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Philosophies

The man who murders his wife Is not the same as the man Who goes around and murders a stranger. I am a woman but I am not The same as another woman. Identity politics are bullshit. There is only the smart and the evil, The good and the righteous. There is only one color on the earth. In its infinite degradations it becomes music and mathematics. There is shit on my hands When I have been playing around with specifics. Love your lover. You are a lover. With each breath God has put a golden faith Upon the snowy mountains of the world. Here, look at the snowy mountains, Glittering with snow. They are wiser than you might think. And in your soul, the small grey animals Of the world sit and wait to do good For you, and together We are one thing, bleating a Somber, scurrying lullaby to Lapsing pinkish angels. Upon a mountain The angels smile sleepily as they stretch Their very long legs, thinking of us. And wise they might seem, us and the angels, But really it is only God who is wise.

Dorothea Lasky

Living,The Mind,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

On Old Ideas

Kissing the bankteller outside his stairs In Brighton, MA I cannot lie. I felt the hope That we once felt, if only for an instant O the lovely bankteller, like a moose he Rode my spirit quite outside my clothes And chrysanthemums sprouted I assure you Out my nipples when he kissed them. And the pureness of not knowing him at all Was really what we all feel when we enter this earth. There is a newness to the best things that cannot Be excelled and old things like old love die and rot. There are old ideas in the world that should be forgotten There are old ideas and old phrases that should at least Be recycled for others There are old plans now that should be new. There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die. Follow me, I am the crusader of the new My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births. And in the mouths of the little beasts, we shall find the great Ocean that spits up black bugs all glittering on its shores. You know there is an anthem to the ages. There is an anthem of the ages. This is that anthem This is that anthem

Dorothea Lasky

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated

Love Poem

The rain whistled. A taxi brought me to your apartment building And there I stood. I had dreamed a dream Of us in a bedroom. The light shining upon us in white sheets. You were singing me a song of your sailing days And in the dream I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal Which in bright red Flew out the window. Sometimes when we talk On the phone, I think to myself That the deep perfect of your soul Is what draws me to you. But still what soul is perfect? All souls are misshapen and off-colored. Morning comes within a soul And makes it obey another law In which all souls are snowflakes. Once at a funeral, a man had died And with the prayers said, his soul flew up in a hurry Like it had been let out of something awful. It was strangely colored, that soul. And it was a funny shape and a funny temperature. As it blew away, all of us looking felt the cold.

Dorothea Lasky

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Poem to an Unnameable Man

You have changed me already. I am a fireball That is hurtling towards the sky to where you are You can choose not to look up but I am a giant orange ball That is throwing sparks upon your face Oh look at them shake Upon you like a great planet that has been murdered by change O too this is so dramatic this shaking Of my great planet that is bigger than you thought it would be So you ran and hid Under a large tree. She was graceful, I think That tree although soon she will wither Into ten black snakes upon your throat And when she does I will be wandering as I always am A graceful lady that is part museum Of the voices of the universe everyone else forgets I will hold your voice in a little box And when you come upon me I won’t look back at you You will feel a hand upon your heart while I place your voice back Into the heart from where it came from And I will not cry also Although you will expect me to I was wiser too than you had expected For I knew all along you were mine

Dorothea Lasky

Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Men & Women

Some Sort of Truth

When my dad first started to die All my mom could remember Was the time he kicked her out After they first started dating So that he could go play golf It is the sort of thing we all remember When we feel death upon us I remember he died twice And once in my dream I just had to see him all nursed and swaddled as if he were sleeping But he wasn’t sleeping I stood in the white light of the nursing home bathroom With the sun spilling everywhere on me And tried to talk to him, but never, he’d never listen People don’t always listen to you when they are dead But that’s not sad I get tired And I don’t listen to one Goddamn thing you are saying But that is because most of the time you bore me And when I am finally asleep it is really nice just to dream I have seen a lot of things in this life But one thing I saw most readily Was that despite his eternal heartbreak And girlish silliness Mike’s face was kind of sweet, a sweet wind He is going to think it is weird that I put him in this poem But I don’t think it is weird that I put him in this poem

Dorothea Lasky

Living,Coming of Age,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Friends & Enemies

Still Life

We’d often been included in the weather, whose changes (as in the still, portending darknesses of after noon) were hardly evident, if even manifest at all. The August rain over Mixcoac & the deadening of all aspect at a distance: yet our sudden wet bodies, firm swelling divested finally of shirts & trousers, left beside turbid footprints on the tiled floor; this tongue, these lips the lightning over the unchartered landscape of your thigh: successive terra nova to resist the still life of the body

Roberto Tejada

Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Nature,Summer,Weather

Carnal

1. without that, the river which was, a substrata is movement now. mermaid left behind flopping in the pipes. her sludge is the sewer where once they fished to watch the night sky blacken. that one, long lingering, now languishes in a cavernous underground source, fountain for none. music of exhaust and darkening horizons, her hair begins to thin, nails soften, while she waits, a siren of light slow to diminish, wasting rescue. dogs at night are frequent. the scales that once cleaved to her flesh, her skin house shelter, now a day-glow phosphorescence, luminous filth, cleavage, radiating and filtered through her. boils begin to grow, round lumps spurting evanescence, a rainbow of industry, inviting those who come to visit to enjoy her paints, corporeal, images of what might be, a river now sewer then tomb, sanctions while poking her eyes out. no sensible heat. 2. images are wanting. she studies them. let them bury themselves in: no comment no comment. a partial shutter moves through the crowd taking us up along its crest. pubises sway. incarnate and incorporated publicly. swaying us. subjects of. the sap in the oak tree the bugs in the bookbinding. for she renders and has left behind the bark. its carnality upon which I turn. hard by and solitary. the other pole. 3. she means to say or stubbornness as a means of resistance speaking about us and for us dread and ailments a celebrated day in liberating explosions of losses disparities and distances dispersed in errors mistaken detours mismade calculations faulty respirations. counter to the stream and in plumes. the pressure transgressed in hands. nor was there another road. trying to gather what is gone. first by pacing. then on her hands and knees with the measuring tape. she’s a period piece asking if. seeking the response she is the question. 4. she means to say we live among a crowded scene. overcrowding faces and malice. a crack in time painted on garden paths. inclined to our desire. we ooze we can flourish there. forward an elephant eleven o’clock rook one o’clock apple and three o’clock lightning perpendicular to spoon soiled underneath apple in line with lightning in line with two cent piece face down. all circling hunted and hunting. elephant trying to leave the scene heading out east spoon facing west constellating failure of identity with apple and rook. 5. meaning to say. given that. the uncertainty. perhaps. surely. perhaps. figures in. the shape. perhaps. calls. subtract. total. a certainty. the space between. shaped by want. by need. fear of threats. the lure of repetition. her feet admired. their figures. the fear of repetition. start at the end. work back to shape. figure that. days wait. the response. slowness as position. a gap to walk into. opposition. given an entrance. she is on your side. whirlpools of repetition. opening traps. a shape appears. groups itself. more figures. a shape in the doorway. time for gets smaller. tilts inwards. the envelope unshared. first. given that. a set of shapes plan to meet. she is faint. clouds to the west. 6. white metal teeth. describe her lips. how they reveal and encircle them. encircling me. place them in some setting. a long walk. the kitchen at night. hounding toward an untimely end. that which spawns life. one foot in front of the next. spawning more. beating out the attachments. strumming along. not refreshing that. productive and not taking advice. recognizable car engine up the road. another can grow again there. 7. unjoined. supporting that. permeated and touched. moved by injury. joining not singular. this state. that stare. meaning the look alikes and she is eying those that be. taken to the extreme. accepting even that. orchestrate a sighing. a fourth. audible sounds of presence. calculating the ooze of difference. a quaver in the voice, it’s the ask if. 8. I adopt a hostile attitude towards it. towards want. forced into the background. escaped from the cage prowls about in your life. a ghost of dead business unfinished and naked cash payments between afterglow. intolerable shadow invites back into the fracture. watching the tree grow naked. going down to the port start from the shore of calculations and yawning. it is voracious. its wanting to be included wanting to grow fast. is asunder where the first was rooted out. sifting through the outrages of lightning and blood. 9. refresh against the sightlines. in its sedimentation along the edge of the mountains. planes overhead. the love of trees indigent and muscular. exploratory chance to disappear bone by bone rancid. finally : slowly : she : exuberant and revolting forcing immobility. along the edges of the mountains replenishing asking Agnes asking Edith. grinding into their own emergence. an unlikely anger such unlikeness. sharp calmness shallow dehydration and a decomposition weary and threadbare. admit nothing turn by turn admitting a hand. expresses weariness. its evanescence its asking to be unlikely bone by bone. 10. she tells more than she knows. a knot of suffocation. strangling itself. gestures your gait and resolutions. a recipe in permanent access in diversions. the flower dies at the end. a short stifled giggle. I had gone ‘too far’ asking toe to toe. adoring and afar we attend. before talking. the horizon folding in on us. to give in advance of conductivity as a dispatch. regardless of protection she means to say. indeed. 11. indeed. I can’t declare them for what they are. the approach goes like this. the dogs bark across the street. when and how and where. despairing answers. here it is finally. the days passing as an argument indeed indeed terrestrial. carnal excavating relentlessly. inaudible slow. howling recalcitrance behind the music. beneath the ground.

Jocelyn Saidenberg

Living,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

A Rod for a Handsome Price

(from her to ravish meaning ravine On the other side artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth) ……………………………….grafted onto the sentenceo a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing the thigh the valley get turned on

Nicole Brossard

Living,The Body,Love,Desire,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1 an urban image from the eighties when we hung out at Chez Madam Arthur and at the back of the room women wrapped their arms around nights of ink and dawn 2 calendar of murmurs vague caresses about the planet and its water we could have confused words but there were doors open confetti in the midst of darkness gentle ways to swoon in a corner with she who put her tongue in my mouth 3 focus on yes, on the woman’s eyelids caress not silence not word focus beyond. Hold me back

Nicole Brossard

Living,Coming of Age,The Body,Love,Desire,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Lucifer

You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would have a black bra hanging from the shower rod. I would have you up against the refrigerator with its magnets for insurance agents and oyster bars. Miracles, ripped thumbnails, everything a piece of something else, archangelic, shadow-clawed, the frolicking despair of repeating decimals because it never comes out even. Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits. Coppers and silvers and radiant traces, gold flecks from our last brush, brushfires. Always they’re espousing accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow not in the aimed-for heart but throat that has the say. There are no transitions, only falls.

Dean Young

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Time & Brevity,Love,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Scarecrow on Fire

We all think about suddenly disappearing. The train tracks lead there, into the woods. Even in the financial district: wooden doors in alleyways. First I want to put something small into your hand, a button or river stone or key I don’t know to what. I don’t have that house anymore across from the graveyard and its black angel. What counts as a proper goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer even when it was ten below. We all feel suspended over a drop into nothingness. Once you get close enough, you see what one is stitching is a human heart. Another is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life. Whenever you put your feet on the floor in the morning, whatever the nightmare, it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion: the solidity of the boards, the steadiness coming into the legs. Where did we get the idea when we were kids to rub dirt into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania? Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.

Dean Young

Living,Life Choices,The Body,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Now I'm a Woman

When you hear the knives ring Turn the page. I wonder why I am not Myself of late, ridiculous glass edges Turn back on themselves And soon reveal The hand of an apprentice And godforsaken embarrassing torch, Stormy back hallways Out of the black and wooden theatres. Crystal Waters plus her driver Plus her entourage is still rolling out Of the Sands, Atlantic City On the soundtracks to shows Held over at The Fairmount She is throwing back shots With the mafia. I have learned To take apart this American Songbook And very fortunately as I would take My audience in confidence Threads of gold fall closely together Coming to break us off. At the first of the shows I sang this song And in between I saw him in the hall, What could I tell you? “Someday we’ll build on a hilltop high.”

Cedar Sigo

Living,Growing Old,Life Choices,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Words nd Ends from Ez IX. From Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

5/3/83 (Ezra Pound) oZier’s cuRve he wAll, Phin hOut exUltant seeN impiDity, Exultance, aZ loR r- leAf Paler rOck- layers at—Un e deNho ia “HaD Ever oZzaglio, e tRacciolino iccArdo Psit, IOve blUer thaN oureD Euridices, yZance, a’s Rest, use At P” n Of trUction eraNts faceD, E tZ e FRance is LAnnes Pire fOrces, a nUisance, was Napoleon 1 22nd. Ery iZation.” deR ed TAlleyrand Political. e,Orage id Up ter—Night al— AnD E yZantines m pRologo othAr. Perform pO e jUniper, ws aNd e lanD E oZart, verhanging n- beAt Pace tO n oUt rk, aNd owardD Er eZzo heRe iziA. Ping. nOrance” e— pUt er, aNd his Name on) anD Eauty, nZe) veRned u45A Ptake e Old a qUestion f coNduct.) inteD En r Zephyrus. eaR, Ity, Are (Pale yOung foUr hroNes, y minD Ere aZe, eaRs k StAte Paris— NOr frUit thiNg, t saiD: Esser oZart, ‘s fRiends te eAch Peace wOrld? n hUsk s fiNished to tiDe’s E rZo hiRd n, heAven, “Paradiso” e Over xcUse ll aNd paraDiso. Ey o Zagreus e aRch greAt Paradiso çOis noUard, e suN ling, “De Et 3 May 1983 New York

Jackson Mac Low

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology,Heroes & Patriotism

Grave

In the harsh glare of an easily reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost in the crack of an infinite sofa. Everything falls apart, everything breaks down, torn into a million fragments, Jericho everyday. I want to be the blameless victim in this canceled puppet show, the marionette every mother loves, the one souvenirs are modeled from. (In that lifetime, Elton John will write mushy ballads just for me. Michael Jackson will want to be my best friend. He’d take me to the Neverland Ranch, and by the llama feeding trough, he’d say something like, “You’re a great guy, don’t give up, stay positive!” And I’d say, “Michael, you fucking idiot, I am positive!” And he’d say, “Oh, you’re so funny! Would you like to touch Bubbles?” And I would.) In the crux of my hollow innocent youth, I believed that my teddy bears had feelings. To cure me of this, my guardians made me give them to the church missionaries’ children. Scrubbed-clean rosy-cheeked blonde kids who smelled of sweat and talc, who were in constant wide-blue-eyed bewilderment as to why they were profusely perspiring in the tropics, instead of living out some winter wonderland Bobsey Twins fantasy, who were oblivious to their parents’ desperate efforts to save the dusky masses, ignorant enough to believe in the secret lives of stuffed animals. I could not eat animal crackers because I did not want to hurt the poor things; but, braised the right way, I could eat any part of a pig, starting with the head, working on the soft flesh around the eyes, savoring its raspy tongue with a dipping sauce of ginger, chilies and lime. Oh blameless innocent victim. What measures a lifetime? I used to have this theory about how much life a human body could hold. It all had to do with the number of heartbeats. Each human is assigned a number determined by an unknown power cascading over the dark waters of the unformed Earth. For some, it was a magnificently high number, seen only in Richie Rich comics, and for others, it was frightfully low, like twenty-six. No bargaining, no coupons, no White Flower Day sale, no specials. Once you hit your number, you croak. I imagined the angels in heaven and the demons in hell gathering to watch the counters turn, like how I enjoyed watching the speedometer line up to a row of similar numbers, and especially when the row of nines turned into the row of zeros. Oh blameless innocent victim. What measures eternity? An eternal damnation. An everlasting love. I could not imagine the night sky stretched out forever, so I decided that it came to an end at some point, by a velvet rope it ended and beyond that rope were row after row of cushioned seats, a majestic cosmic theater, playing every movie I can remember. I want to be able to evoke those blameless and innocent days, to revel in their ignorance and goodness as if they have the power to protect and to heal, and to strengthen, and to bring me to safety long after all other resources were exhausted. But I emerge anew in the wreckage, blinking in the sunlight, the residue of salt water in my belly. You know what they say, God never closes a door before making sure that the windows are barricaded and the fire escape is inaccessible. I used to know how to stop the revolution of planets. I used to know how to save the world. Now, I don’t know anything anymore.

Justin Chin

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Relationships,Home Life,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Oh God

spilling water from my back, you call and i come. that exhausted walk to reach you breathless and no i didn’t run to see you, i’ve been smoking too much, same thing. another awkward hug in the car as my face smashes your cheek that i can feel it leaving now is the saddest, a beautiful eruption you could have picked it off the tree and chowed but you weren’t hungry. feeling it dying away all day much worse than the straining against the leash, another gorgeous thing that should not have happened, gone again.

Michelle Tea

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

The Bride of Frank

We were application — aerial shapes investigating their causes as they unfolded their wandering life — possessed of temper, parents, talent, fancy — in books in which characters redeem being from the hands of infidels. I feel soaring pleasure. When I was thirteen I opened my father — title page of my book —to explain exploded powers warmed by a glance. To penetrate the ocean behind the elements and give names — fidelity — from a stream of fire reduced to electricity — over the malignity of an alarming bed — the brightness of a familiar eye commences connection: These are the faces cooped up in one place, and his sweetest voice hiding how the blood circulates, and my peculiar trembled body, the seat of beauty. At the end of two years every object inherited human feelings. I paused and brain exemplified generation. His child pursuing these reflections. My pale cheek and tremendous secrets of fingers. Winter, spring passed — watch the blossom — it breathed hard —convulsive muscles of pearly whiteness — with his watery eyes disturbed by the first kiss traversing my bedchamber. His eyes held up the curtain of the bed. I remained listening, unfinished. My food its white steeple drenched by the rain. We ascended into my room, putting my hands before my eyes —tingle — save me and save me — anticipated with such nervous joy I became capable of shooting forth from the trees — it was a divine spring — that night drawing me out I felt the sensations of others. When shown the body they saw permission — I believe in innocence notwithstanding temptation — whom you loved was a creature who’d fill the air with birds serving you — feelings worked up by events — to wean us fro our future prospects towards a tenderness of fainting limbs, a type of me. I was encompassed by a bodily cloud. I remained rushing at the window. They congregated around me, the unstained pinnacle. I arrived at the same lulling sounds: the giver of oblivion. The ascent is solemn, curling in wreaths — I sat upon the glittering peaks — swelled with sunlight over your narrow beds. I beheld the figure of a man at some distance. As he approached a mist came over my eyes. You are community. Instinctively lying down I covered myself with little winged animals, light from my eyes. Spreading my cloak I covered the ground. One part was open. It was a paradise filled with milk. Uttering a few sounds the young man had been filled up. I awoke into my voice by his means — sun on the red leaves — mounted high in the heavens using gesticulations and a gush of tears. Feelings of kindness and gentleness overcame me. Fringed by deep lashes, I contemplated my companyion…

Aaron Shurin

Burroughs

fleshes his dirty rotten hunka tin I am right strapped into head electrodes he sticks a gun in teen age drug Harry S Truman decided to drop first I am right sequence repeat dim jerky far away smoke cop rat bares his yellow teet kicks in the door I am right survivors burned time and place he throws atom bomb knocks man to floor you are wrong you are wrong he was looking for are wrong Breaks through door I’m poli outside bar Hiroshima has strayed into Dillinger’s right is making a difficult decision right survivors burned mixed you child I am he kicks him into 1914 movie if you are gay I am right wrong executioner officer I am cop right enough you are I am right right wrong Pentagon dim jerky far away smoke. I cut up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity. Is a Burroughs to eat? I am timid, abstract, complete, light fever, timid. Barefoot, yells Hey Pop, got any more Dick Tracys? Burroughs am paying one wrecked penny for the pleasure he’s wreaking on some “boy”; shooting quarts of toxins, skin a welcome mat, body heroically disjunct Picasso (two profiles, left front high…). The stapled urge for self-protection that…Danger is a refuge from more danger. Don’t even know what a Burroughs is. Manhattan Project, first atom bomb test, New Mexico 1945: Oppenheimer and his boys think the planet could go critical. Oppenheimer refigures, the probability remains, “What the hell.” So-and-so many blasts: radioactive sex causes untold genetic mutations. A carnival of giants, vile luminosity sheeting off their scales and exoskeletons, march out of that desert looking for something to eat. I don’t want to die but witness APPETITE and MURDER tread the vile luminous sand: ant spider Gila monster rattler wasp rat locust lizard grasshopper rabbit praying mantis crow ant spider wasp…The entire town of Soda Bluff stampedes down narrow canyons scattering funeral lights beneath their trembling feet. The destruction of today. Last men, mercenaries on the last patrol, eat rations with dog mouths, then fool around in caustic green dusk; they wear Mylar capes and copper-studded jockstraps. Bud’s withheld a basket musta weigh two pounds of fresh peaches. Bud squirms down with a deep sigh, odor of penetration, he says, “I want to be so embraced.” The last ant cold mandibles his thigh, a howl and spasms from Bud’s lifted body mean death. I send my own spear into the enormous insect eye shattering a thousand selves —point touched pinpoint brain, blue sparks, burning isolation, burning rubber, ant collapses, cold heap of old parts. The reason Bud dies, so that his orgasm stays beyond. I don’t wonder who I am, I wonder where I am—still, nothing to do now but kick back and wait for orders.

Robert Glück

Living,Life Choices,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture

Snow

White people leave the express at 96th Street, collectively, like pigeons from a live wire or hope from the hearts of Harlem. And I’m one of them, although my lover sleeps two stops north between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards, wishing my ass were cupped inside her knees and belly, wishing this in a dream thick with inequalities. I live on Riverside Drive. My face helped get me here. I was ruddy with anticipation the day I interviewed for the rooms near the park with its snow-covered maples. I was full of undisguised hope as I strolled along the river, believing I belonged there, that my people inherited this wonderland unequivocally, as if they deserved it. My lover buys twinkies from the Arabs, bootleg tapes on ‘25th, and carries a blade in her back pocket although her hands are the gentlest I’ve known. She ignores the piss smells on the corner, the sirens at 4 A.M., the men whose brains have dissolved in rum. And tries to trust a white woman who sleeps near the trees of Riverside. When we go out together, we avoid expensive cafés on Columbus Avenue, jaunts to the Upper East Side. Harlem eyes us suspiciously or with contempt beneath half-closed lids. We have friends there, hidden in the ruins like gold, who accept us. When it snows, we walk boldly anywhere, as if the snow were a protection, or a death.

Maureen Seaton

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

Proportion Surviving

Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal. My lover, then, wanted to spend much of her life asleep. She had no ostensible reaction to the city’s sudden depletion of all its fresh apples and no hope for them. In a world where a person’s tastes revolve around the kind of sleep she gets, I could not find four people who cared. I thought that if I could find those four people we could really do something. A few of my friends pretended they were chosen. A few neighbors felt bad and made offers. My mother called to console me. My lover—in actuality, the closest person to being a member of the encumbered troop, slept next to me. Sleep became our network: falling in and out of it for change. The rule of survival is that no two people can lie in the same bed and sleep at the same time. So I kept an eye on her and played this game of freshness. If by morning I could quickly run out and do seven things that did not involve longing, she would reward me. Before the crisis, the reward would have needed only to be an apple one. But after the apples were gone. The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost. Demographics help people in cars. Some people did not notice me. Some demographers lose sleep and do not notice me. That was two days before. The evening before it was two days before the crisis, I was thinking that I did not think I was asleep. I had been watching the sunlight take the corner of my room and my housemate’s cat in it. When I looked again, there was no light—but I had not been asleep. It’s the way people react to traumatic events. They say, “I had just been there” or will say, “She was just with me.” So the loss of light was emotional and the lost state—demographic. I began to trace things by their disappearance. Alone in the room, my memory, and anticipated darkness going for light. People like to talk about the daytime. People in strange moods often miss the daytime. Before the crisis it was not often that one would find me in strange moods. I had managed a particular kind of balance fortified by a certain satisfaction of taste. I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice. Five weeks before the crisis, I was employed at the natural foods grocery around the corner from my house. I did not really work there, but I went there every week. All but the third Sunday of each month, I would walk in and find all kinds of juice on sale. Not to buy, but to stand next to. Shorter people have the privilege of proximity to most cardboard signs. That was one thing. I would stand there and be something for taller people who couldn’t see. I had gotten into the habit of improvised customer service as a way to peruse the juice aisles without being noticed. My parents thought my talents should have led me somewhere. My father would always say, “If you’re not going to be a people person, then numbers will have to do.” He was surprised that with all the time I had on my hands, I chose to spend most of it alone. Numbers then did hold some mystery for me, but mostly too high and far-reaching to explore. For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed. My decision to drink only fresh juice, which costs as much as a small satisfying breakfast, kept me busy rounding up cash. I would have to leave most friendships behind. As a way of keeping my life “wall-free,” I had to divide my time. I would spend the first part of the day searching for volunteer positions in organic juice factories. The second part of my day I would spend telling people about the first part. The other parts are not of substance here. Twenty-five years before the crisis I had for the first time what would eventually become known to me as apple juice. Twenty-three years later a magazine editor would reject my first attempt to recount that experience in litany. I am always drinking in my poems, a good friend says. In the first years of my life, everything I ate was mush. Today I will tolerate only the toughest of green vegetables and date people who will always forget this. When I had that remarkable glass of apple juice, I had no idea that one day I simply would not be able to find it. The city gets rid of its apples. People find themselves inventing fruit. The day I decided to write poems about it—it was twelve days before the rumors began and fourteen days before the media coverage—I had been resting in my best friend’s easy chair. We were discussing the rise of the smoothie industry when something fantastic occurred to me. Five days later I had twenty poems. When a person writes a poem about her passions, people on the street are bound to notice them. The passions overwhelm the body. She carries the body as though it were the book. The friend whose easy chair gave way to my failures moved out of town the next week, and though I miss her it was the failures that saved me. On every other day any kind of crisis one finds particular sayings helpful. If certain words are spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of the cup turned toward the wall, whatever strength found in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strutting slightly. In the alley behind the natural foods grocery, I met my second lover for the first time. Meeting people in vulnerable places accentuates the passion later. Or it may be so hot that the lover never thinks in the present. And the weather was so hot during the crisis. Only the alleys had shade. Forty-eight days into the crisis, while on a thirst strike, I had to make a run for the alley. Not as though people were after me, but the elements. The foundation of anyone feeling that they must get away is need; at the bottom of any body-based need is grace. When I appeared at the opening of the alley, a woman who not twenty-four hours later would be dozing in my bed was stacking crates against the east-side wall. Women who work against surfaces inspire me to do things—I thought about telling her, or—short women make me want things. All the time while I was growing up I put a lot of demands on my juice; forty-eight days into the crisis she made me forget it. I did not forget it, but was embroiled. The newspapers were saying things about the past. People were celebrating thick juice, and I kept writing those poems. That day in the alley I realized three things about life. While assisting her I learned three things to carry around with me, to disperse when needed. For six months during the crisis, I did not care about the crisis. When my faith returned all my lovers were gone. That morning I woke to the two hundred and thirty-second day of the crisis; I was beneath my bed. It was the sixth day that I had awakened beneath my bed. I was lonely, but I was also sure. Life without juice had taken on the name and shape of my weakest character, who—when we passed on the street—did not know me. I knew it was me by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are compelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. That day of my faith, friends thinking I was sick came by to see me. It would be the last day I spent alone; I was happy, but still would not drink. The juice on my mind was no longer juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.

Renee Gladman

Living,Life Choices,The Mind,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Home

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair. After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping my chin. My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin. Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from the house. The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth. Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima. In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for their sake. Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can I go down and be the sixth among them. And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go under the blanket and be the sixth among them. Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group under the blanket admits him to their company. Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside. Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered. In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage. I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside. I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English in a book called “Know Your Islam,” dark blue with gold calligraphed writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with marks above and below the letters. I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the language itself. God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit. As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth. I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know where he was being led. When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked. And said, “Father, where is the ram?” Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice his son and proved his love by taking up the knife. Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn. I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath. Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to protect his health. Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the steel comb in water to comb my hair flat. My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight. At which point I realized my hair was curly. My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic. The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his hand before I left. There are two different ways of going about this. If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he asked me. Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss the book. There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to be punishable by lashings and death. Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture. Should I travel out from under the blanket. Comfort from a verse which also recurs: “Surely there are signs in this for those of you who would reflect.” Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur. There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song ofMyself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black BuffaloWoman—somewhere unrevealed as such. Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the annotations. What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions. She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me asPatience. In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top, thirsting for what. My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage. She had told me the reason why. Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages. I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she would give a new son. I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs. It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never forgiven myself. There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make. You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God will still welcome you. My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

Kazim Ali

Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine,Islam

For William McN. who studied with Ezra Pound

in ten Minutes Come back: you will have taught me chiNese (sAtie). shall I retUrn the favor? Give you otHer lessons (Ting!)? Or would you prefer sileNce?

John Cage

Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Music

Female Masculinity

Two guys sucking each other in the steam room didn’t want anything to do with me, evidently— I left them to their comedy. * Legato longings: wish for walnuts, wish for water, wish to exorcise this morning’s debauch— two Fauré nocturnes. * In slow motion Steve tussled with a motorcycle trying to run me over on the boulevard of moon smut splicing together bridges and lagoons, like the bride of Frankenstein rushing to overtake the inert Real, a mass of facts, some conjugal, some comic— contrapuntal tenebrae!

Wayne Koestenbaum

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

How We Sizzled in the Pasture

for Kenward Elmslie Down in the boondocks rhematic sinsigns multiply jug jug to hungry ghosts, bursting open pearly gates. “Aint no grace, aint no guilt, popcorn twiddle, come full tilt” handy pathfinders whoop at no-restriction hurdles : Da woid ob sin aint dare at all, not in giggles nor reddening toes no think blink no tattle no buckle high dick fun at the fair. Vestigial legisigns just don’t operate, healty wisps entwining and buzzing, hinterland busy with fresh huggermugger. Replica points: you point your toes in fact it’s toes we fluffily toss. Secret moon lotion rub by reedy pool. “They call me Googoo” I said, I….. All upsurge, hot tip green informants signify the trees are barking “cheeze it, the cops.” Trees tease, twinkle. That need being versed in country things: guiltless I milked the cow, slaughtered chicken, swam with snakes, unjust barefoot hobbledehoy ahoy.

Gerrit Lansing

Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Class,Town & Country Life

Genius Loci

(Oakland) Make it the place it was then, so full it split vision to live there in winter so late & wet abundance toppled toward awful—birds of paradise a profusion the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters umbrellas smashed like pigeons, bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering; camellias’ pink imagoes dropping into water & rotting, sweet stink— & did not stop : the inundated eye, over- populous urban eye, the whole place, to look at it, was a footprint in January : everywhere cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines, & meanwhile indoors differed by degree alone : without love, loosed from God, there were lovers & touch rushing in to redraw your boundaries constantly because it was a tune you kept getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant to live alone, months of that and then . sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay, balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey & condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk, just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that, taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you . start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?, & small, as in of the back, wet in heat & the urge to touch him there, skin just visible between his jeans & t-shirt, to see if he’s sweating, to see if he feels what you feel?, & if he does, is that all the spirit the place will give, a small thing shared, just a phrase, not a whole song, but something to build on?, & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever, is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, the where to touch it, the when will genius sing your name so it sounds like a place you can live?

Brian Teare

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Nature,Summer,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality

Present Light

If I could hold light in my hand I would give it to you and watch it become your shadow.

Charles Ghigna

Love,Relationships

Hunting the Cotaco Creek

His hand in hold so trigger-tight its blood believes in ghosts. It clings with finger set on steel and waits inside a dream of ducks. The twilight burns into a rising arc of eastern sky as sun reveals herself too proud and instantly receives full-face a splash of mallard flock. A shotgun blasts the yellow into streaming pinks and gives the creek its new-day taste of echoed blood. Two green head ghosts fly through the pulse of dawn upon a trigger’s touch. The creek empties of sound. In silence human fingers find wet feet of web and carry in each hand a bird whose only cry comes in color.

Charles Ghigna

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Southern Bred

In the backyard of my father’s house a hen’s warm neck once filled the center of my pale fist. Her place on the stump still wears my shadow like a stain.

Charles Ghigna

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

A Hymn for Berryman

You marched into the gray eyes of dawn feeling older than the bones that held their ground like grazing, aged cattle waiting, eyes closed to the wind, on a winter, slaughter morning. You searched through the fog for a sign, but there was no sun to burn the way, no burst of rainbow bridge to keep you from the cattle call.

Charles Ghigna

Living,Death,Growing Old,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Poem for Haruko

I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain or happiness like candles lighting the entire soft lace of the air around the full length of your hair/a shower organized by God in brown and auburn undulations luminous like particles of flame But now I do retrieve an afternoon of apricots and water interspersed with cigarettes and sand and rocks we walked across: How easily you held my hand beside the low tide of the world Now I do relive an evening of retreat a bridge I left behind where all the solid heat of lust and tender trembling lay as cruel and as kind as passion spins its infinite tergiversations in between the bitter and the sweet Alone and longing for you now I do

June Jordan

Living,The Body,Love,Desire,Relationships

One Day

One day after another— Perfect. They all fit.

Robert Creeley

Living,Time & Brevity

Pride Diary

1 Who knew it’s quite all right that I downed three gin-and-tonics (can’t fit male inside female part on fanny pack) at four o’clock the Dyke March day of NY Pride? Who knew Manhattan streets would liquefy and lurch with dames sans bras, sans hair, sans shirt in step with beer-can band led by a skirt- ed trans in green brassiere, led by the cops whose sentries are staid as posts with glasses on, lined up beside the march like S/M tops? (They seem to think Gay Pride’s this weekend’s yawn.) (Pit stop at McD’s, can’t clip pack back on.) Who knew she’d march beside me hand-in-hand and who’d expect me to remember names when Liz’s girlfriend saw us and waved “Hi. It’s . . . Anna”? (CNN shot feed, then frames.) Booze-stymied by the glare of girls and sky, how could I choose? Should I grip hand, or pray wondering: Is today today the day she’ll let me turn the key, lead her inside? 2 Okay, I’m sober now. Today is just the kind of day she talks but feels no lust. 3 Beside her isn’t bad. Fan-stirred, the air is humid and the theater is packed. An ear-cuffed thespian tries to fix the cold, our leading ladies sweat it out in back. A prim man to my right begins to sneeze. My nose is in agreement. The perfume from Queen Mother there could clear the room. This shadow play across her face is fine. Her arm’s near mine, which means exactly nothing. Hope’s hope hums on through separate listening. That skull, opaque to me as Midland’s vault, her silky crop, its pepper dabbed with salt — I chuckle at an apt sardonic line. Her suede complexion, lifts up, checks the time. 4. Les Nouvceaux from La Nouvelle Justine I don’t love her. She doesn’t love me. Neither does this waiter who may think it strange when young girls dine with staid dames twice their age on salade de Bastille and pain de Sade. I don’t like sitting by her like wet cloth. I don’t like restaurants whose queers pawn sex to the bachelor bunch who want a thrill. I don’t like dining with my, well, not-ex, both measuring the humid air for signs of sparks I see by parts will not ignite. I’d rather have a knock-down, drag-out fight that cleared the joint than watch another guy get spanked by Corset Kris, who’d like to grab a tit, not spend hip humping hairy thighs. I’d rather I were twice her age and wise. I’d spin cruel stories of past day of bliss then give my own hands covert exercise and send her home to bed without a kiss. 5. L’Addition 30 for the play and 10 for gins, 10 for two cabs and 40 for the eats, at least the metro home was freezer-cold, at least the Broadway Local still had seats at 96th, the local went express. I blistered home ten sockless humid blocks back to my solo digs for solo sex. I got this poem for my 90 bucks.

Jenny Factor

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality

Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves

Darkened not completely dark let us walk in the darkened field trees in the field outlined against that which is less dark under the trees are bushes with orange berries dark green leaves not poetry’s mixing of yellow light blue sky darker than that darkness of the leaves a modulation of the accumulated darkness orange of the berries another modulation spreading out toward us it is like the reverberation of a bell rung three times like the call of a voice the call of a voice that is not there. We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.

John Taggart

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Precious Lord

1 Not sweet sixteen not even sweet sixteen and she’s moaning not even sixteen years old and she’s moaning not even sweet sixteen and she’s moaning the words moaning out the words to “Precious Lord” she says “ain’t no harm to moan” and she’s moaning it’s Aretha in the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit in 1956 words moaned out so that she becomes denuded no more little black dress she has nothing to hide no more little black dress she has nothing left to hide. Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words and the music for “Precious Lord” Thomas Dorsey aka Georgia Tom wrote other songs one of the other songs “Deep Moaning Blues” Thomas Dorsey: “I like the long moaning groaning tone” Georgia Tom moaned “Deep Moaning Blues” with Ma Rainey Georgia Tom and Ma Rainey moan they moan and groan their moaning and groaning make you see moaning and groaning you’re made to see they have nothing. 2 The first time Mahalia does it as one interconnected phrase she does it as three in one three words in one phrase three in one: “take-en-n—my-ah-aah—ha-an-nd” Mahalia does it in the same year in 1956 the same year as Aretha same but different the second time it is more aggressive it’s more aggressive: “take-ake my-ah han-and” Mahalia was a big fine woman Mahalia was denuded she sang “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Martin Luther King Aretha sang “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Mahalia. Thomas Dorsey met Mahalia met her for the first time in 1928 it was in 1928 that Georgia Tom moaned with Ma Rainey he moaned with Ma Rainey he moaned and he groaned with Ma Rainey he met Mahalia and he taught her how to moan “you teach them how to say their words in a moanful way” to say their words how to say his words Mahalia was a big fine woman Mahalia was denuded Dorsey knew the heavier the voice the better the singer Dorsey knew as any teacher knows the heavier the better. 3 Al Green has a softened voice he has a voice made softened he was made to sing softened by Willie Mitchell in 1972 softened and softened and softened Al Green became Rev. Al Green of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in 1980 a tabernacle is a fixed or movable habitation habitation where you stay together with the lord Al Green has a softened voice he has a voice made softened he was made to sing softened on “Let’s Stay Together” in 1982 he was made to sing softened on “Precious Lord.” Photograph of Thomas Dorsey photograph of a smooth operator photograph of Georgia Tom photo of a smooth operator the photo smoothed out retouched softened one side of the face completely light one side of the face all dark one side merges into the light smoothed out softened one side merges into the dark smoothed out made softened in the photograph a smooth operator is lighting a cigarette slender fingers hold a matchbox hold a match slender fingers hold a softened flame against the softened dark. 4 “Lead me” sing “lead me” they move with a repetitive rhythm Dom Mocquereau: “rhythm is the ordering of the movement” repetitive rhythm orders them to move on “lead” they move with all their weight on “lead” it sounds like “feed” it’s the Soul Stirrers it’s the most rhythmic music you ever heard repetitive rhythm it sounds like “feed me” S.R. Crain tenor A.L. Johnson baritone J.J. Farley bass Edmond Jabès: “can we be healed by repetition?” the Soul Stirrers move with a repetitive rhythm sing “feed me.” Thomas Dorsey came to Chicago came looking for deliverance Georgia Tom came in 1916 the Soul Stirrers in 1937 to get deliverance you have to wait on the movements of providence he played piano he sang at buffet flats at rent parties he was a smooth player and he sang softly a smooth player they called him “the whispering piano player” the most popular dance at the parties was the slow drag he learned how to drag easy how to sing softly how to drag easy how to wait on the movements of providence. 5 Soul Stirrers move with a repetitive rhythm sing “feed me” repetitive rhythm orders them to sing “feed me” R.H. Harris sings lead he sings the essential word R.H. Harris taught Sam Cooke and Sam Cooke taught Johnny Taylor Johnny Taylor “Who’s Making Love” 1968 R.H. Harris: “they got a touch of me even if they don’t know me” what they got a touch of touch of tongue love R.H. Harris taught them to study the essential word the word brings it to a picture it’s the lord making love. Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the essential word wrote “precious” not “blessed” the essential word is “precious” this was to be enshrined as a moment of epiphany moment when he wrote the better-sounding word moment of épiphanie epiphania epiphano epiphaneia epiphanies moment of epiphany essential word shining picture Dorsey: “that thing like something hit me and went all over me” that thing must be that same thing went all over him. 6 Clara Ward’s real nasal her nasality makes her a real moaner she moans the three in one three words in one word she moans so that one word becomes three one becomes three: “thru-uuu-uah” double-clutches just like Aretha: “thru-ah thru-uuu-uah the night” sounds just like Aretha because Aretha sounds just like her Aretha followed Clara Ward note for moaning note denuded Aretha followed denuded Clara and did Aretha follow her to the lord to the lord to the light. Thomas Dorsey was invited to Philadelphia by Gertrude Ward Mrs. Gertrude Mae Murphy Ward the mother of Clara in 1931 Mrs. Ward was told in a vision was told to go and to sing Dorsey was invited to teach the Wards how to sing how to say his words in a moanful way Dorsey liked the long moaning groaning tone Mrs. Ward was told in a vision a vision from the lord Dorsey taught Clara and Clara taught Aretha how to say his words in a moanful way all through the night. 7 Sounds like “feed me” doesn’t sound like the Soul Stirrers it’s not the Soul Stirrers it’s the Kings of Harmony the Kings of Harmony with Carey Bradley on lead Carey Bradley was taught by Silas Steele the first hard lead Silas Steele sang lead for the Blue Jay Singers those singers recorded the first quartet version of a Dorsey song Silas Steele sang hard with a repetitive rhythm question is can we be healed by repetition over “feed me” Carey Bradley sings hard: “take-ah my hand.” Blue Jay Singers the first quartet to record a Dorsey song in 1931 those singers recorded “If You See My Saviour” those singers: “if you see my saviour tell him that you saw me” in 1931 Georgia Tom recorded “Please Mr. Blues” Georgia Tom recorded in 1931 with Tampa Red Georgia Tom and Tampa Red recorded a low moaning blues “Please Mr. Blues” is a deep low-down moaning blues those singers: “please be careful handle me like a child” if you saw their saviour you would see Mr. Blues. 8 Brother Joe May has a big voice has a big and loud voice Brother Joe May the thunderbolt of the Middle West the way he sang “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” is like thunder he was taught to sing “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” by Mother Smith he was taught to sing by Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith she was called Mother he called her Mother Mother Smith: “the lord just anoints me while I’m singing” when you’re anointed something goes all over you must be that same thng went all over her went all over her son. Mrs. Willie May introduced “If You See My Saviour” in 1930 this was before she was called Mother twenty years before Brother Joe May sang “pra-aaa-aaa-aaa-shus” in 1930 in Chicago at the National Baptist Convention during the morning devotions at the convention she sang “you saw me” during the morning devotions in 1930 in Chicago Georgia Tom recorded “She Can Love So Good” in 1931 in Chicago Georgia Tom recorded “Please Mr. Blues” if you saw her you’d see Mr. Blues loving her so good. 9 Way past sixteen way past sweet sixteen and she’s moaning she says “when I don’t feel like singing I moan” it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe at The Hot Club de France in 1966 Sister Rosetta had dyed her hair red played a hollow-body jazz guitar Sister Rosetta has a resonating vibrato she moans “ho-oo-oo-oo-meh” with a resonating vibrato she moans out “ho-oo-oo-oo-meh” becomes resonant “when I don’t feel like singing I moan” she becomes completely resonant she has nothing left to hide. Thomas Dorsey wrote the words wrote the words and the music Thomas Dorsey wrote the words and the music for “Precious Lord” the song is an answer song to another song answer to George Nelson Allen’s “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” George Nelson Allen thought the answer was no a cross for everyone “there’s a cross for everyone” Thomas Dorsey thought the answer was no “see you got to be susceptible for whatever comes in the ear” he got Sister Rosetta to be susceptible got everyone susceptible.

John Taggart

Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Popular Culture

All the Steps

1 Those who hear the train they had better worry worry those who hear they had better worry worry. 2 No disgrace to worry to have the worried life blues might do some good to be worried in the hour of our need. 3 Run run run away going to run run run away there are those who think they’re going to run away. 4 To hear and to be facing and to be facing what is heard to hear and to be face to face with what is heard. 5 Run run run away they’re going to run run run away there are those who think they’re going to run away from the train. 6 Fort built to protect the community from desert raiders community thought to protect itself from raiders. 7 Those who hear the train they had better worry worry better worry worry about a gift of tears. 8 Those who are gathered in the fort had better learn they had better learn how to cure their wounds. 9 The train with its poison and its tongue the lurking train with its poison and its tongue. 10 Those who are gathered better learn to be insensitive learn how to put on a show of being insensitive. 11 Danger of its poison and of its tongue danger of its poison and of its tongue against our teeth. 12 Had better break the habit the habit of prayer better let the jokes come back to us when we’re at prayer. 13 What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer standing in a gathering in the need of prayer. 14 Don’t if we don’t if we don’t break the habit we will be made to climb all the steps of the ladder. 15 Brood over someone else’s dream: three-story red tower beneath the tower the train is always departing. 16 Danger of its tongue for those gathered like a group gathered like a group of all virgins with their downcast eyes. 17 There is this problem with cutting off the prayer hand there is this problem with the other hand. 18 How insensitive is how those who hear better be how insensitive how unmoved and cold they had better be. 19 You can call him you can call him up and ask him if we had only asked for “Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny. 20 Red tower green sky three-story tower against green sky beneath the tower the train is always departing. 21 Don’t break it be made to climb all the steps we don’t break it we’ll be made to climb all the steps. 22 Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor the small ant anticipates by sound or shadow. 23 Light turns out in the kitchen when somebody pulls on the string those gathered not able to anticipate the danger. 24 If we had only stayed in the school of the prophets in the school of the prophets who catch thoughts from words. 25 Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor those gathered not able to anticipate the danger. 26 Those who are gathered are fondled and taken by the hand taken by the hand and made to climb all the steps. 27 Perfectly built fort bound to make the community unhappy bound to make those in the community unhappy. 28 What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer I’m standing in the need of jokes that come back. 29 Standing in the need of prayer in a perfectly built fort bound to make you unhappy bound to make me unhappy. 30 Not broken the habit of prayer not been broken those who are gathered better learn how to cure their wounds.

John Taggart

Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Refrains for Robert Quine

Love comes in spurts. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS 1 And goes is gone cause for mourning head in hands in tears gonna be a long long wait for the resurrection of the dead. There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful at sunrise in the white light there is a garden with high walls around it jardin de plaisir of mint and lavender of hyssop in hedges glassy beads of water on velvet leaves purple-flaked lupin spikes above velvet pulmonaria there is a gardener la belle jardinière bare-breasted and bare-footed bouquets of all flowers in her arms and woven in her hair. 2 And it hurts not good but bad to see a man head in hands in tears it breaks you up to see a man come down in tears. There are birds there is birdsong having come through hunger and danger there is free song a free weaving of many songs song against song and other songs clustered/spun out in a blending of wavy pitches tant doucement the phrase means what the songs mean freshness that meaning so sweetly and freely as a gardener weaves flowers in her hair. 3 Can we stay in the weave of that meaning can we/should we attempt to stay to linger in a pleasure garden everlasting dream of love tomorrow its unseen/secret structure when our time remains a bad time and what time wasn’t bad wasn’t and isn’t a time of hunger and danger of young men and older men in tears our time a time of terror and counterterror can we/should we our time remaining a really bad time a really down and dirty time of terror what walls do not fall and who says they have no fear. 4 And boo-hoo-hoo like dolls hurts breaks you up like dolls get broken the visible human the visibly spastic plastic. There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful having come through there is a garden with swept gravel paths dream designed/bel et bon designed connecting and interconnecting non brisé where men and women are in contemplation in conversation in one another’s eyes there is a gardener holding her bouquets and holding her skirts like the light like so sweetly woven song like love never for sale.

John Taggart

Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Music

Winter

How long will the bed that we made together hold us there? Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered particles now, islands of shaving foam slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops stippling the water pink as I kiss the back of your neck, our faces framed inside a medicine cabinet mirror. The blade of your hand carves a portal out of steam, the two of us like boys behind frosted glass who wave goodbye while a car shoves off into winter. All that went unnoticed till now — empty cups of coffee stacked up in the sink, the neighborhood kids up to their necks in mounds of autumn leaves. How months on a kitchen calendar drop like frozen flies, the flu season at its peak followed by a train of magic-markered xxx’s — nights we’d spend apart. Death must work that way, a string of long distance calls that only gets through to the sound of your voice on our machine, my heart’s mute confession screened out. How long before we turn away from flowers altogether, your blind hand reaching past our bedridden shoulders to hit that digital alarm at delayed intervals — till you shut it off completely.

Timothy Liu

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

Nocturnal Admissions

I went to my mother’s room at 13 past midnight, and told her I was dying. I’d wet the bed, I’d had this crazy dream, about a sexy neighbor I’d been spying on. Well, I didn’t tell her that. I mean, the day before she asked who I was eyeing when I didn’t want to go outside for ice cream. The truck was parked out front, and she was buying, but I couldn’t join the other screaming kids — not with Lance applying suntan lotion to his muscled teenage skin. Stretched out on a beach towel in his front yard, his body mystified me, while mine seemed happy to defy me. My dick would tent my cut-offs at the sight of him. I wore two pair of underwear, but even then I thought I’d burst right through the seams. So I didn’t dare tell mother what I’d dreamed, though she did think to ask me. I’d have been a fool to tell her that. She thought my blush was any boy’s, puzzling out his sexuality, but I swear it was as much because the fantasies were always other boys. some from my baseball team, some the roughnecks at school, but usually Lance. He was flying naked in the dream I had that night, the one that made me think that God was mad and killing me. I was lying (also naked — and hard as cinder block) on the beach towel I’d seen him lay across the grass the day before. I tried to understand the signs implying I might turn into some kind of freaky thing. But it would have been cruel to tell my mother that, especially when she was already crying, and trying not to laugh at the same time, when I showed her what came out of me. She apologized for throwing such a scene, said I was growing up to be a man, that’s all it meant, said it was normal for a boy my age’s thing to start uprising like a metal beam. She apologized again that I didn’t have my dad around to train an 11-year old boy in the ways of puberty. I was as stupefied as I’ve ever been. She never mentioned him. And I have never turned a deeper red than I did then, at 26 past midnight, when my mother helped me change my sheets, and said the next day she’d teach me to wash them. And then she said she’d ask the man across the street to talk to me. Would that be okay? Or would I feel more comfortable with someone younger, like his son?

Chip Livingston

Living,Coming of Age,Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

Pulse: 1

1. It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so — He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues. All desiccant names now after an earthquake Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I’m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron. The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.

Fady Joudah

Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Animals,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries

The Tea and Sage Poem

At a desk made of glass, In a glass walled-room With red airport carpet, An officer asked My father for fingerprints, And my father refused, So another offered him tea And he sipped it. The teacup Template for fingerprints. My father says, it was just Hot water with a bag. My father says, in his country, Because the earth knows The scent of history, It gave the people sage. I like my tea with sage From my mother’s garden, Next to the snapdragons She calls fishmouths Coming out for air. A remedy For stomach pains she keeps In the kitchen where She always sings. First, she is Hagar Boiling water Where tea is loosened. Then she drops In it a pinch of sage And lets it sit a while. She tells a story: The groom arrives late To his wedding Wearing only one shoe. The bride asks him About the shoe. He tells her He lost it while jumping Over a house-wall. Breaking away from soldiers. She asks: Tea with sage Or tea with mint? With sage, he says, Sweet scent, bitter tongue. She makes it, he drinks.

Fady Joudah

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Sleeping Trees

Between what should and what should not be Everything is liable to explode. Many times I was told who has no land has no sea. My father Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story Of a sycamore tree he used to climb When he was young to watch the rain. Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red. My brother believed bad dreams could kill A man in his sleep, he insisted We wake my father from his muffled screams On the night of the day he took us to see his village. No longer his village he found his tree amputated. Between one falling and the next There’s a weightless state. There was a woman Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand. When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew Could turn anyone into one-half reptile. I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being The only one left. When we woke my father He was running away from soldiers. Now He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king And tried not to stop. He flew But mother woke him and held him for an hour, Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward. Maybe if I had just said it.Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe I don’t know much about dreams But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead Know about the dying and sometimes Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree My father used to climb When he was young to watch the rain stream, And he would gently swing.

Fady Joudah

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

Scarecrow

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows, They know what they love, milk in the grain. When it happens, there will be no time to look for anyone. Husband, children, nine brothers and sisters. You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket, Stop shouting at birds and run. They will load you in trucks and herd you for a hundred miles. Old men will teach you trade with soldiers at checkpoints. You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans, They’ll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck, The army jeep trailing it will run you over. Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land. Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive enough to eat. Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks. And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots, Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets. And you will keep your cool. Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them. Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.

Fady Joudah

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Moon Grass Rain

1. Here, shooting stars linger They give out A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision Silver, or amber If the moon is low and rising red 2. And the rain melts the roads And the roads Can rupture a spleen Or oust a kidney stone As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events 3. “Mize, zey eat mize” The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile “Rraized and shipped from za States” We raise rats! I thought That’s a lot of protein! “Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens Have had their fill 4. She was the only nurse in town before the war She spoke seven languages and died suddenly He was a merchant He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes 5. Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice Here they are dancing Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia 6. One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks The neighbor demanded compensation For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates Do you know what it’s like To drive on roads occupied By animal farms: you cannot tell Who killed who or how Many ducks were there to begin with 7. In the morning, elephant grass moves the way Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin 8. Today, I yelled at three old women Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need One wanted extra For her grandson who came along for the ride 9. Like lip sores The asphalt blisters in the rain And the boys Fill the holes with dirt and gravel And broken green branches Then wait: No windex. No flowers or newspapers And gratuity is appreciated 10. “I have ants in my leg” And “My leg went to sleep” Are not the same thing! The French argue There is no sleep in a tingling numbness The symptom of sluggish blood: I agree. Me too my leg has been anted And we are learning to reconcile The dark with the electric 11. Four days the river runs to the border Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape Of your nose that gave you away And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day A pile of wood plus change in your pocket Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s 12. No more running long or short distance The old women Snicker at me when I pass them by 13. She was comatose post-partum And the beekeeper Bathed her in love everyday When she recovered I gave up What he’d promised me for the woman Who took up nursing their newborn Since as coincidence would have it Her name was Om Assel — Mother of Honey 14. The translation of a medical interview Is not a poem to be written Come recite a verse from childhood with meI see you’re unable to weep, does loveHave no command over you? The sea’s like the desertNeither quenches the thirst 15. Here, dry grass burns the moon Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes 16. And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky The clinic is empty, soon The earth will unseal like a jar Harvest is the season that fills the belly 17. Here, I ride my bicycle invisible Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way Is already past 18. And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon Home is an epilogue: Which came first Memory or words?

Fady Joudah

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Weather,Religion

The Whip

I spent a night turning in bed, my love was a feather, a flat sleeping thing. She was very white and quiet, and above us on the roof, there was another woman I also loved, had addressed myself to in a fit she returned. That encompasses it. But now I was lonely, I yelled, but what is that? Ugh, she said, beside me, she put her hand on my back, for which act I think to say this wrongly.

Robert Creeley

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships,Men & Women

The Tunnel

Tonight, nothing is long enough— time isn’t. Were there a fire, it would burn now. Were there a heaven, I would have gone long ago. I think that light is the final image. But time reoccurs, love—and an echo. A time passes love in the dark.

Robert Creeley

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Love,Romantic Love

The Rain

All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

Robert Creeley

Living,The Mind,Love,Romantic Love,Nature,Weather

Kora in Hell: Improvisations II

To Flossie II 1 Why go further? One might conceivably rectify the rhythm, study all out and arrive at the perfection of a tiger lily or a china doorknob. One might lift all out of the ruck, be a worthy successor to—the man in the moon. Instead of breaking the back of a willing phrase why not try to follow the wheel through—approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery. There’s as much reason one way as the other and then—one never knows—perhaps we’ll bring back Eurydice—this time! _______________  Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest. And so it may be that once upon the way the end drives back upon the beginning and a stoppage will occur. At such a time the poet shrinks from the doom that is calling him forgetting the delicate rhythms of perfect beauty, preferring in his mind the gross buffetings of good and evil fortune.2 Ay dio! I would say so much were it not for the tunes changing, changing, darting so many ways. One step and the cart’s left you sprawling. Here’s the way! and—you’re hip bogged. And there’s blame of the light too: when eyes are humming birds who’ll tie them with a lead string? But it’s the tunes they want most,—send them skipping out at the tree tops. Whistle then! who’d stop the leaves swarming; curving down the east in their braided jackets? Well enough—but there’s small comfort in naked branches when the heart’s not set that way.________________ A man’s desire is to win his way to some hilltop. But against him seem to swarm a hundred jumping devils. These are his constant companions, these are the friendly images which he has invented out of his mind and which are inviting him to rest and to disport himself according to hidden reasons. The man being half a poet is cast down and longs to rid himself of his torment and his tormentors. 3 When you hang your clothes on the line you do not expect to see the line broken and them trailing in the mud. Nor would you expect to keep your hands clean by putting them in a dirty pocket. However and of course if you are a market man, fish, cheeses and the like going under your fingers every minute in the hour you would not leave off the business and expect to handle a basket of fine laces without at least mopping yourself on a towel, soiled as it may be. Then how will you expect a fine trickle of words to follow you through the intimacies of this dance without—oh, come let us walk together into the air awhile first. One must be watchman to much secret arrogance before his ways are tuned to these measures. You see there is a dip of the ground between us. You think you can leap up from your gross caresses of these creatures and at a gesture fling it all off and step out in silver to my finger tips. Ah, it is not that I do not wait for you, always! But my sweet fellow—you have broken yourself without purpose, you are—Hark! it is the music! Whence does it come? What! Out of the ground? Is it this that you have been preparing for me? Ha, goodbye, I have a rendezvous in the tips of three birch sisters. Encouragez vos musiciens! Ask them to play faster. I will return—later. Ah you are kind.—and I? must dance with the wind, make my own snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fugue! Huzza then, this is the dance of the blue moss bank! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.

William Carlos Williams

Living,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries

I Walked in the House

I walked in the house on the flat aspect of the wood I took rectangular instruction of the wood when I walked I turned at the wall and on the flat I moved steadily unimpeded, not tumbling, climbing or short of breath. I walked in ease on the flat. Something electric charged into our account and zinged out of it, pre-instructed and paid for the house. I felt house on my heel then instep and toe. I had a bad foot and I paid to get it fixed so I could walk here. I paid for the house and I paid for the foot that touches it. I paid to be directed rectangularly and down a hall. I curved my body to direct my waste through a hole. I am helped and paying for it. all of me exchanged, housing exchange. I saw us standing up in the world. And we sank into exchange vibrating transparency like a sea nettle afloat in the night sea the edges of the sea-veil tensed slapping above, visible when the wind crevassed and doilied If there is a ceiling to exchange and above it sky I don’t can’t see it and I don’t know why I want it above my house which is crystalline gel edges because the whole world’s disappeared viewed as exchange I broke my arm and the window integrally to exchange. I paid someone to fix me and improve the window, triple-glazing it, and warmer I rebounded knit in knit up. All parties to the event’s aftermath were paid. Suppose I did not go in pain to hospital, did not visit and revisit for x-rays, left the window smashed and sat here by it, stuck up among the crystalline and cold. I was painful and determined not to play, and with the other unemployed weighed — the ghostship sagged with holes. —So you want to be a thing outside exchange? Drain out the dying bath see what color you are? The coin changed hands identical with a will to transact.

Catherine Wagner

Living,Life Choices,The Body,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Macular Hole

Please god love me and buy me Read this hillock and ride me Wraith typing all day for money. God bought me today for two silver fish in a can God bought me tomorrow for bland in a pan and a card an email from Rebecca Bought four hours of my control alt delete shut down Bought a new day-section with a headstand My commerce in shall Sky like a grandstand Transact God performed me today for a half minute lucky in locker room hiding my boobs from the kids and my hair is silky and my mane shot silk gold Bought a book on economy Georgie Bataille Called about plane tickets Georgie Bataille I bought my debt today Georgie Bataille hooray Debt off my God today God off my debt in a macular hole I dream of an end like a fount to this night Run thinner and thinner and then it’s all light Macerated in signal by my go I bought my ghost I walk my ghost

Catherine Wagner

Living,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,God & the Divine,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Exercise 8 (12/4/00 AM)

Raise up your back like an insect on the face of the nation He took Miss Mousie on his knee, O say little mouse will you marry me? Getting hair cut this morning illegally I can’t afford it Fourteen fifteen I depend on you and roiling unlap this morn The mind refrigerated all night Now to clarify the broth skim off the oil & swallow it is your oil I must have it shorter so it grows longer in unison A glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears

Catherine Wagner

Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Social Commentaries

My New Job

I am Invested in by a Huge Fund Heavy highquality furniture Sense of heavy Addiction glossy pleasance I was lying Down on a yoga mat My bones basketing air Barely draped in skin the basket Effulged by local Air Highquality scented humid air to support My orchid Skin Suffuged in this Air expense I nearly floated Who was my Body I am comfortable I am comfortable Flying my spirit On a long leash She is in the wind I am in the belle belle jar shellacked and brittle begins to ding How can I From inside this comfort Represent Hope to No no I am Too tempted To think I Deserve it Rigidly and with effort know my privilege I know my fluorescent doorway A rectangle Among the ceiling tiles Ordinary flecked coated 1) foam rectangles and one hard white light regularly rubbled 2) glass rectangle these are my choices the ceiling tile I would tear in behind the Ugly lattice to the Duct area Unscrew the grille Smallen myself Into the dark cold Square pipe To share My cold What is in My basket Bone-basket With the other breathers/Workers Or through the fluorescent door Means giving up On going behind the lattice. All that’s allowed Through the flow light Is what Is shined upon The light bends looking at my Skin and hair and green blouse When I concentrate The light bending All at once Hooks my outsides Hooks them into itself Now I am absent that I am not / shined upon very small dusty lizardlike a toad a turd on a tabletop corner And the outside of that is hooked away wow my parents hooked away People on the street skin and clothing hung on hangers from electric wires blooming and twisting swells of breeze leave behind on the street a fair weather an easy weather walk-through I think I’m better than the walk-throughs because something is left of me that’s what I think I must be wrong to think so Would you like to Eat at my house Fill up your Walk-through You drive through Fill it up with tea and sheets water from the toilet These could be your eyebrows [crayons] these could be your knees, these coasters What could be your inside? Paper wadded paper It says something What about Something sticky For your mouth Honey Then we will read you For dinner In my transitional housing [dirt ball toad] I picked myself apart With a fork Connected a wire Where my belly was Coiled up the plug The prongs poke hurt This is the part Light plugs into My/The outside plugs into To light up The shine is from unshiny sewn in place with the little Light hooks Made a case for me Visible so I retaliated Against the hooks I was trying My lizard turd was trying to join the other Mud my thrashing harnessed motored made the light Meanwhile My toad absorbed pollution from the walkthroughs High empty thoughts Funneled backchannel Won’t you be mine [mind] Be my thought softening the rockmud I will reorient now I will claymation That is a scary Gingerbready mud man walking You can’t catch me hole for Your thoughts tunneled invisible Unreflecting unrepresenter Not wrapped The Sun is here Also later and at the same time the sun burned up and we revolved around it dirt rock warm dirt rock in the dark of coursing around the dark I have made myself the center of the galaxy I am very important to myself must lose this visibility The shine is off perspect while kicking Where do you think they get the lights from? Burn it up, burn up all the fuel into furious dirt Nematodes don’t need light When I am in a room with forest It is not that myself comes home to myself Selva oscura, ya Obsecurity of self I considered long and seriously before I was bornt I stood on the street With the hookers Who were selling Disappear into a hole Into Mama but come back out. Go in, boys. Go in and stay there.

Catherine Wagner

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries

Your Voice

Amazing the mood it's put me in. And the sky's tint at this hour—out on my own, occasional hum or zip of a car, August the summer month half the city splashes about the Mediterranean, or north: the beach at Donostia a jewel —its Paseo the lip of a shell to walk. It's hearing you what really pulls me in, soft this interior punch, recalling the sheen of your brow—we'd talk with our limbs, the Liffey below, have lunch... Re-lived this evening on the phone; the pitch of your Dublin tone. Madrid

Francisco Aragón

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

Spitwads

Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance.

Michael McFee

Living,Activities,School & Learning,Philosophy

Peach Fires

Out in the orchards the dogs stoodAlmost frozen in the bleak spring night & Mister dragged out into the rows Between his peach trees the old dry limbsBuilding at regular intervals careful pyres While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped & the ice began to hang long as whiskersFrom the globes along the branches & at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze Tending each carefully so as not to scorchThe trees as we steadily fed those flames Just enough to send a rippling glow along Those acres of orchard where that body—Sister Winter—had been held so wisely to the fire

David St. John

Nature,Winter

Mutability ["We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon"]

I. We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soonNight closes round, and they are lost for ever:— II.Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast,To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. III.We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep; We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:— IV.It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free;Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Living,Time & Brevity

Kora in Hell: Improvisations XXVII

XXVII 1 This particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry. D.C. al fin. 2 There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that puts wings to your heels, at your knees. 3 Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed: crisp summer!—neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh! ________________ Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rise: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozenness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other.

William Carlos Williams

Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

Kora in Hell: Improvisations XXII

XXII 1 This is a slight stiff dance to a waking baby whose arms have been lying curled back above his head upon the pillow, making a flower—the eyes closed. Dead to the world! Waking is a little hand brushing away dreams. Eyes open. Here’s a new world. _______________  There is nothing the sky-serpent will not eat. Sometimes it stops to gnaw Fujiyama, sometimes to slip its long and softly clasping tongue about the body of a sleeping child who smiles thinking its mother is lifting it. 2 Security, solidity—we laugh at them in our clique. It is tobacco to us, this side of her leg. We put it in our samovar and make tea of it. You see the stuff has possibilities. You think you are opposing the rich but the truth is you’re turning toward authority yourself, to say nothing of religion. No, I do not say it means nothing. Why everything is nicely adjusted to our moods. But I would rather describe to you what I saw in the kitchen last night—overlook the girl a moment: there over the sink (1) this saucepan holds all, (2) this colander holds most, (3) this wire sieve lets most go and (4) this funnel holds nothing. You appreciate the progression. What need then to be always laughing? Quit phrase making—that is, not of course—but you will understand me or if not—why—come to breakfast sometime around evening on the fourth of January any year you please; always be punctual where eating is concerned. ________________ My little son’s improvisations exceed min: a round stone to him’s a loaf of bread or “this hen could lay a dozen golden eggs.” Birds fly about his bedstead; giants lean over him with hungry jaws; bears roam the farm by summer and are killed and quartered at a thought. There are interminable stories at eating time full of bizarre imagery, true grotesques, pigs that change to dogs in the telling, cows that sing, roosters that become mountains and oceans that fill a soup plate. There are groans and growls, dun clouds and sunshine mixed in a huge phantasmagoria that never rests, never ceased to unfold into—the day’s poor little happenings. Not that alone. He has music which I have not. His tunes follow no scale, no rhythm—alone the mood in odd ramblings up and down, over and over with a rigor of invention that rises beyond the power to follow except in some more obvious flight. Never have I heard so crushing a critique as those desolate inventions, involved half-hymns, after his first visit to a Christian Sunday school. 3 This song is to Phyllis! By this deep snow I know it’s springtime, not ring time! Good God no! The screaming brat’s a sheep bleating, the rattling crib-side sheep shaking a bush. We are young! We are happy! says Colin. What’s an icy room and the sun not up? This song is to Phyllis. Reproduction lets death in, says Joyce. Rot, say I. to Phyllis this song is! ________________ That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it. 

William Carlos Williams

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

Kora in Hell: Improvisations XIV

XIV1 The brutal Lord of All will rip us from each other—leave the one to suffer here alone. No need belief in god or hell to postulate that much. The dance: hands touching, leaves touching—eyes looking, clouds rising—lips touching, cheeks touching, arm about . . . Sleep. Heavy head, heavy arm, heavy dream—: Of Ymir’s flesh the earth was made and of his thoughts were all the gloomy clouds created. Oya! ________________ Out of bitterness itself the clear wine of the imagination will be pressed and the dance prosper thereby. 2 To you! whoever you are, wherever you are! (But I know where you are!) There’s Dürer’s “Nemesis” naked on her sphere over the little town by the river—except she’s too old. There’s a dancing burgess by Tenier and Villon’s maitresse—after he’d gone bald and was skin pocked and toothless: she that had him ducked in the sewage drain. Then there’s that miller’s daughter of “buttocks broad and breastes high.” Something of Nietzsche, something of the good Samaritan, something of the devil himself,—can cut a caper of a fashion, my fashion! Hey you, the dance! Squat. leap. Hips to the left. Chin—ha!—sideways! Stand up, stand up ma bonne! you’ll break my backbone. So again!—and so forth till we’re sweat soaked. ________________ Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem. It so happened that the words of the thing spoke of gross matters of the everyday world such as are never much hidden from a quick eye. Out of these semblances, and borrowing certain members from fitting masterpieces of antiquity, the poet began piping up his music, simple fellow, thinking to please his listeners. But they getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him with violent imprecations. 3 It’s all one. Richard worked years to conquer the descending cadence, idiotic sentimentalist. Ha, for happiness! This tore the dress in ribbons from her maid’s back and not spared the nails either; wild anger spit from her pinched eyes! This is the better part. Or a child under a table to be dragged out coughing and biting, eyes glittering evilly. I’ll have it my way! Nothing is any pleasure but misery and brokenness. THIS is the only up-cadence. This is where the secret rolls over and opens its eyes. Bitter words spoken to a child ripple in morning light! Boredom from a bedroom doorway thrills with anticipation! The complaints of an old man dying piecemeal are starling chirrups. Coughs go singing on springtime paths across a field; corruption picks strawberries and slow warping of the mind, blacking the deadly walls—counted and recounted—rolls in the grass and shouts ecstatically. All is solved! The moaning and dull sobbing of infants sets blood tingling and eyes ablaze to listen. Speed sings in the heels at long nights tossing on coarse sheets with bruning sockets staring into the black. Dance! Sing! Coil and uncoil! Whip yourselves about! Shout the deliverance! An old woman has infected her blossomy grand-daughter with a blood illness that every two weeks drives the mother into hidden songs of agony, the pad-footed mirage of creeping death for music. The face muscles keep pace. Then a darting about the compass in a tarantelle that wears flesh from bones. Here is dancing! The mind in tatters. And so the music wistfully takes the lead. Ay de mí, Juana la Loca, reina de España, esa está tu canta, reina mía!

William Carlos Williams

Living,The Body,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Kora in Hell: Improvisations XI

XI 1 Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink! _______________ Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities. 2 When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’s hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stone—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump. Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the country have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee? ________________ Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of the fancy which they have drunk four rollicking companions take delight in the thought that they have thus evaded the stringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathed in moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken the moon to a cow and its light to milk.

William Carlos Williams

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Weather,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

What the Bones Know

Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath. The later Yeats was right To think of sex and death And nothing else. Why wait Till we are turning old? My thoughts are hot and cold. I do not waste my breath.

Carolyn Kizer

Living,The Body,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Where I've Been All My Life

I. Sirs, in our youth you love the sight of us. Older, you fall in love with what we’ve seen, Would lose yourselves by living in our lives. I’ll spin you tales, play the Arabian girl; Working close, alone in the blond arena, Flourish my cape, the cloth on the camera. For women learn to be a holy show. I’ll tell you where I’ve been, not what I am: In Rotterdam, womb where my people sprang, I find my face, my father, everywhere. New cousins I must stoop to greet, the get Of tall, whey-colored burghers, sturdy dams, As children fed on tulip bulbs and dirt, Tugged at dry dugs and sucked at winter’s rind. My cousins, dwarfed by war! Your forms rebuke The butcher and the bystander alike. To ease you I can’t shrink this big Dutch frame Got of more comfortable ancestors. But from my Southern side I pluck a phrase, “I’ll carry you.” And it means “rest in me,” To hold you as I may, in my mind’s womb. But snap the album, get the guidebook out! Rotterdam: her raw, gray waterfront, Zadkine’s memorial burning on the quay; This bronze is mortal, gaping in defeat, The form that wombed it split to let it be. It mends; he lurches up, in blood reborn, The empty heavens his eternal frame. II. Move to my room beside the Golden Horn Where minarets strike fire against the sky. The architecture: breasts and phalluses. Where are the words to say that words are lies? Yeats lied. And here Byzantium lies dead. Constantinople? Syllables in a text. Istanbul. Real. Embalmed in dancing dust. Everywhere the dark-brown past gives way To the beige of progress, that wide vacant lot. Turkey without coffee! Endlessly we sip tea From bud vases, and I lust for the guide, A sultry, serious, pedantic boy In a tight brown suit, thirsting to get out Of the triple city weighing on his mind. Oh, he was doomed, doomed like the dogs On Dog Island, in the sea, Netted and dumped and exiled, left to die, Then skinned. We heard imaginary canine howls, Like the rustlings of a thousand gauzy girls, Film-eyed cattle, perishing of ennui In abandoned harems where he guided me. Meanwhile the Faithful, prostrate and intoning, Stare into the light as blind as death, Knowing for sure their end is instant Heaven. We Infidels concede them Paradise, Having seen heaven-as-harem, a eunuch God In charge: the virgin slowly fattening to blubber. Love, become feminized, tickles like a feather. The saints of Art? Sophia, that vast barn Holds no small Savior waiting to get born. The formal scribble on the assaulted walls— Five hundred years of crossing out His name! Some famous, glittering pebbles mark the place As God’s most grandiose sarcophagus. Decay, decay. And the mind, a fetus, dies. III. Return me to the airfield near Shanghai Where I am very young: shy, apprehensive, Seated like Sheba on a baggage mountain Waiting for the first adventure to begin. The train will glide through fields of rice and men, Bodies like thongs, and glorious genitals, Not alien as Chinese, but Adam-strange. Rejoiced by her first look at naked men, Her soul swims out the window of the train! She goes where newborn daughters clog the creeks; Bank-porticoes are strewn with starving rags. Here the old dragon, China, thrashes, dying. But the ancient, virile music of the race Is rising, drenched in gongs and howls of dogs Islanded, the sighs of walled-up women Dreaming of peasants in their prisoning fields… But we break out of the harem of history! No longer that young foreigner on the train, I listen like a bird, although I ruminate Like a cow, in my pale Holland body, riven By love and children. These eyes are what they see. Come die with me in the mosques of Rotterdam.

Carolyn Kizer

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships

October 1973

Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown until heaps of rich, beautiful fabric were strewn over the chairs and sofas. They posed before mirrors, with their diamonds and trinkets and floor-length furs. Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help. They became distracted—by constantly ringing phones, by obsequious secretaries, bustling in with packages, flowers, messages, all the paraphernalia, all part of the uninterruptible rounds of the rich, the nice rich, smiling soothingly, as they touched their hair or picked up their phone extensions. Absently patting my arm, they smiled, “It will be all right.” Dusk fell on the city as I ran, naked, weeping, into the streets. I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, Who, as a young girl, rescued four Loyalist soldiers from a Spanish prison; in her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks, she drove an old car sagging with Loyalist pamphlets across the Pyrenees all the way to Paris without being caught. And not long ago, she helped save a group of men from Franco’s sentence of death. In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona. I realize this isn’t quite right, but I just stand there paralyzed, as one does in dreams. Then, dimly, from the other end of the line, through the chatter of international operators, we hear artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men, cracked voices singing, “Los Quartros Generales” through the pulsations of the great, twisted cable under the ocean.Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermente & sueño.Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía. “No, Barbara!” I scream. "We are not back there. That’s the old revolution. Call up the new one.” Though I know that, every day, your friends, Nicanor, telephone Santiago, where the number rings and rings and rings with never an answer. And now the rings are turning into knells: The church bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda, his poems looted, his autobiography stolen, his books desecrated in his house on Isla Negra. And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture, his desk overturned, the ruined books strewn over the floor, lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish academy, the wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over. And the bells toll on… Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone. She dials the number again, then turns to me, smiling, smiling like an angel: “He is there.” Trembling, I take the phone from her, and hear your voice, Nicanor, sad, humorous, infinitely disillusioned, infinitely consoling: “Dear Carolyn…” It is Nicanor! And the connection is broken, because I wake up, in this white room, in this white silence, in this backwater of silence on this Isla Blanca: Nicanor, Nicanor, are you, too, silent under the earth, Brother, Brother?

Carolyn Kizer

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,Class,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Ingathering

The poets are going home now, After the years of exile, After the northern climates Where they worked, lectured, remembered, Where they shivered at night In an indifferent world. Where God was the god of business, And men would violate the poets’ moon, And even the heavens become zones of war. The poets are going home To the blood-haunted villages, To the crumbling walls, still pocked With a spray of bullets; To the ravine, marked with a new cross, Where their brother died. No one knows the precise spot where they shot him, But there is a place now to gather, to lay wreaths. The poets will bring flowers. The poets are coming home To the cafés, to the life of the streets at twilight, To slip among the crowds and greet their friends; Thee young poets, old now, limping, who lean on a cane: Or the arm of a grandchild, peer with opaque eyes At the frightening city, the steel and concrete towers Sprung up in their absence. Yet from open doorways comes the odor of grapes Fermented, of fish, of oil, of pimiento… The poets have come home To the melodious language That settles in their heads like moths alighting, This language for which they starved In a world of gutturals, Crude monosyllables barked by strangers. Now their own language enfolds them With its warm vocables. The poets are home. Yes, they have come back To look up at the yellow moon, Cousin of that cold orb that only reflected Their isolation. They have returned to the olives, the light, The sage-scented meadows, The whitewashed steps, the tubs of geraniums, The sere plains, the riverbanks spread with laundry, The poppies, the vineyards, the bones of mountains. Yes, poets, welcome home To your small country Riven by its little war (As the world measures these events), A country that remembers heroes and tears; Where, in your absence, souls kept themselves alive By whispering your words. Now you smile at everything, even the priests, the militia, The patient earth that is waiting to receive you.

Carolyn Kizer

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Symphony No.3, in D Minor

Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In Pan’s spring rain “drives his victims out to the animals with whom they become as one”— pain and paeans, hung in the mouth, to be sung II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal: A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature… Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest: I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down and The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words John, claritas tell us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plantains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to form corollas in light clusters of tones… Sam Palmer hit it: “Milton, by one epithet draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw, ‘Pine and monumental oak’: I have just been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than any in the park.” Muse in a meadow, compose in a mind! III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me Harris’s Sparrow— 103 species seen by the Georgia Ornithological Society in Rabun Gap, including Harris’s Sparrow, with its black crown, face, and bib encircling a pink bill It was, I think, the third sighting in Georgia, and I should have been there instead of reading Clare, listening to catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew directly into the Volkswagen and bounced into a ditch Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d been going 40 you might be whistling in some grass. 10 tepid people got 10 stale letters one day earlier, I cannot be happy about that. IV. What the Night Tells Me the dark drones on in the southern wheat fields and the hop flowers open before the sun’s beckoning the end is ripeness, the wind rises, and the dawn says yes YES! it says “yes” V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not— that, let Shakespeare’s delectation bear us VI. What Love Tells Me Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien and prays: Dear God, Sweet Jesus, Save Us, Save Us… the Light in the Grass, the Wind on the Hill, are in my head, the world cannot be heard Leaves obliterate my heart, we touch each other far apart… Let us count into the Darkness

Jonathan Williams

Living,The Mind,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

The Midnite Show

Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight: figures of women cascading through the Sunday night; no beer in sight. I remember the Night-bloomingCereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto… there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods behind us. 

Jonathan Williams

Nature,Summer,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

Two Pastorals for Samuel Palmer at Shoreham, Kent 

I. “If the Night Could Get Up & Walk” I cannot put my hand into a cabbage to turn on the light, but the moon moves over the field of dark cabbage and an exchange fills all veins. The cabbage is also a globe of light, the two globes now two eyes in my saturated head! II. “One Must Try Behind the Hills” Eight Great Dahlias stood beyond the Mountains. They set fire to the Sun in a black wood beyond the Mountains, in the Valley of Vision In the Valley of Vision the Fission of Flowers yields all Power in the Valley of Vision. Eight Suns on Eight Stems, aflame! 

Jonathan Williams

Living,The Mind,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers

A Vulnerary 

for Robert Duncan  one comes to language from afar, the ear fears for its sound-barriers— but one “comes”; the language “comes” forThe Beckoning Fair One plant you now, dig youlater, the plaint stirs winter earth… air in a hornet’s nest over the water makes a solid, six-sided music… a few utterly quiet scenes, things are very far away—“formis emptiness” comely, comely, love trembles and the sweet-shrub

Jonathan Williams

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

On Cowee Ridge

December 13, 1993  John Gordon Boyd died on the birthday of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers: Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness” and with extraordinary eyes & ears… I think of two texts on the grievous occasion of his death: “Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands.” — Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis and two lines in Rainier Maria Rilke, John’s favorite poet, that say it all… Was tun Sie, Gott,Wenn ich bin stürbe? “What will you do, God, when I am dead?” 

Jonathan Williams

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Wreck on the A-222 in Ravensbourne Valley

There are more things to love than we would dare to hope for. —Richard of St. Victor  where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with blazons of fennel and umbels of dill fell through the spokes of a wheel on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle, sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider— and spied: “saw the very drops of sweat glittering frostily between the shoulder blades” of a lad …on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle, small as a spider, hiding in the fireweed, getting wet from the skins of many human suns aground at the Kentish river near Tunbridge Wells, where the dill lulls, and all boys spoil…

Jonathan Williams

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Philosophy

Folk Education

Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time. One song described the dark around the military vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars. They got away with it and worked to abolish youth by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was in love because my sentiments were matched by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames. Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.

Paul Foster Johnson

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Music,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Chat Room

P. entered a third space from which he could watch time pass instead of walking to the monastery in the middle of the night. His opaque sexuality derived from the absence of a guarantee that his person would remain intact. He recognized this in himself and we stared at the pylons regressing into the lackluster northeastern woods. The monastery was a display before which he claimed sangfroid a picturesque ruin to which he was conveyed as though by boreal fluid. Everyone loved occasional works like this their allusions to complementary and absent events. Weaving around proliferating drywall I despaired over this desire. P. joined the migrant workforce and grew more disconsolate and distant and drunk in our presence. Our presence was only possible because of advances in technology in a dialectical relationship with their debasement: servers in cold rooms and a recursive void of woodblock chat sounds.

Paul Foster Johnson

Living,The Mind,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

last swan of avon

socalled swan of avon n/t but a beaurocrat buggering the buttercups goy from the waist up now soldiers’re the ones making offers and fucking caravaggio posters maybe the artist had bothered about melancholia suddenly xe finds xemself walking down some dark corridor california was truly the promised land for a minute there video marlboro to show us shoppingcart in dingy water and then turn melancholical sign reads no squatting switchd on the cathode ray at yr coronation the bomb droppd w/ regular monotony leaving us wanting a to zed dampened a grid satyrical deliria pan’s baallet in a black tutu who have the inclination but even whose necromancer— firelit but dred— —commandeering meadows— protests were pathetic

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics

murder on the gowanus

swell me a bowl with lusty oil brightest under bis geynest under gore ecce who com inna persian vestment un monodatal voll marines cd not hoist thee whose eyes go seaward noreaster reeling thrashing at the mouth of the gowanus mischance upbrimmd sludgie helas, aloft sometimes honeysuckle can smell like MURTHER yr shining form to oil hath returned yr helmet now shall make a hive for bees it was no dream I lay broad waking oil blossomed green, incarnadine s/thing keeps on testing me for tb is politer not to talk about beastly p.o.v. ludic like a succubus vomiting ivy lordly subtler grotesquerie you can bet it smelled like murther creped and crinolinnd along the noggin w/ a victorian western pin till I may see a plumper sludgie swim everlike rotund buddha—smack aghast everlike leo and thir friends marching in lockstep to the sunlit uplands.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

elegy for kari edwards

for memorial at Zinc Bar, 23 June 2007, NYC I am your sugarplum fairy commodore in chief. —kari edwards conturbabimus illa (vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus [let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love]) —Catullus V.II damesirs of fishairs princes reginae I dont need this botheration guilded toe in a gendered pension embedded narcissism skirts can or could be worn w/ intentional disgrace getting oh-aff I sleep where I sit gog and magog ope myopia sweetness and delight do it for sidney, as starlover did rue on star, thir mistress cloying the lack, with thir poesis toying twill never hurt regina prince alack, areft locks beset candle agrove a buck in a corridor as like with likeness grace the tongue and sweets with sweets cloy them among conturbabimus illa let us confound them beasts implored and character impaled agathas breast in a 14th century pincer anon 7 heads w/ 7 comings on horns on their horns wings at their feet and at their wings well you have three seconds to live bespeckled apprentice freckled daylilly a penny uneasily pleaded myrtle iron bootblackeningat the speedwe levatate con there is no missus I am among limbed elms colluding with doves nor tide nor tail angels w/ svelte angles the rub and tug goils languid as jersey too early for supper etc was their pimp and whatever their sucker shitslinger master cleanser w/ corporate coffee and torture pâté my present page in l-l-livery old glut of a beast’s spleen the glory over lordling socked ajaw nassau ablog by fairly a sweepmate a swoopster bedeviled in gullet swashbuckld by proxy homosexuality eh? red river andaloos funny albeit friday all the dork-rock gender suggests we levitate avec held captive patrón, bothermonger ah myrtle why sie is taken my mind impertinent parasol glossy wit promise of salt caint leave thir cellphone alone ipode eternal satellite viscera muscadetted papillon (that one) strident 17 stallions with horns on their heads and horns coming out of the horns a papillon that one a buck in a corridor conturbabimus illa let us confound them all ridded of giggling anthropomorphia aghast DL in the bowries the tee hee ambigenuity of amputee-wannabees googling tee heesilly faggotdicks are for chicks dicks are for chicks wicked hee to bury my heart at my heart was in my knee

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

poem in praise of menstruation

if there is a river more beautiful than this bright as the blood red edge of the moon if there is a river more faithful than this returning each month to the same delta if there is a river braver than this coming and coming in a surge of passion, of pain if there is a river more ancient than this daughter of eve mother of cain and of abel if there is in the universe such a river if there is some where water more powerful than this wild water pray that it flows also through animals beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave

Lucille Clifton

Living,The Body,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

john

somebody coming in blackness like a star and the world be a great bush on his head and his eyes be fire in the city and his mouth be true as time he be calling the people brother even in the prison even in the jail i’m just only a baptist preacher somebody bigger than me coming in blackness like a star

Lucille Clifton

Religion,Christianity,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

spring song

the green of Jesus is breaking the ground and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus is opening the house and the dance of Jesus music has hold of the air and the world is turning in the body of Jesus and the future is possible

Lucille Clifton

Nature,Spring,Religion,Christianity,God & the Divine

sisters

for elaine philip on her birthday me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time and mama laugh and shake her head at me and you. me and you got babies got thirty-five got black let our hair go back be loving ourselves be loving ourselves be sisters. only where you sing i poet.

Lucille Clifton

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

my poem

a love person from love people out of the afrikan sun under the sign of cancer. whoever see my midnight smile seeing star apple and mango from home. whoever take me for a negative thing, his death be on him like a skin and his skin be his heart’s revenge. * lucy one-eye she got her mama’s ways. big round roller can’t cook can’t clean if that’s what you want you got it world. lucy one-eye she see the world sideways. word foolish she say what she don’t want to say, she don’t say what she want to. lucy one-eye she won’t walk away from it. she’ll keep on trying with her crooked look and her wrinkled ways, the darling girl. * if mama could see she would see lucy sprawling limbs of lucy decorating the backs of chairs lucy hair holding the mirrors up that reflect odd aspects of lucy. if mama could hear she would hear lucysong rolled in the corners like lint exotic webs of lucysighs long lucy spiders explaining to obscure gods. if mama could talk she would talk good girl good girl good girl clean up your room. * i was born in a hotel, a maskmaker. my bones were knit by a perilous knife. my skin turned around at midnight and i entered the earth in a woman jar. i learned the world all wormside up and this is my yes my strong fingers; i was born in a bed of good lessons and it has made me wise. * light on my mother’s tongue breaks through her soft extravagant hip into life. lucille she calls the light, which was the name of the grandmother who waited by the crossroads in virginia and shot the whiteman off his horse, killing the killer of sons. light breaks from her life to her lives… mine already is an afrikan name. *

Lucille Clifton

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

cutting greens

curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere.

Lucille Clifton

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Home Life,Religion,The Spiritual

The Book of Non-Writing 

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind. —Marguerite Duras (translated by Mark Pollizzotti)  It came. Words smashed out of the sky and from the mouths and off the pages and from the flesh and blood of the bodies and the words hit the readers and were destroyed like more bodies and the fields of the nation were littered with bodies and dead. Carcass love, they called it. Carcass economy, they called it. And the readers found the carcasses strewn across the pages and the readers came and stripped their innards and twirled intestines above their heads like lassos. The carcasses fell onto the pages and were taken away in wagons and trucks and they were replaced with new carcasses that were sold for words before the flies laid eggs and the wounds had time to fester. FALSE CARCASS ECONOMY! Will the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the bodies whose lips slurp out the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the words from the bodies who slurp out the souls of the carcasses cease to exist when the bodies themselves die? The readers grovel in the pages and find themselves in ditches with the carcasses but they do not know the rules of the false carcass economy. In this book the readers can feel their feet being removed. In this book the readers can feel the splash of the abattoir blood that sprinkles the page with poems. How do you know if the poems have too many bubbles? That is, how do you know if the blood of the poems has too many bubbles? When we speak of our own lives, says the collective voice of the readers, we certainly don’t mean human life. On the page the readers find themselves crawling around like quadrupeds with hands full of grass and earth uprooting plants and trees setting out for home and not getting far counting corpses on the fields to hell with animals there is God grinding his teeth with joy forging his way through the ruins of failing flesh there is the machine that has annihilated the bulk of humanity is it semen or is it a carburetor that makes us unrecognizable we know who we are through decay and in someone else’s story this is a lot worse than knocking your own brains out with good results then drinking tea with sugar and milk and suddenly feeling revived then exploding with words and speaking with animals and sinking in mud and being found by peasants who clean turds and who are like silent gods with holes in their shoes it is horrible to eat horrible to bulge in the belly with food horrible to blink when so many can’t blink oh to ruminate once more on the air polluted with liability on the hair singed from pollution the eyes burning fingers shrivelling the exact moment of ending will not come for many millennia we will not be able to document it it will document us it’s okay to kill some bodies speak of nothing and you’re lucky to make friends flank kidney liver swollen body on the sand who are you now that I am speaking with a mouth full of words that do not belong to me I crawl across the page and I don’t know if I’m dying or dead.

Daniel Borzutzky

Living,The Body,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

The Book of Equality

Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.

Daniel Borzutzky

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics,War & Conflict

Waterlily Fire

for Richard Griffith 1 THE BURNING Girl grown woman fire mother of fire I go to the stone street turning to fire. Voices Go screaming Fire to the green glass wall. And there where my youth flies blazing into fire The dance of sane and insane images, noon Of seasons and days. Noontime of my one hour. Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces Among the tall daylight in the city of change. The scene has walls stone glass all my gone life One wall a web through which the moment walks And I am open, and the opened hour The world as water-garden lying behind it. In a city of stone, necessity of fountains, Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes. An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass, Behind the wall I know waterlilies Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers, Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon Who will not believe a waterlily fire. Whatever can happen in a city of stone, Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall. I walk in the river of crisis toward the real, I pass guards, finding the center of my fear And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm. The arm of flame striking through the wall of form. 2 THE ISLAND Born of this river and this rock island, I relate The changes : I born when the whirling snow Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood. General, gangster, child. I know in myself the island. I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire Among the building of my young childhood, houses; I was those changes, the live darknesses Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields Over the river fronting red cliffs across— And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks— Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose From sleeping streams of change in the change city. The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness. Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water. Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring. Whatever can come to a city can come to this city. Under the tall compulsion of the past I see the city change like a man changing I love this man with my lifelong body of love I know you among your changes wherever I go Hearing the sounds of building the syllables of wrecking A young girl watching the man throwing red hot rivets Coals in a bucket of change How can you love a city that will not stay? I love you like a man of life in change. Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring Like today accepted and become one’s self I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels, Rock, cloud, ships, voices. To the man where the river met The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red. Towers falling. A dream of towers. Necessity of fountains. And my poor, Stirring among our dreams, Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers And lives, looking out through my eyes. The city the growing body of our hate and love. The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways. A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare. Male flower heading upstream. Among a city of light, the stone that grows. Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered Monuments rivetted against flesh. Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I See stopped in time a crime behind green glass, Lilies of all my life on fire. Flash faith in a city building its fantasies. I walk past the guards into my city of change. 3 JOURNEY CHANGES Many of us Each in his own life waiting Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking And early on the road of the hill of the world Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass The stages of the theatre of the journey I see the time of willingness between plays Waiting and walking and the play of the body Silver body with its bosses and places One by one touched awakened into into Touched and turned one by one into flame The theatre of the advancing goddess Blossoming Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go And far across a field over the jewel grass The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god A supple god of searching and reaching Who weaves his strength Who dances her more alive The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses Always the journey long patient many haltings Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing When the decision to go on is made Along the long slopes of choice and again the world The play of poetry approaching in its solving Solvings of relations in poems and silences For we were born to express born for a journey Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way And then I came to the place of mournful labor A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away Repeated farther than sight. The voice saying slowly But it is hell. I heard my own voice in the words Or it could be a foundation And after the words My chance came. To enter. The theatres of the world. 4 FRAGILE I think of the image brought into my room Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks. He is asking about the moment when the Buddha Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration. “Isn’t that fragile?” he asks. The sage answers: “I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?” 5 THE LONG BODY This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood An island in a river of crisis, now The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies. We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes. Whatever can come to a woman can come to me. This is the long body : into life from the beginning, Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward, And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground, Going as we go in the changes of the body, As it is changes, in the long strip of our many Shapes, as we range shifting through time. The long body : a procession of images. This moment in a city, in its dream of war. We chose to be, Becoming the only ones under the trees when the harsh sound Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men, And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors. Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang. We are the living island, We the flesh of this island, being lived, Whoever knows us is part of us today. Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me. Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies Reaching from darkness upward to a sun Of rebirth, the implacable. And in our myth The Changing Woman who is still and who offers. Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth. In ways of being, through silence, sources of light Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light. And everything a witness of the buried life. This moment flowing across the sun, this force Of flowers and voices body in body through space. The city of endless cycles of the sun. I speak to you You speak to me

Muriel Rukeyser

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,The Body,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality

The Speaking Tree

for Robert Payne Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving Like a most recognizable most silvery woman; Tall Alexander to the island came. The small breeze blew behind his turning head. He walked the foam of ripples into this scene. The trunk of the speaking tree looks like a tree-trunk Until you look again. Then people and animals Are ripening on the branches; the broad leaves Are leaves; pale horses, sharp fine foxes Blossom; the red rabbit falls Ready and running. The trunk coils, turns, Snakes, fishes. Now the ripe people fall and run, Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame. Stiff Alexander stands. He cannot turn. But he is free to turn : this is the speaking tree, It calls your name. It tells us what we mean.

Muriel Rukeyser

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Akiba

THE WAY OUT The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys. Where the rock is split and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea. All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage. Music of one child carried into the desert; firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid. Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain. The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs, the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening. Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain. Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child. The meaning beginning to move, which is the song. Music of those who have walked out of slavery. Into that journey where all things speak to all things refusing to accept the curse, and taking for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world, all creation being created in one image, creation. This is not the past walking into the future, the walk is painful, into the present, the dance not visible as dance until much later. These dancers are discoverers of God. We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song. Out of a life of building lack on lack: the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith: an army who came to the ocean: the walkers who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou, city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo, the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes, swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March: all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man. Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world. Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death by his disciples carried from Jerusalem in blackness journeying to find his journey to whatever he was loving with his life. The wilderness journey through which we move under the whirlwind truth into the new, the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night: faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in. Barbarian music, a new song. Acknowledging opened water, possibility: open like a woman to this meaning. In a time of building statues of the stars, valuing certain partial ferocious skills while past us the chill and immense wilderness spreads its one-color wings until we know rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea, the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find. What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey. Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

Muriel Rukeyser

Living,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

[Murmurs from the earth of this land]

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters, from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot. We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down where water has not run for sixty years. Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from the abandoned iron-black mill. Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten colors. Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock. Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots. You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat. You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green; The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of accretions A beach of dream before the smoking mirror. You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon, Everywhere your own silence, who drink from the crater, the nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

Muriel Rukeyser

Living,Growing Old,The Body,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Night Feeding

Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death I lay there dreaming and my magic head remembered and forgot. On first cry I remembered and forgot and did believe. I knew love and I knew evil: woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind, despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass, renewal of all waters and the time of the stars and the black snake with gold bones. Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding. Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth walked through the house, black in the morning dark. Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief, my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep. Voices of all black animals crying to drink, cries of all birth arise, simple as we, found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream, deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.

Muriel Rukeyser

Living,The Body,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

Song at Drumholm

My liveliest self, I give you fair leave in these windblown weathers, heather-hearted and human and strange, to turn every blackberry corner of yesterday’s summer. The robin, singing her love-me-forever, kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather blues, sings tide flow and autumn’s turning and white winds folding. Cattle along all hedges wind winter into their frosty breathing, their slow eyes dreaming barn, bullock, and fodder under all hedges. But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world is wider than weather. Blackberries darken the corners I turn, and gold seas turning darken, darken. My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed on our farings. The bronze path at evening. Toward summer, then. My hand, your hand— as if first meeting.

John Unterecker

Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Weather

Midwinter

At dusk, a great flare of winter lightning photographed the bay: Waves were broken scrolls. Beyond Donegal, white mountains hung in a narrow bas-relief frozen on sky. Later, there was sleet: trees down on the Drumholm road; near Timoney’s farm, a frantic goose pinned under branches. All night long, we spoke of loneliness, long winter, while winter sang in the chimneys. Then the sky cleared and a marvel began: The hills turned blue; in the valley a blue cottage sent up the day’s first plume of smoke. It gathered like a dream drenched in frost. That should have been all. We had worn out night. But single-file, deliberate, five heifers, a black bull, three calves stepped through the broken fence. They arranged themselves between the house and hedge: a kind of diagram: a shifting pattern grazing frozen weeds. Their image is with me still. The backs of the cattle are patchy with frost blue as morning.

John Unterecker

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Winter,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

[The giant takes us]

The giant takes us down. A man with no arms. Unbreakable. What made today is concordant, transforms the brief decisive phase we call fear. I look to that whited-over part and see a face. Then I look to the black and see the same face. There were tunnels…chambersbeneath some of the sidewalks…page after page of places… The last thing you think of. Won’t be my fluffy blonde hair. We have his ear. He was the first boy I knew. The liberation. Which I remember from sand. The pail shape. The whole world’s washed out. These words: take refuge. What I mean by dream in this case is his last dream. And you see no land, you’re that far away. Someone coughs in my first life. Someone must have noticed how like you he is… First you can’t be heard Then you can’t hear Then you can’t dial Then you can’t turn it off You pose a question, I repeat it.And as always with speech, one is blind. As a reflector, as of cloth or thick flecked glass, as slats— You asked though about the self. There were fireflies, and the corn cut to the nubs. The windows shook, we saw a flash of light… then the tiniest feckles of rain after we waited all day.

Kate Greenstreet

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Activities,Travels & Journeys

7 December

Men are trading their bullets for worms. “I spent a lifetime building.” We come down from the mountains. We brought eggs, a table, a windowshade. There were times when we couldn’t bring anything. So many people. As you were walking up the hill and I was walking down, we almost passed each other. But I grasped your arm and backed up. You said: “This is what I look like now.” 

Kate Greenstreet

Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

13 December

She considers a field. She considers a field and buys it. Let her have the fruit of her hands. We come down from the mountains. Yellow trees, green trees. I was leaving Earth but, before I did, I had to get rid of all my animals. My main one, my main model for behavior, was my snake. He was attached to the bottom of my foot but had become dangerous seeming and I was afraid he would bite me if he got the chance. My sister was there and I said, “Before I leave, I have to get rid of all my animals,” thinking maybe she’d help me. I said, “My horse, my frog, my snake…” but didn’t mention I was worried about how to dislodge my snake safely. As I was waking up, I thought of going to a place where they could give the snake a shot to knock it out or even kill it before they tried to get it off my foot. Which seemed like a pretty good idea, though inconvenient.

Kate Greenstreet

Living,Life Choices,The Mind,Relationships,Pets,Religion,The Spiritual

You've Ruined My Evening/You've Ruined My Life

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish only as one i contain the complications in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts the actors bow gently to me and i envy them their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another only as one i contain the complications and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing re-running the reels of my presence in this world the difficulties vanish and the images are the same eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications only as one walking gently storing my dream

Tom Raworth

Living,Disappointment & Failure,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film

The University of Essex

(for John Barrell)  1. gone to lunch back in five minutes night closed in on my letter of resignation out in the square one of my threads had broken loose the language i used was no and no while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills occasionally the metabolism alters and lines no longer come express waiting for you what muscles work me which hold me down below my head? it is a long coat and a van on the horizon a bird that vanishes the arabic i learn from observation is how to break the line (genius creates surprises : the metropolitan police band singing ‘bless this house’ as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam 2. walking my back home the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band and the footstep echoes i have conjured people 3. ah, it all falls into place when it was time what he had left became a tile bodies held shaped by the pressure of air were clipped to his attention by their gestures my but we do have powerful muscles each of us equal to gravity or sunlight that forces our shadows into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle 4. good morning he whispered the horrors of the horses are the crows the bird flies past the outside the library many heels have trapped the same way he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees check the pattern swerves with the back the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings aloft the hand removes a book and checked it for death by glasses or the angle food descends 5. the broadcast she turns me on she turns on me that the view from the window is a lake and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat of the library the grass outside goes brown in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks

Tom Raworth

Living,Life Choices,Activities,Jobs & Working,School & Learning

Gaslight

a line of faces borders the strangler’s work heavy european women mist blows over dusty tropical plants lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight mist in my mind a riffled deck of cards or eccentrics was i a waterton animal my head is not my own poetry is neither swan nor owl but worker, miner digging each generation deeper through the shit of its eaters to the root – then up to the giant tomato someone else’s song is always behind us as we wake from a dream trying to remember step onto a thumbtack two worlds – we write the skin the surface tension that holds you in what we write is ever the past curtain pulled back a portrait behind it is a room suddenly lit looking out through the eyes at a t.v. programme of a monk sealed into a coffin we close their eyes and ours and still here the tune moves on 

Tom Raworth

Living,The Mind,Mythology & Folklore,Horror

Beautiful Habit

(for Ed and Jenny)  greetings as the door opened ticking please listen to this food alone for all the f.b.i. will continue maybe you dozed off i hung by that phone all night suppose he talks * vida later aria * once upon a time not looking for any thing * you’re on your own it’s off it’s on * perhaps it means ragged like that golda my-yeer pre-meer * and pour the old box down a drain * too much news said the news * r e o l e * it’s us or rust listener * deep personal regret looking up monday * we can save your head or your body we can shave * even his admission is a subtle lie * in suspense what is cut into the smallest of the * grinding to fill a prescription * drum to the wobble and a roll on the sea come to mind an article of light distance through distance unfinished * piano * willing to believe * national anthem hearer * perfect rhyme to some all cars kept in doors * sophisticated newsmen show how it could have been * retreat from the swiss legation * numbers for an event * corruption why not? * infinite detail is no more real * thought against power * answer it * hooked to just another piece of tape hooked to just one more little piece of tape * through words in to no record * writer righter riter * am: i on replay? * all you do is expand the system * a polaroid of la with the wrong voice print * astronaut amazed at what was expected

Tom Raworth

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

Gracious Living          ‘Tara’ 

lonely as four cherries on a tree at night, new moon, wet roads a moth or a snowflake whipping past glass lonely as the red noses of four clowns thrust up through snow their shine four whitened panes drawn from imagined memory lonely as no other lives touching to recorded water all objects stare their memories aware lonely as pain recoiling from itself imagining the cherries and roses reaching out

Tom Raworth

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Heartache & Loss,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

[I did something I could never discuss]

I did something I could never discuss made an acquaintance and embraced him in a phone booth. While interested parties lurked among free newspaper boxes he removed his domino. What to construe from leather bracelets? The impossibility of translation from a phone booth to a churchyard a gate painted white a belfry with no bell some culture with haceks the sense of lolling in a park from a churchyard to a community garden heckling the rooster as it crowed. We left the part we liked jeering the rooster from a sward. We reentered the garden with a script but refused to expand on the vestiges of happiness. A girl took responsibility for the garden and plied us with background information until her nervous guardian sent us back to the church with a coat of arms where we were going anyway as though under the influence of boreal fluid. The songbirds of the yard were about to be contaminated by a new age concert. With so little at stake they praised positive thinking.

Paul Foster Johnson

Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

The Vein

But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation. (Lord Byron, November 1816)  what happens in any sovereign body is created on the evidence of the last head on its last lap those of us watching then, during the programme see the die seem to be cast to draw the teeth of our first question affecting essential interests they and only they had she was dealing with an unworthy family gathered for death inconvenient location gruesome tired mannerisms a bit thick coming from her losing the thread of argument in a sinuous cartwheel drained of what life hurried out with a pushchair unsparing he takes us to the cabaret into patterns and groups contrived for distraction more likely to deepen withdrawal such a decrease in which women had views diametrically opposed soon changes his tune howling face to face cruel for people recoiling in horror plastered indeed by any form of social charges and interest it may be healthy to change the tone of administration in growth dynamics use of perspective attachment to things entail perpetual disruption of what space is for built up in absence transactions typically occur under conditions of heightened variations in taste spaces, isolated thoughts which his concept of beauty distorts to represent thinking and feeling life he considers in particular superimposed spatial images accelerating production of different times to control the future this book has been edited to detect the note of such preoccupations blue evening light desire out of stasis for jobs investment itself ruthless traders organising forces unable to stop the drift of imagination over materiality form an autobiography in fires of competition only to emerge stronger within this system of production brought into our homes which in turn form the basis of generating and acquiring aesthetic pleasure conventional these days cluttered with illusion based on writing remixed to demolish any narrative of the world within no image concealed from the realm of material accumulation and circulation in part as would be true enduring time by herself he touches her surrounded by models able to pass unrecognised in the stream of money implied by a photograph where the sun never seen can be constructed crashing through layer after layer on a depthless screen with the requisite speed somewhere behind us thrown into the street patiently to see rotting pieces of car buttons working backwards against nerve junctions tilt her head towards her ankles in the underground light black fur gleamed off the oil drum searchers found a delicate bubble of oil sweeping through it pure oxygen dawn touched at the corners rose in flame lengths of thin steel drawn across dust shifting in thick time on motions playing out across from me not in sequence cut into the sides of an extension run below his eyes were tombstones ringed with razor-wire he threaded bright slashes of colour through open jolts of fear measuring, calculating shaking so hard a lump of shadow watching turned from side to side shielding us from the sun pale green glass frames disintegrating tarmac down to the tunnel of the corner of his eye moving on to some other man for the moment horizon of empty water locking him away inside and he wore two pictograms set in strange lines invisible in air energetically above them heels and silk scatter snow in the middle of a room swirling out of the mist bright with arrangements tainted too historically he had forgotten quite violent fights listening to the continuous pounding of some other thought looking at the surface far away down in a cloud of dust tattered lace about her she watched him calmly bits of it he tore off at the end of each meeting seemed colour-coded sparkling violently tingling on his skin holes turned round slowly in brown earth lined with age he smelled burning trees in darkness a voice came from an imaginary telephone on the dashboard shrink-wrapped packages soft underfoot glowed in the dark blinds slanted to make the match flame blast across his face snap shut in the jungle after the ones still alive start confessing flashbulbs go off her hand flicked back and forth over a section of floor he had heard more than every single word from the once proud ruins of arches in one outstretched hand an odd sensation included balance working to repair the damage of triumph on his face folded against the edge of exhaust fumes closing his lids properly needed great care she heard a rustle little numbers flew around trees tumbled across a moonlit field trying to reassemble his head again she blinked some sort of code subtle variations in the colour of her eyes a reliable testing ground gardens inside shelters shades patterning an idealised culture in one landscaped clump stuffed full of shells a version or remnant of something under a different name some crisis of identity spanned the world thought was the only thing to come back to acting beyond acoustics even when dramatic she always wore fancy dress simply cut and held low objects grouped together confidently into fine jewellery after the storm new scents touched by salt spray hardly dimmed the harsh light he sometimes pulled at his hair obsessed with finding the beautiful curtain allowing him entry never able to follow the middle of night downwards to find a runway with deep sides writhing under his fingers personalities full of energy order a series of the same programme cool for film using this knowledge machines talk to themselves maintain a very persistent buzzing as the signal ends in a dramatic freeze close to the border on a street with a few orange trees

Tom Raworth

Living,Disappointment & Failure,The Mind,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

The Chamber

for Jack Kerouac  IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME, I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass, black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh seen in the clear bright light. It is not night and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside. And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls in the light of the room. I sit or stand wanting the huge reality of touch and love. In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting only the purity of clean colors and new shapes and feelings. I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY I have ten years left to worship my youth Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I feel the swell of smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars the brown shadows on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to dull plane from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face. The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the clear grain. I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are. The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall. I am real as you are real whom I speak to. I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash to my eyes. No change to the room. Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world. The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture. An agony to be so in pain without release when love is a word or kiss.

Michael McClure

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

Dream: The Night of December 23rd 

for Jane  —ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE SIZE OF OSTRICHES, they turned and walked away from us and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two but this was the nineteen-forties, in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was getting dark and the trees around the bridge almost glowed like a scene by Palmer. The two Giant Birds—Aepyorni—from Madagascar, extincted A.D. one thousand, turned and walked from us across the bridge. Even in the semi-darkness the softness of their brown feathers made curls pliant as a young mother’s hair. There was a sweet submission in the power of their enormous legs (giant drumsticks). Their tiny heads (in proportion to their bodies) were bent utterly submerged in their business and sweeping side to side as a salmon does—or as a wolf does— but with a Pleistocene, self-involved gentleness beyond our ken. My heart rose in my chest (as the metaphysical poets say “with purple wings of joy.”) to see them back in life again. We both looked, holding hands, and I felt your wide-eyed drinking-in of things. Then I turned and viewed across the darkening field and there was a huge flightless hunting fowl (the kind that ate mammals in the Pliocene). He stood on one leg in the setting sun by the sparkling stream that cut across the meadow to the bridge. He had a hammer head and curled beak, and after my initial surge of fear to see the field was dotted, populated, by his brethren, each standing in the setting sun, I saw their stately nobility and again the self-involvement. We followed the Aepyorni across the old wooden bridge made of huge timbers. The bridge was dark from the shadows of the poplars and the evergreens there. The stream was dimpled with flashing moonlight —and I think it had a little song. Then I found that on the bridge we were among a herd of black Wildebeests—Black Gnus. One was two feet away—turned toward me— looking me eye-into-eye. There was primal wildness in the upstanding coarse (not sleek as it really is in Africa) fur on the knobby, powerful-like-buffalo shoulders. (Remember this is a dream.) I passed by him both afraid and unafraid of wildness as I had passed through the herd of zebras at the top of Ngorongoro Crater in front of the lodge, where from the cliff we could see a herd of elephants like ants, and the soda lake looked pink because of flamingos there. There is an essence in fear overcome and I overcame fright in passing those zebras and this black Wildebeest. Then we passed over the heavy bridge and down a little trail on the far side of the meadow, walking back in the direction we had been. Soon we came to a cottage of white clapboards behind a big white clapboard house and knocked on the door; it was answered by a young man with long hair who was from the Incredible String Band. He took us inside and he played an instrument like a guitar and he danced as he played it. The lyre-guitar was covered with square plastic buttons in rows of given sizes and shapes. The instrument would make any sound, play any blues, make any creature sound, play any melody…I wanted it badly—it was a joy. My chest rose. I figured I’d have to, and would be glad to, give twenty or thirty thousand for it… Then the dream broke and I was standing somewhere with Joanna to the side of a crowd of people by a wall of masonry and I reached into my mouth and took from my jaw (all the other persons vanished and I was the center of everything) a piece which was eight teeth fused together. I stared at them wondering how they could all be one piece. They were white…It was some new fossil. Down on the bone there were indentations like rivulets like the flowing patterns of little rivers.

Michael McClure

Living,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Men & Women