internal, hidden shoal, The treasures we can’t hide, our swallowed gold.

Rafael Campo

Living,Health & Illness,The Body

from The Changing Face of AIDS:  V. Elegy for the AIDS Virus

How difficult it is to say goodbye to scourge. For years we were obsessed with you, your complex glycoproteins and your sly, haphazard reproduction, your restraint in your resistance, how you bathed so slight yet fierce in our most intimate secretions. We will remember you for generations; electron micrographs of you seem quaint already, in the moment of our victory. How difficult it is to claim one’s right to living honestly. The honesty you taught was nothing quite as true as death, but neither was it final. Yes, we vanquished you, with latex, protease inhibitors, a little common sense— what’s that, you say? That some remain at risk? How dare you try to threaten us again! Of course, you’d like to make outrageous claims that some behaviors haven’t changed, that some have not had access to the drugs that mask your presence in the body. Difficult it is, how very sad, to see you strain (no pun intended) at response—our quilts, our bravest poetry, our deaths with grace and dignity have put you in your place. This elegy itself renounces you, as from this consciousness you’ve been erased. The love for you was very strong, the hot pursuits so many of us reveled in— but what once felt like love was really not. I hardly know what I will find to hate as much as I have loved and hated what you brought to bear upon my verse, the weight of your oppression and the joys of truth. How difficult it is—to face the white of nothingness, of clarity. We win!

Rafael Campo

Living,Death,Health & Illness,The Body,Love,Social Commentaries

What I Would Give

What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure; what I would like to give them, ill from not enough of laying in the sun not caring what the onlookers might think while feeding some banana to their dogs— what I would like to offer them is this, not reassurance that their lungs sound fine, or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not a melanoma, but instead of fear transfigured by some doctorly advice I’d like to give them my astonishment at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping, and how ridiculously gently it slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that, the joy I felt while staring in your eyes as you learned epidemiology (the science of disease in populations), the night around our bed like timelessness, like comfort, like what I would give to them.

Rafael Campo

Living,The Body,The Mind,Love,Relationships

The Four Humours

I. Blood We wondered if the rumors got to her. I’d seen her with that other girl behind The Stop and Shop when I was walking home from school one day. I swear, the two of them were kissing, plain as that, the grass so high it brushed their cheeks. I told my teacher so, and maybe it was her who called their folks. Before too long, it was like everyone in town had heard. We waited for them at the dime store once, where Cedric grabbed her tits and said I’ll learn you how to love how God intended it, you ugly fucking dyke. Thing was, she wasn’t ugly like you’d think. She had a certain quality, a shyness maybe, and I’d describe the way she laughed as kind of gentle. Anyway, we never saw her with that girl again. They say she got depressed— shit, at the service all of us got tearful. I got to thinking what an awful sight it was, all that red blood—it wasn’t in the papers, but I heard Melissa’s mother, who was the nurse in the Emergency that night, say how she was just covered up in blood. I can’t think how you bring yourself to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked the counselor they called in to the school, and she said something like, What better inkto write the language of the heart? I guess it proves that stuff from Bible school they say, that such a life of sin breeds misery. II. Phlegm “My brain is draining from my head,” he said as once again he blew his nose. The clock read 3 A.M.; its second hand swept slowly through another viscous minute. Dead to even nurses sticking them for new IVs, the other ones slept off their benders soundlessly. “I’m losing my intelligence,” he said, and blew. My patience waned. He thought he was the president:Dementia, KS, HIV were printed in his problem list. “And plus, I’m getting feverish.” I can’t recall his name, but I remember hating him—grim wish that he would hurry up and die. Just then, he took my hand, and kissed the back of it as though I were a princess in his foreign land. “My lady, you are beautiful,” he said, and coughed again. Unsure of what to say, my own throat burned. He said, “You can’t know what I feel.” III. Bile A gun went off and killed a little girl The day my friend was diagnosed with cancer. I walked through Central Park; a black dog snarled At squirrels chattering like they had answers. The day my friend was diagnosed with cancer I dreamed of killing someone with a knife. The squirrels, chattering, had likely answers To all my angry questions about life— A homeboy threatened someone with a knife Not far from where a cop showed off his gun, An angry answer to most questions about life. I watched the squirrels hop, the yuppies run; The cop approached the black kids with his gun. I wondered how much longer she would live; The squirrels scattered when the homeboy ran. I wondered if she’d ever been in love, I wondered who would pray for her to live, Forgive her for her anger and her weaknesses. I wondered why it hurt to fall in love. The cop tried aiming past me, towards the woods. Forgive us for our anger, for our weaknesses: Through Central Park, past the black dog’s snarls, The cop gave chase. A skirmish in the woods. The gun went off—No! shrieked a little girl. IV. Melancholy We picked at it with sticks at first, until an older kid named Samuel arrived. He dropped a heavy rock right on its skull; we watched as thick black slime began to ooze from somewhere just below its heart—or where we thought its heart should be. “Raccoon,” said someone solemnly. The landscaper— sweat gleaming, like the polished figurines my mother wouldn’t ever let me touch— regarded us with keen suspicion from across the street. We learned what it could teach; like any body’s secrets, the sublime receded toward the fact of death. I knew both sadness, and disgust in love’s untruths.

Rafael Campo

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,The Mind,Love,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

What the Body Told

Not long ago, I studied medicine. It was terrible, what the body told. I’d look inside another person’s mouth, And see the desolation of the world. I’d see his genitals and think of sin. Because my body speaks the stranger’s language, I’ve never understood those nods and stares. My parents held me in their arms, and still I think I’ve disappointed them; they care And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry. I look inside their other-person’s mouths And see the wet interior of souls. It’s warm and red in there—like love, with teeth. I’ve studied medicine until I cried All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds. Anatomy and physiology, The tiny sensing organs of the tongue— Each nameless cell contributing its needs. It was fabulous, what the body told.

Rafael Campo

Living,The Body,Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

Night Dive

Plankton rise toward the full moon spread thin on Wakaya’s surface. Manta rays’ great curls of jaw scoop backward somersaults of ocean in through painted caves of their mouths, out through sliced gills. Red sea fanspulse. The leopard shark lounges on a smooth ramp of sand, skin jeweled with small hangers-on. Pyramid fish point the way to the surface.Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough, their mouths neon cautions. Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm. Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands of mouths held open to night.Currents’ communion—giant clams slam shut wavy jaws, send shivers of water. Christmas tree worms snap back, flat spirals tight,living petroglyphs against the night.

Peggy Shumaker

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

The Word That Is a Prayer

One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please. By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please: a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it is, knocking and knocking, and finally falling back to earth as rain, as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch, collecting in drains, leaching into the ground, and you walk in that weather every day.

Ellery Akers

The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Class,Money & Economics

Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what. Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot.Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought.Now I find them: thistles, goatheads, the barbed weeds all those with hooks or horns the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones those wearing lantern jaws,old ones in beards, leapers in silk leggings, the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds and grab handholds in whatever lean place.It’s been a good day.

Peter Everwine

Blister

the noun A disease of the peach tree —a fungus distorts leaves. The first time I was taken to see him I was five or six. A vesicle on the skin containing serum, caused by friction, a burn, or other injury. He lived on Alabama Street next to Saint Peter’s and wore a white t-shirt, starched and snug. A similar swelling with fluid or air on the surface of a plant, or metal after cooling or the sunless area between one’s toes after a very long walk. Don’t ask me how it is I ended up holding it. An outer covering fitted to a vessel to protect against torpedoes, mines, or to improve stability. My guess is that he brought it out to show me thinking, perhaps, I had never seen one up close, let alone felt the blunt weight of one in my hands. A rounded compartment protruding from the body of a plane. What came next: no image but sensation of its hammer (my inexpert manipulation) digging into but not breaking skin—the spot at the base of my thumb balloons, slowly filling with fluid… In Spanish: ampolla—an Ampul of chrystal in the Middle Ages could be a relic containing the blood of someone holy. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t loaded.

Francisco Aragón

Living,Coming of Age,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Process of Explication

I Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom. Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags Likewise, hello and goodbye. II Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed. Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage. III Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night. I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.

Dorothea Lasky

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Desire,Activities,Jobs & Working,School & Learning

Ars Poetica

I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me But I resisted for fear she'd think it strange I am very lonely Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness No other human had before to my ears And told me that I was no good Well maybe he didn't mean that But that is what I heard When he told me my life was not worthwhile And my life's work the work of the elite. I say I want to save the world but really I want to write poems all day I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep, Write poems in my sleep Make my dreams poems Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes I want my face to be a poem I have just learned how to apply Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide There is a romantic abandon in me always I want to feel the dread for others I can feel it through song Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few Like when he said I am no good I am no good Goodness is not the point anymore Holding on to things Now that's the point

Dorothea Lasky

Living,Life Choices,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets