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May You Always be the Darling of Fortune
|
March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides
into rain. The imperceptible change begins
out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new
craving, spring. May your desire always overcome
your need; your story that you have to tell,
enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world
you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging
from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things
fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because
now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting
the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything
wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I
vigilant.
| Jane Miller | Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Spring,Weather | null |
Double Dutch
|
The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.
| Gregory Pardlo | null | null |
Our Lady of Perpetual Help
|
The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky, its empty windows edged in soot, its portals boarded up and slathered with graffiti, oily layers, urgent but illegible.All that can be plundered has been, all but the carapace—the hollow bell tower, the fieldstone box that once served as a nave. The tidy row of homes that line this block have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines. Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits. Those who live here triple lock their doors day and night. Some mornings they step out to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons the street is still but for a mourning dove and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray, a dead incisor in a wary smile. A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse into the chancel, where a sodden mattress and dirty blanket indicate that someone finds this place a sanctuary still, takes his rest here, held and held apart from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses, watched over by the night’s blind congregation, by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.
| April Lindner | null | null |
A Low Bank of Cloud
|
But for a low bank of cloud,
clear morning, empty sky. The bright band of light beneath the cloud’s gray I thought at first was open distance, but it’s ice that by extension raised the lake above the lip of blue lake and spilled it farther out than that horizon along the sky and floods the clouds. Seeing the distant level further unfurl into the sky says not to trust blue line as terminus when a meniscus of ice can ride up that wall of the skyline, a measure of illusion how close the eye can be to filled with seeing, to widen instead the tube of that measure of sight we are given. There is the larger lake the wider look we open eyes to see. That glance of the lip put in a bigger cylinder falls away, but how much deeper the spring to fill the cup. As if the surface we are seeing drops the more seeing is added, while we feel the stories well as our height from which to see. And watch the dawns coming. …I seem to be emptying of time the more time I put in, and see like a man with weathered eyes enough to face to face up to the sight’s field expanded to insight. To the dark the lake can turn and curl up like a map for poems to have these likenesses to graph, then come un-scrolled from semblance back to just this lake. Water cities are led to layout beside. But never in stillness; always the restoration to change, from ice, from cloud, turning to clear liquid—as is most of our body water— thinned sheet, layer that if written on or with, a bearing a name chiseled on water disappears.
| Ed Roberson | Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
A Slim Volume Taken Into the Provinces
|
I have to leave early in the dark
and hungry to avoid crossing the snow as the noon burns the crust into an un-servable lake slush instead of the crisp bridge that would be in order to get me over the ridge My journal is already laundered clean of my words and my instructions have dissolved into a white mash a washed bone ball rolled into itself of all I have in the world in my pocket The ink is thin the paper is poor my eyes balance on the pale words around which a stream flows almost erasing the way across the idea Shadows the black flowers of the light self -sowing through the trees dark gardens of midnight for the gray-white morning hour of blindness in print miles before I am to arrive here To approach the waiting milestone dims whatever else of its lantern ‘til only the placed light there is on me. In this light barely but used to it I can make out the staggered columns of my account as if back through weren’t the real distance: the thin chest flag pinned on by each ridge the titled introduction taking your coat each storm. My letters and ribbons have been the natural— strengths on their way to the more— natural weaknesses— and loss. yet— I wonder where I thought I was going— to ’ve done what you must pass examinations for before I took any.
| Ed Roberson | Living,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Winter,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life | null |
truth
|
And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?
Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?
Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.
The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.
| Gwendolyn Brooks | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
Samuel Beckett's Dublin
|
When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.
The seasonable or more rabid heats Of love and summer in some other cities Unseal the all too human: not in his. When it is cold it stinks, but not before; Smells to high heaven then most creaturely When it is cold. It stinks, but not before His freezing eye has done its best to maim, To amputate limbs, livelihood and name, Abstracting life beyond all likelihood. When it is cold it stinks, and not till then Can it be fragrant. On canal and street, Colder and colder, Murphy to Molloy, The weather hardens round the Idiot Boy, The gleeful hero of the long retreat. When he is cold he stinks, but not before, This living corpse. The existential weather Smells out in these abortive minims, men Who barely living therefore altogether Live till they die; and sweetly smell till then.
| Donald Davie | Living,Disappointment & Failure,The Body,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life | null |
The Nonconformist
|
X, whom society’s most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates, In art is seen confusingly to stand For disciplined conformity, with Yeats. Taxed to explain what this resentment is He feels for small proprieties, it comes, He likes to think, from old enormities And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms. Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes His fathers suffered rankle in his blood, That he find least excusable the times When they acceded, not when they withstood. How else explain this bloody-minded bent To kick against the prickings of the norm; When to conform is easy, to dissent; And when it is most difficult, conform?
| Donald Davie | Living,Life Choices,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
Rodez
|
Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall
At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket Known to me wherever the flattened cat Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving. Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome, No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse. Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks, Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday. Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some Think that I enter them, those centuries Of monkish superstition, here I leave them With their true garlands, and their honest masks, Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden, Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday. Goodbye to all the centuries. There is No home in them, much as the dip and turn Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us. And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.
| Donald Davie | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Architecture & Design,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics | null |
A Spring Song
|
“stooped to truth and moralized his song”
Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time. Vernal a little. Primavera. First Green, first truth and last. High time, high time. A high old time we had of it last summer? I overstate. But getting out the maps… Look! Up the valley of the Brenne, Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses. High time for that, high time. To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay Or so the song says, an amoral song Like Ronsard’s where we go today Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well! Philip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt Or some word as ridiculous, the whole Diction kit begins to fall apart. High time it did, high time. High time and a long time yet, my love! Get out that blessed map. Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it. Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire. High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.
| Donald Davie | Living,Growing Old,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys | null |
No Epitaph
|
No moss nor mottle stains
My parents’ unmarked grave; My word on them remains Stouter than stone, you told me. “Martyred to words”, you have thought, Should be your epitaph; At other times you fought My self-reproaches down. Though bitterly once or twice You have reproached me with how Everything ended in words, We both know better now: You understand, I shall not If I survive you care To raise a headstone for You I have carved on air.
| Donald Davie | Living,Death,Marriage & Companionship,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics | null |
The Craftsman
|
I ply with all the cunning of my art
This little thing, and with consummate care
I fashion it—so that when I depart,
Those who come after me shall find it fair
And beautiful. It must be free of flaws—
Pointing no laborings of weary hands;
And there must be no flouting of the laws
Of beauty—as the artist understands.
Through passion, yearnings infinite—yet dumb—
I lift you from the depths of my own mind
And gild you with my soul’s white heat to plumb
The souls of future men. I leave behind
This thing that in return this solace gives:
“He who creates true beauty ever lives.”
| Marcus B. Christian | Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
What You Have to Get Over
|
Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.
Your first love rounding a corner,
that snowy minefield.
Whether you step lightly or heavily,
you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance
before evening falls,
letting no one see you wend your way,
that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,
meaning “to proceed, to journey,
to travel from one place to another,”
as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.
You have to get over your resentments,
the sun in the morning and the moon at night,
all those shadows of yourself you left behind
on odd little tables.
Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to
cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan,
crawl over this ego or that eros,
then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.
Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning
“that indicated place, somewhere generally seen
or just beyond sight.” If you would recover,
you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot
to that bridge in the darkness
where the sentinels stand
guarding the border with their half-slung rifles,
warned of the likes of you.
| Dick Allen | Living,Growing Old,Life Choices,Activities,Jobs & Working | null |
The Water Carriers
|
On hot days we would see them leaving the hive in swarms. June and I would watch them weave their way through the sugarberry trees toward the pond where they would stop to take a drink, then buzz their way back, plump and full of water, to drop it on the backs of the fanning bees. If you listened you could hear them, their tiny wings beating in unison as they cooled down the hive. My brother caught one once, its bulbous body bursting with water, beating itself against the smooth glass wall of the canning jar. He lit a match, dropped it in, but nothing happened. The match went out and the bee swam through the mix of sulfur and smoke until my brother let it out. It flew straight back to the hive. Later, we skinny-dipped in the pond, the three of us, the August sun melting the world around us as if it were wax. In the cool of the evening, we walked home, pond water still dripping from our skin, glistening and twinkling like starlight.
| Angelo Giambra | null | null |
Book 1, Epigram 5: Ad lectorem de subjecto operis sui.
|
The little world, the subject of my muse, Is a huge task and labor infinite; Like to a wilderness or mass confuse, Or to an endless gulf, or to the night: How many strange Meanders do I find? How many paths do turn my straying pen? How many doubtful twilights make me blind, Which seek to limb out this strange All of men? Easy it were the earth to portray out, Or to draw forth the heavens’ purest frame, Whose restless course, by order whirls about Of change and place, and still remains the same. But how shall man’s, or manner’s, form appear, Which while I write, do change from what they were?
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
Book 1, Epigram 34: Ad. Thomam Freake armig. de veris adventu.
|
The welcome Sun from sea Freake is returned, And cheereth with his beams the naked earth, Which gains with his coming her apparel And had his absence six long months mourned. Out of her fragrant sides she sends to greet him The rashed primrose and the violet; While she the fields and meadows doth beset With flowers, and hangs the trees with pearl to meet him. Amid this hope and joy she doth forget, To kill the hemlock which doth grow too fast, And chill the adder making too much haste, With his black sons revived with the heat; Till summer comes with diverse colours clad, Much like my Epigrams both good and bad.
| Thomas Bastard | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Book 1, Epigram 39: Ad librum suum.
|
My little book: who will thou please, tell me? All which shall read thee? No that cannot be. Whom then, the best? But few of these are known. How shall thou know to please, thou know'st not whom? The meaner sort commend not poetry; And sure the worst should please themselves for thee: But let them pass, and set by most no store, Please thou one well, thou shall not need please more.
| Thomas Bastard | Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
Book 2, Epigram 4: Ad Henricum Wottonum.
|
Wotton, the country and the country swain, How can they yield a Poet any sense? How can they stir him up, or heat his vein? How can they feed him with intelligence? You have that fire which can a wit enflame, In happy London England’s fairest eye: Well may you Poets’ have of worthy name, Which have the food and life of Poetry. And yet the country or the town may sway, Or bear a part, as clowns do in a play.
| Thomas Bastard | Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life | null |
Book 2, Epigram 8
|
Walking the fields a wantcatcher I spied, To him I went, desirous of his game: Sir, have you taken wants? Yes, he replied, Here are a dozen, which were lately ta’en. Then you have left no more. No more? quoth he. Sir I can show you more: the more the worse; And to his work he went, but 'twould not be, For all the wants were crept into my purse. Farewell friend wantcatcher, since 'twill not be, Thou cannot catch the wants, but they catch me.
| Thomas Bastard | Nature,Animals | null |
Book 2, Epigram 21: In Momum.
|
Momus, to be a Poet Laureate, Has strained his wits through an iron grate. For he has rhymes and rhymes, and double strains, And golden verses, and all kinds of veins, Now to the press he presses hastily, To sell his friends stinking eternity. For who would be eternal in such fashion, To be a witness to his condemnation.
| Thomas Bastard | Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Book 2, Epigram 22
|
I met a courtier riding on the plain, Well-mounted on a brave and gallant steed; I sat upon a jade, and spurred to my pain My lazy beast, whose tired sides did bleed: He saw my case, and then of courtesy Did rein his horse, and drew the bridle in, Because I did desire his company: But he corvetting way of me did win. What should I do, who was besteaded so? His horse stood still faster than mine could go.
| Thomas Bastard | Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,Class | null |
Book 2, Epigram 40: De libro suo.
|
One said my book was like unto a coat, Of diverse colours black and red and white. I, bent to cross him, said he spoke by rote. For they in making rather are unlike. A coat, one garment made of many fleeces: My book, one meaning cut into many pieces.
| Thomas Bastard | Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Book 3, Epigram 36
|
The peasant Corus of his wealth does boast, Yet he’s scarce worth twice twenty pounds at most. I chanc’d to word once with this lowly swain, He called me base, and beggar in disdain. To try the truth hereof I rate myself, And cast the little count of all my wealth. See how much Hebrew, Greek, and Poetry, Latin Rhetoric, and Philosophy, Reading, and sense in sciences profound, All valued, are not worth forty pounds.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Midlife,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Sciences,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics | null |
Book 5, Epigram 20: In Misum & Mopsam.
|
Misus and Mopsa hardly could agree, Striving about superiority. The text which says that man and wife are one, Was the chief argument they stood upon. She held they both one woman should become, He held both should be man, and both but one. So they contended daily, but the strife Could not be ended, till both were one wife.
| Thomas Bastard | Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Home Life,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Book 6, Epigram 7: In prophanationem nominis Dei.
|
God’s name is bare of honour in our hearing, And even worn out with our blasphemous swearing. Between the infant and the aged, both The first and last they utter, is an oath. Oh hellish manners of our profane age. Jehovah’s fear is scoffed upon the stage, The Mimicking jester, names it every day; Unless God is blashphem’d, it is no play.
| Thomas Bastard | Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
Book 6, Epigram 14: De Piscatione.
|
Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest, of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what, ye, why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.
| Thomas Bastard | Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Town & Country Life | null |
Book 6, Epigram 17: In Sextum.
|
Sextus upon a spleen, did rashly swear, That no new fashion he would ever wear. He was forsworn, for see what did ensue, He wore the old, till the old was the new.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,The Body,Time & Brevity | null |
Book 6, Epigram 30
|
Upon the plain as I rode all alone, Assaulted by two sturdy lads I was; I am a poor man Sires, let me be gone. Nay, but ye shall be poor before ye pass. And so I was: yet lost nothing thereby. Would they had robbed me of my poverty.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Life Choices,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Money & Economics | null |
Book 7, Epigram 9: De senectute & iuuentute.
|
Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Coming of Age,Growing Old,Philosophy | null |
Book 7, Epigram 36: De puero balbutiente.
|
Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy | null |
Book 7, Epigram 42
|
Our vice runs beyond all that old men saw, And far authentically above our laws, And scorning virtues safe and golden mean, Sits uncontrolled upon the high extreme. Circes, thy monsters painted out the hue, Of feigned filthiness, but ours is true. Our vice puts down all proverbs and all themes, Our vice excels all fables and all dreams.
| Thomas Bastard | Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology | null |
Book 7, Epigram 47: De Hominis Ortu & Sepultura.
|
Nature which headlong into life doth throw us, With our feet forward to our grave doth bring us, What is less ours, than this our borrowed breath, We stumble into life, we go to death.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Death,Growing Old,Life Choices | null |
A History Without Suffering
|
In this poem there is no suffering.
It spans hundreds of years and records
no deaths, connecting when it can,
those moments where people are healthy
and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter,
maybe a Volume, shorn of violence
consists of an adult reading aimlessly.
This line is the length of a full life
smuggled in while no one was plotting
against a neighbour, except in jest.
Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She
is in a drought-fisted field
with a hoe. This is her twelfth year
on the land, and today her back
doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity
and of murder have declared a day’s truce
in the Civil War within her. So today,
we can bring Nellie, content with herself,
with the world, into our History.
For a day. In the next generation
we find a suitable subject camping
near the border of a divided country:
for a while no one knows how near. For these
few lines she is ours. But how about
the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed
body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes;
anticipation of the young, the edited memory
of the rest of us? How about thoughts
higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes.
Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes:
they have their own privileged history,
like inherited income beside our husbandry.
We bring our History up to date
in a city like London: someone’s just paid
the mortgage, is free of guilt
and not dying of cancer; and going
past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline
advertising torture. This is all
recommended reading, but in small doses.
It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.
| E. A. Markham | Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics | null |
Produce Wagon
|
The heat shimmer along our street one midsummer midafternoon, and wading up through it a horse’s hooves, and each shoe raising a tongueless bell that tolled in the neighborhood, till the driver drew in the reins and the horse hung its head and stood.And something in a basket thin as shavings (blackberries? or a ghost of the memory of having tasted them?) passing into my hands as mother paid, and the man got up again, slapping the loop from the reins, and was off on his trundling wagon.
| Roy Scheele | null | null |
Book 4, Epigram 7: "Our fathers did but use the world before"
|
Our fathers did but use the world before,And having used did leave the same to us.We spill whatever resteth to their store.What can our heirs inherit but our curse?For we have sucked the sweet and sap away,And sowed consumption in the fruitful ground;The woods and forests clad in rich arrayWith nakedness and baldness we confound.We have defaced the lasting monuments,And caused all honour to have end with us;The holy temples feel our ravishments.What can our heirs inherit but our curse?The world must end, for men are so accurst;Unless God end it sooner, they will first.
| Thomas Bastard | Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,God & the Divine | null |
After a Rainstorm
|
Because I have come to the fence at night, the horses arrive also from their ancient stable. They let me stroke their long faces, and I note in the light of the now-merging moonhow they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been by shake-guttered raindrops spotted around their rumps and thus made Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.Maybe because it is night, they are nervous, or maybe because they too sense what they have become, they seem to be waiting for me to say somethingto whatever ancient spirits might still abide here, that they might awaken from this strange dream, in which there are fences and stables and a man who doesn’t know a single word they understand.
| Robert Wrigley | null | null |
H
|
Yet the after is still a storm
as witness bent shadbush and cord grass in stillness sand littered with the smallest of fragments whether shell or bone That city we are far from is still frozen, still in ruins (except its symmetries be renewed by sleep, its slant colors redeemed) Nothing has changed but its name and the air that it breathes There’s still no truth in making sense while the ash settles, so fine that planes keep falling from the sky And the name once again to be the old one Saint Something, Saint Gesture, Saint Entirely the Same as if nothing or no one had been nameless in the interim or as if still could be placed beside storm that simply, as in a poem Have you heard the angels with sexed tongues, met the blind boy who could see with his skin, his body curled inward like a phrase, like an after in stillness or a letter erased Have you seen what’s written on him as question to an answer or calendar out of phase Add up the number of such days Add illness and lilt as formed on the tongue Add that scene identical with its negative, that sentence which refuses to speak, present which cannot be found
| Michael Palmer | Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life | null |
Twenty-four Logics in Memory of Lee Hickman
|
The bend in the river followed us for days
and above us the sun doubled and redoubled its claims Now we are in a house with forty-four walls and nothing but doors Outside the trees, chokecherries, mulberries and oaks are cracking like limbs We can do nothing but listen or so someone claims, the Ice Man perhaps, all enclosed in ice though the light has been shortening our days and coloring nights the yellow of hay, scarlet of trillium, blue of block ice Words appear, the texture of ice, with messages etched on their shells: Minna 1892, Big Max and Little Sarah, This hour ago everyone watched as the statues fell Enough of such phrases and we’ll have a book Enough of such books and we’ll have mountains of ice enough to balance our days with nights enough at last to close our eyes
| Michael Palmer | Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books | null |
Eighth Sky
|
It is scribbled along the body
Impossible even to say a word An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand Yet not, not marks inside a box For example, this is a mirror box Spinoza designed such a box and called it the Eighth Sky called it the Nevercadabra House as a joke Yet not, not so much a joke not Notes for Electronic Harp on a day free of sounds (but I meant to write “clouds”) At night these same boulevards fill with snow Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe, as you wrote, writing of death in the snow, Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan It is scribbled across each body Impossible even to name a word Look, you would say, how the sky falls at first gently, then not at all Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause, twin ships, twin nemeses preparing to metamorphose into an alphabet in stone St.-Benoit-sur-Loire to Max Jacob
| Michael Palmer | Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets | null |
Autobiography 2 (hellogoodby)
|
The Book of Company which
I put down and can’t pick up
The Trans-Siberian disappearing, the Blue Train and the Shadow Train Her body with ridges like my skull Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge A philosopher in a doorway insists that there are no images He whispers instead: Possible Worlds The Mind-Body Problem The Tale of the Color Harpsichord Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse The ring of O dwindles sizzling around the hole until gone False spring is laughing at the snow and just beyond each window immense pines weighted with snow A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow holds out his Third Meditation like a necrotic star. He whispers: archery is everywhere in decline, photography the first perversion of our time Reach to the milky bottom of this pond to know the feel of bone, a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb, the maternal clavicle, the familiar arch of a brother’s brow He was your twin, no doubt, forger of the unicursal maze My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard I study their faces through the haze Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed, please, at these digressions They are soldering the generals back onto their pedestals for A. C.
| Michael Palmer | Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy | null |
Autobiography 3
|
Yes, I was born on the street known as Glass—as Paper, Scissors or Rock.
Several of my ancestors had no hands. Several of my ancestors used their pens in odd ways. A child of seven I prayed for breath. Each day I passed through the mirrored X into droplets of rain congealed around dust. I never regretted this situation. Though patient as an alchemist I failed to learn English. Twenty years later I burned all my furniture. Likewise the beams of my house to fuel the furnace. Once I bought an old boat. I abandoned the tyrannical book of my dreams and wrote about dresses, jewels, furniture and menus eight or ten times in a book of dreams. It sets me to dreaming when I dust it off. Our time is a between time; best to stay out of it. Send an occasional visiting card to eternity or a few stanzas to the living so they won’t suspect we know they don’t exist. Sign them Sincerely Yours, Warmest Regards, Thinking of You or Deepest Regrets. Brown river outside my window, an old boat riding the current. What I like most is to stay in my apartment. So that is my life, pared of anecdotes. I go out occasionally to look at a dance. Otherwise the usual joys, worries and inner mourning. Occasionally in an old boat I navigate the river when I find the time. Water swallows the days. I think maybe that’s all I have to say except that an irregular heart sometimes speaks to me. It says, A candle is consuming a children’s alphabet. It says, Attend to each detail of the future-past. Last night the moon was divided precisely in half. Today a terrifying wind.
| Michael Palmer | Living,Growing Old,Life Choices,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships | null |
Lone Egret
|
Classically stagy, goose-neck elegant, river’s third eye. Pencil thin head. S for a throat. Skeleton of a saint.Plodder, preening posturer. One foot, another. Up from the dank weeds.
| Kathleen M. McCann | null | null |
Christmas Prelude
|
O little fleas
of speckled light
all dancing
like a satellite
O belly green trees
shaded vale
O shiny bobcat
winter trail
Amoebic rampage
squamous cock
a Chinese hairpiece
burly sock
A grilled banana
smashes gates
and mingeless badgers
venerate
The asses of the
winter trees
rock on fat asses
as you please
Be jumpy
or unhinged
with joy
enlightened
fry cakes
Staten hoy.
| Lisa Jarnot | Activities,Eating & Drinking,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture,Christmas | null |
Marcus Aurelius Rose
|
for Thomas
From the five good emperors
I have learned that there were five good emperors,
From the lemon tree I’ve planted
now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop,
From the clock, the time, it’s five p.m.,
from the sun the length of day,
From Quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves
of all the trees,
From burning I’ve learned burning,
from the aster family chickory abounds,
From hawkweed of the colors bright,
from sleeping, of my dreams,
From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing,
from turkeys how to run and how to hop,
From erect perennials I’ve learned to reach the shelf,
from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin,
From the sparrows I’ve learned this and that,
from Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds,
From the window blinds, from the sun decayed,
from the heart, a brimming record braised and turned.
| Lisa Jarnot | Living,Growing Old,Life Choices,Activities,School & Learning | null |
Four Glimpses of Night
|
I
Eagerly
Like a woman hurrying to her lover
Night comes to the room of the world
And lies, yielding and content
Against the cool round face
Of the moon.
II
Night is a curious child, wandering
Between earth and sky, creeping
In windows and doors, daubing
The entire neighborhood
With purple paint.
Day
Is an apologetic mother
Cloth in hand
Following after.
III
Peddling
From door to door
Night sells
Black bags of peppermint stars
Heaping cones of vanilla moon
Until
His wares are gone
Then shuffles homeward
Jingling the gray coins
Of daybreak.
IV
Night’s brittle song, sliver-thin
Shatters into a billion fragments
Of quiet shadows
At the blaring jazz
Of a morning sun.
| Frank Marshall Davis | Living,Time & Brevity,Nature | null |
Inventing a Horse
|
Inventing a horse is not easy.
One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
One must include a place where horses like to live;
or do when they live with humans like you.
Slowly, you must walk him in the cold;
feed him bran mash, apples;
accustom him to the harness;
holding in mind even when you are tired
harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil
to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun;
one must imagine teaching him to run
among the knuckles of tree roots,
not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves,
and not to grow thin in the city,
where at some point you will have to live;
and one must imagine the absence of money.
Most of all, though: the living weight,
the sound of his feet on the needles,
and, since he is heavy, and real,
and sometimes tired after a run
down the river with a light whip at his side,
one must imagine love
in the mind that does not know love,
an animal mind, a love that does not depend
on your image of it,
your understanding of it;
indifferent to all that it lacks:
a muzzle and two black eyes
looking the day away, a field empty
of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees,
and some piles of hay.
| Meghan O'Rourke | Living,Life Choices,The Mind,Nature,Animals | null |
The Layers
|
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
| Stanley Kunitz | Living,Life Choices,Midlife,The Mind,Relationships,Friends & Enemies | null |
End of Summer
|
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
| Stanley Kunitz | Living,Coming of Age,Time & Brevity,Nature,Fall | null |
Hunger Moon
|
The last full moon of February
stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position
until now, in the small hours, across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me, not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun of silence.
I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.
Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.
| Jane Cooper | Living,The Body,Time & Brevity,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Winter | null |
Bonsai at the Potter's Stall
|
Under fluorescent light, aligned on a benchand table top, oranges the size of marbles danglefrom trees with glossy leaves. White trumpetsbloom in tiny clay pots. Under a firethorn’s twistedlimbs, a three inch monk holds a cup from whichhe appears to drink the interior life. The potterprizes his bonsai children who will never grow up,never leave home.
| Kay Mullen | null | null |
Tonight
|
Tonight is a drunk man, his dirty shirt.There is no couple chatting by the recycling bins, offering to help me unload my plastics.There is not even the black and white cat that balances elegantly on the lip of the dumpster.There is only the smell of sour breath. Sweat on the collar of my shirt. A water bottle rolling under a car. Me in my too-small pajama pants stacking juice jugs on neighbors’ juice jugs.I look to see if there is someone drinking on their balcony. I tell myself I will wave.
| Ladan Osman | null | null |
Behind the Plow
|
I look in the turned sod for an iron bolt that fell from the plow frame and find instead an arrowhead with delicate, chipped edges, still sharp, not much larger than a woman’s long fingernail. Pleased, I put the arrowhead into my overalls pocket, knowing that the man who shot the arrow and lost his work must have looked for itmuch longer than I will look for that bolt.
| Leo Dangel | null | null |
Falling Water
|
I drove to Oak Park, took two tours,
And looked at some of the houses.
I took the long way back along the lake.
The place that I came home to—a cavernous
Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee—
Seems basically a part of that tradition,
With the same admixture of expansion and restraint:
The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging
Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense
That while the superficial conflicts got resolved,
The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium,
It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live.
Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man
Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person
Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations,
Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life
That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure,
In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe
And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it,
But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining
Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture,
And in the unconstructed life that it contains.
In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates
That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus”
Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself;
And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter”
Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair.
I wish that time could bring the future back again
And let me see things as they used to seem to me
Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state—
Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow.
There used to be a logic in the way time passed
That made it flow directly towards an underlying space
Where all the minor, individual lives converged.
The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past
And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light
I remembered from home, and which has faded.
And the voices get supplanted by the rain,
The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind
That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky
Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air,
While in its place a kind of monument appears,
Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity
And standing in a small and singular expanse—
As though the years had been a pretext for reflection,
And my life had been a phase of disenchantment—
As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw,
The reassuring settings slowly melt away,
And what remains is just a sense of getting older.
In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart
Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted
And refused to see. The homely notions of the good,
The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like
Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life
Deteriorate with manically increasing speed,
The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter,
And the serenity it brings—not in reflection,
But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken,
Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the
Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box;
The life that can’t accommodate another’s)—
As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things.
Why can’t the more expansive ecstasies come true?
I met you more than thirty years ago, in 1958,
In Mrs. Wolford’s eighth grade history class.
All moments weigh the same, and matter equally;
Yet those that time brings back create the fables
Of a happy or unsatisfying life, of minutes
Passing on the way to either peace or disappointment—
Like a paper calendar on which it’s always autumn
And we’re back in school again; or a hazy afternoon
Near the beginning of October, with the World Series
Playing quietly on the radio, and the windows open,
And the California sunlight filling up the room.
When I survey the mural stretched across the years
—Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected
Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which,
In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real.
I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with
Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that
Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a
Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate—
As though the future weren’t real, and the present
Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to,
And the past were there forever. And the art
That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t
Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood,
Which harden into shapes as it recedes.
I wish I knew a way of looking at the world
That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my
Life that didn’t always see a half-completed
Structure made of years and filled with images
And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s
Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones.
I wish there were a place where I could stay
And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium
Where I could wander back and forth across a field
Replete with all the incidents and small details
That gave the days their textures, that bound the
Minutes into something solid, and that linked them
All together in a way that used to seem eternal.
We used to go to dances in my family’s ancient
Cadillac, which blew up late one summer evening
Climbing up the hill outside Del Mar. And later
I can see us steaming off the cover of the Beatles’
Baby-butcher album at your house in Mission Bay;
And three years later listening to the Velvet
Underground performing in a roller skating rink.
Years aren’t texts, or anything like texts;
And yet I often think of 1968 that way, as though
That single year contained the rhythms of the rest,
As what began in hope and eagerness concluded in
Intractable confusion, as the wedding turned into a
Puzzling fiasco over poor John Godfrey’s hair.
The parts were real, and yet the dense and living
Whole they once composed seems broken now, its
Voice reduced to disembodied terms that speak to me
More distantly each day, until the tangled years
Are finally drained of feeling, and collapse into a
Sequence of the places where we lived: your parents’
House in Kensington, and mine above the canyon:
Then the flat by Sears in Cambridge, where we
Moved when we got married, and the third floor
Of the house on Francis Avenue, near Harvard Square;
The big apartment in Milwaukee where we lived the
Year that John was born, and last of all the
House in Whitefish Bay, where you live now
And all those years came inexplicably undone
In mid-July. The sequence ended late last year.
Suppose we use a lifetime as a measure of the world
As it exists for one. Then half of mine has ended,
While the fragment which has recently come to be
Contains no vantage point from which to see it whole.
I think that people are the sum of their illusions,
That the cares that make them difficult to see
Are eased by distance, with their errors blending
In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding
In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable,
Yet each the same as all the others) and their
Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled
Moral vision whose intense, meandering design
Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling,
As in grief, or in the pathos of a life
Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate,
Because the most important thing is human happiness—
Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of
Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms
And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real.
The whole transcends its tensions, like the intimate
Reflections on the day that came at evening, whose
Significance was usually overlooked, or misunderstood,
Because the facts were almost always unexceptional.
Two years ago we took our son to Paris. Last night
I picked him up and took him to a Lou Reed show,
And then took him home. I look at all the houses as I
Walk down Hackett Avenue to work. I teach my classes,
Visit friends, cook introspective meals for myself,
Yet in the end the minutes don’t add up. What’s lost
Is the perception of the world as something good
And held in common; as a place to be perfected
In the kinds of everyday divisions and encounters
That endowed it with integrity and structure,
And that merged its private moments with the past.
What broke it into pieces? What transformed the
Flaws that gave it feeling into objects of a deep and
Smoldering resentment—like coming home too early,
Or walking too far ahead of you on the rue Jacob?
I wish that life could be a window on the sun,
Instead of just this porch where I can stand and
Contemplate the wires that lace the parking lot
And feel it moving towards some unknown resolution.
The Guggenheim Museum just reopened. Tonight I
Watched a segment of the news on PBS—narrated by a
Woman we met years ago at Bob’s—that showed how
Most of Wright’s interior had been restored,
And how the ramp ascends in spirals towards the sky.
I like the houses better—they flow in all directions,
Merging with the scenery and embodying a milder,
More domestic notion of perfection, on a human scale
That doesn’t overwhelm the life that it encloses.
Isn’t there a way to feel at home within the
Confines of this bland, accommodating structure
Made of souvenirs and emblems, like the hammock
Hanging in the backyard of an undistinguished
Prairie School house in Whitefish Bay—the lineal,
Reduced descendant of the “Flameproof” Wright house
Just a block or two away from where I live now?
I usually walk along the street on Sunday,
Musing on how beautiful it seems, how aspects of it
Recapitulate the Oak Park house and studio, with
Open spaces buried in a labyrinthine interior,
And with the entrance half-concealed on the side—
A characteristic feature of his plans that made it
Difficult to find, although the hope was that in
Trying to get inside, the visitor’s eye would come to
Linger over subtleties he might have failed to see—
In much the way that in the course of getting older,
And trying to reconstruct the paths that led me here,
I found myself pulled backwards through these old,
Uncertain passages, distracted by the details,
And meeting only barriers to understanding why the
Years unfolded as they did, and why my life
Turned out the way it has—like his signature
“Pathway of Discovery,” with each diversion
Adding to the integrity of the whole.
There is this sweep life has that makes the
Accidents of time and place seem small.
Everything alters, and the personal concerns
That love could hold together for a little while
Decay, and then the world seems strange again,
And meaningless and free. I miss the primitive
Confusions, and the secret way things came to me
Each evening, and the pain. I still wonder
Where the tears went, standing in my room each day
And quietly inhabiting a calm, suspended state
Enveloped by the emptiness that scares and thrills me,
With the background noise cascading out of nothing
Like a song that makes the days go by, a song
Incorporating everything—not into what it says,
But simply in the way it touches me, a single
Image of dispersal, the inexhaustible perception
Of contingency and transience and isolation.
It brings them back to me. I have the inwardness
I think I must have wanted, and the quietude,
The solitary temper, and this space where I can
Linger with the silence curling all around me
Like the sound of pure passage, waiting here
Surrounded by the furniture, the books and lists
And all these other emblems of the floating world,
The prints of raindrops that begin as mist, that fall
Discreetly through the atmosphere, and disappear.
And then I feel them in the air, in a reserved,
More earthly music filled with voices reassembling
In a wellspring of remembrance, talking to me again,
And finding shelter in the same evasive movements
I can feel in my own life, cloaked in a quiet
Dignity that keeps away the dread of getting old,
And fading out of other people’s consciousness,
And dying –with its deepest insecurities and fears
Concealed by their own protective colorations,
As the mind secretes its shell and calls it home.
It has the texture of an uncreated substance,
Hovering between the settings it had come to love
And some unformulated state I can’t imagine—
Waiting for the telephone to ring, obsessed with
Ways to occupy these wide, unstructured hours,
And playing records by myself, and waking up alone.
All things are disparate, yet subject to the same
Intense, eradicating wills of time and personality,
Like waves demolishing the walls love seemed to build
Between our lives and emptiness, the certainty they
Seemed to have just two or three short years ago,
Before the anger spread its poison over everything.
I think about the way our visions locked together
In a nightmare play of nervousness and language,
Living day to day inside the concentrated
Force of that relentless argument, whose words
Swept over us in formless torrents of anxiety, two
People clinging to their versions of their lives
Almost like children—living out each other’s
Intermittent fantasies, that fed upon themselves
As though infected by some vile, concentrated hatred;
Who then woke up and planned that evening’s dinner.
It’s all memories now, and distance. Miles away
The cat is sleeping on the driveway, John’s in school,
And sunlight filters through a curtain in the kitchen.
Nothing really changes—the external world intrudes
And then withdraws, and then becomes continuous again.
I went downtown today and got a lamp with pendant
Lanterns made of opalescent art glass—part, I guess,
Of what this morning’s paper called the “Wright craze.”
I like the easy way the days go by, the parts of aging
That have come to seem familiar, and the uneventful
Calm that seems to settle on the house at night.
Each morning brings the mirror’s reassuring face,
As though the years had left the same enduring person
Simplified and changed—no longer vaguely desperate,
No longer torn, yet still impatient with himself
And still restless; but drained of intricacy and rage,
Like a mild paradox—uninteresting in its own right,
Yet existing for the sake of something stranger.
Now and then our life comes over me, in brief,
Involuntary glimpses of that world that blossom
Unexpectedly, in fleeting moments of regret
That come before the ache, the pang that gathers
Sharply, like an indrawn breath—a strange and
Thoughtful kind of pain, as though a steel
Band had somehow snapped inside my heart.
I don’t know. But what I do know is that
None of it is ever going to come to me again.
Why did I think a person only distantly like me
Might finally represent my life? What aspects
Of my attitudes, my cast of mind, my inconclusive
Way of tossing questions at the world had I
Supposed might realize another person’s fantasies
And turn her into someone else—who gradually became
A separate part of me, and argued with the very
Words I would have used, and looked at me through
Eyes I’d looked at as though gazing at myself?
I guess we only realize ourselves in dreams,
Or in these self-reflexive reveries sustaining
All the charms that contemplation holds—until the
Long enchantment of the soul with what it sees
Is lifted, and it startles at a space alight with
Objects of its infantile gaze, like people in a mall.
I saw her just the other day. I felt a kind of
Comfort at her face, one tinctured with bemusement
At the strange and guarded person she’d become—
Attractive, vaguely friendly, brisk (too brisk),
But no one I could think might represent my life.
Why did I even try to see myself in what’s outside?
The strangeness pushes it away, propels the vision
Back upon itself, into these regions filled with
Shapes that I can wander through and never see,
As though their image were inherently unreal.
The houses on a street, the quiet backyard shade,
The room restored to life with bric-a-brac—
I started by revisiting these things, then slowly
Reconceiving them as forms of loss made visible
That balanced sympathy and space inside an
Abstract edifice combining reaches of the past
With all these speculations, all this artful
Preening of the heart. I sit here at my desk,
Perplexed and puzzled, teasing out a tangled
Skein of years we wove together, and trying to
Combine the fragments of those years into a poem.
Who cares if life—if someone’s actual life—is
Finally insignificant and small? There’s still a
Splendor in the way it flowers once and fades
And leaves a carapace behind. There isn’t time to
Linger over why it happened, or attempt to make its
Mystery come to life again and last, like someone
Still embracing the confused perceptions of himself
Embedded in the past, as though eternity lay there—
For heaven’s a delusion, and eternity is in the details,
And this tiny, insubstantial life is all there is.
—And that would be enough, but for the reoccurring
Dreams I often have of you. Sometimes at night
The banished unrealities return, as though a room
Suffused with light and poetry took shape around me.
Pictures line the walls. It’s early summer.
Somewhere in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel,
Reflecting on his years with “Albertine”—with X—
Suggests that love is just a consciousness of distance,
Of the separation of two lives in time and space.
I think the same estrangement’s mirrored in each life,
In how it seems both adequate and incomplete—part
Day-to-day existence, part imaginary construct
Beckoning at night, and sighing through my dreams
Like some disconsolate chimera, or the subject
Of a lonely, terrifying sadness; or the isolation
Of a quiet winter evening, when the house feels empty,
And silence intervenes. But in the wonderful
Enclosure opening in my heart, I seem to recognize
Our voices lilting in the yard, inflected by the
Rhythms of a song whose words are seamless
And whose lines are never-ending. I can almost
See the contours of your face, and sense the
Presence of the trees, and reimagine all of us
Together in a deep, abiding happiness, as if the
Three of us inhabited a fragile, made-up world
That seemed to be so permanent, so real.
I have this fantasy: It’s early in the evening.
You and I are sitting in the backyard, talking.
Friends arrive, then drinks and dinner, conversation…
The lovely summer twilight lasts forever…
What’s the use?
What purpose do these speculations serve? What
Mild enchantments do these meditations leave?
They’re just the murmurs of an age, of middle age,
That help to pass the time that they retrieve
Before subsiding, leaving everything unchanged.
Each of us at times has felt the future fade,
Or seen the compass of his life diminished,
Or realized some tangible illusion was unreal.
Driving down to Evanston last week, I suddenly
Remembered driving down that road eight years ago,
So caught up in some story I’d just finished
That I’d missed the way the countryside was changing—
How in place of trees there now were office towers
And theme parks, parts of a confusingly panoply of
Barns and discount malls transfiguring a landscape
Filled with high, receding clouds and rows of flimsy
Houses in what used to be a field. I thought of
Other people’s lives, and how impossible it seemed
To grasp them on the model of my own—as little
Mirrors of infinity—or sense their forms of
Happiness, or in their minor personal upheavals
Feel the sweep of time reduced to human scale
And see its abstract argument made visible.
I thought of overarching dreams of plenitude—
How life lacks shape until it’s given one by love,
And how each soul is both a kingdom in itself
And part of some incorporating whole that
Feels and has a face and lets it live forever.
All of these seemed true, and cancelled one another,
Leaving just the feeling of an unseen presence
Tracing out the contours of a world erased,
Like music tracing out the contours of the mind—
For life has the form of a winding curve in space
And in its wake the human figure disappears.
Look at our surroundings—where a previous age
Could visualize a landscape we see borders,
Yet I think the underlying vision is the same:
A person positing a world that he can see
And can’t contain, and vexed by other people.
Everything is possible; some of it seemed real
Or nearly real, yet in the end it spoke to me alone,
In phrases echoing the isolation of a meager
Ledge above a waterfall, or rolling across a vast,
Expanding plain on which there’s always room,
But only room for one. It starts and ends
Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim
Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace
Delights that make the days go by, with simple
Arguments and fears, and with the nervous
Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit
Transforming both the landscape and our lives,
Until we look around and find ourselves at home,
But in a wholly different world. And even those
Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything
Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order
All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate.
—Yet why? That things are temporary doesn’t
Render them unreal, unworthy of regretting.
It’s not as though the past had never happened:
All those years were real, and their loss was real,
And it is sad—I don’t know what else to call it.
I’m glad that both of us seem happy. Yet what
Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world
Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind,
And no more tangible than that. And now it’s gone,
And in its place I find the image of a process
Of inexorable decay, or of some great unraveling
That drags the houses forward into emptiness
And backwards into pictures of the intervening days
Love pieced together out of nothing. And I’m
Certain that this austere vision finally is true,
And yet it strikes me as too meager to believe.
It comes from much too high above the world
And seems to me too hopeless, too extreme—
But then I found myself one winter afternoon
Remembering a quiet morning in a classroom
And inventing everything again, in ordinary
Terms that seemed to comprehend a childish
Dream of love, and then the loss of love,
And all the intricate years between.
| John Koethe | Living,Growing Old,Separation & Divorce,Time & Brevity,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Home Life | null |
Girls’ Middle School Orchestra
|
They’re all dressed up in carmine floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair festooned with matching ribbons: their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them infuse this sort-of-music as if happiness could actually be each-plays-her-part-and-all-will-take-care-of-itself. Their hearts unscarred under quartz lights beam through the darkness in which we sit to show us why we endured at home the squeaking and squawking and botched notes that now in concert are almost beautiful, almost rendering this heartrending music composed for an archduke who loved it so much he spent his fortune for the musicians who could bring it brilliantly to life.
| Michael Ryan | null | null |
The Farmer
|
Each day I go into the fields
to see what is growing
and what remains to be done.
It is always the same thing: nothing
is growing, everything needs to be done.
Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray
till my bones ache and hands rub
blood-raw with honest labor—
all that grows is the slow
intransigent intensity of need.
I have sown my seed on soil
guaranteed by poverty to fail.
But I don’t complain—except
to passersby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain. A farmer of dreams
knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams
knows what it means to be patient.
Each day I go into the fields.
| W.D. Ehrhart | Activities,Gardening,Jobs & Working,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life,Labor Day | null |
The Watchers
|
Two women on the lone wet strand (The wind's out with a will to roam)The waves wage war on rocks and sand, (And a ship is long due home.)The sea sprays in the women's eyes— (Hearts can writhe like the sea's wild foam)Lower descend the tempestuous skies, (For the wind's out with a will to roam.)"O daughter, thine eyes be better than mine," (The waves ascend high as yonder dome)"North or south is there never a sign?" (And a ship is long due home.)They watched there all the long night through— (The wind's out with a will to roam)Wind and rain and sorrow for two— (And heaven on the long reach home.)
| William Stanley Braithwaite | Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
Virgin Mule
|
The conversations of the French
Quarter mules in their stables
after a full day of pulling
tourists and voters over cobble-
stones is not espresso witty
and in their dark no TVs feed
them news of the ends of mules
elsewhere in the Middle East
and West. In our stables the ends
of others are a fact of atmosphere.
The yoyos on the mystery island
nextdoor are revving familiar tools
in backyard now gripped by failure
first of electricity than of
a meaner something that’ll grow
into nothing we’ll know in the A.M.
Once they were visitors like us
then they grew mulish in their
bubbles and pulled whatever
was put around their necks in-
cluding a banner that said, About
What Kills Us We Know Little.
On certain nights after a good
internal fight we hear the voice-
less others through the glass
fearfully sweet’n’soft like dough.
Oh let the monsters in. Help us
rise above our not seeing them,
may they let us into their eyes
as well. Banish the blindness
of these cobblestones, clop, clop.
But! Pffsst! Our notes are in-
complete. Loving you was
never on the agenda. Better
to sing as roughly as the stones.
On Memorial Day we had one
thousand hotdogs & counting.
Didn’t visit a single graveyard.
We the Grant Wood folks scan
the sky for incoming missiles:
blips ourselves we understand
timing and touring in America.
The gilded dads in the portraits
sought the idealized continuity
now moving before us democratically
in showers of pixels and dots.
I’ll go with the distracted mariner,
my lover, and we’ll be in the world.
It will be late by then and dark.
We lyric virgin mules keep our
book of hours in a dream apart,
having stranded a billion turistas.
But we could not break the chummy hand.
Ready to brave the snow without a hat,
severe weather notwithstanding,
we merely nod and understand.
| Andrei Codrescu | Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture | null |
April Midnight
|
Side by side through the streets at midnight, Roaming together, Through the tumultuous night of London, In the miraculous April weather.
Roaming together under the gaslight, Day’s work over, How the Spring calls to us, here in the city, Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!
Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces, Cleansing, entrancing, After the heat and the fumes and the footlights, Where you dance and I watch your dancing.
Good it is to be here together, Good to be roaming, Even in London, even at midnight, Lover-like in a lover’s gloaming.
You the dancer and I the dreamer, Children together, Wandering lost in the night of London, In the miraculous April weather.
| Arthur Symons | Love,Romantic Love,Nature,Spring,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life | null |
April Love
|
We have walked in Love's land a little way, We have learnt his lesson a little while, And shall we not part at the end of day, With a sigh, a smile?
A little while in the shine of the sun, We were twined together, joined lips, forgot How the shadows fall when the day is done, And when Love is not.
We have made no vows--there will none be broke, Our love was free as the wind on the hill, There was no word said we need wish unspoke, We have wrought no ill.
So shall we not part at the end of day, Who have loved and lingered a little while, Join lips for the last time, go our way, With a sigh, a smile?
| Ernest Dowson | null | null |
Sonnet 1
|
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
| Sir Philip Sidney | Love,Classic Love,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books | null |
Sea Fever
|
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
| John Masefield | Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
Ode
|
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.
We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming —
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.
They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man's soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man's heart.
And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day's late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.
But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.
For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry —
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God's future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.
Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.
| Arthur O'Shaughnessy | Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
The Sorrow of True Love
|
The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow
And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:
Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair
Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear
Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.
But greater sorrow from less love has been
That can mistake lack of despair for hope
And knows not tempest and the perfect scope
Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual
Of drops that from remorse and pity fall
And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,
Removed eternally from the sun’s law.
| Edward Thomas | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Classic Love,Heartache & Loss,Nature,Weather | null |
Houses, Scams, Language
(with a line in romanian)
|
silver & gossamer & porcelain & cobwebs
some people are made out of
they walk from here to there
a limited number of times only—
but the bony phone is just dumb plastic
it rings not at all
i don’t understand: my ideas are universal
but my audience is five guys at the shell
station people just don’t get it
she longs for what makes her grin
(tînjeşte dupâ ce rînjeşte)
the sweetness of want
the repulsiveness of having
after days she was returned
by the storms of language
that had tossed her far
& she rearranged her face
for the english language—
what i heard i did not hear
what i saw i did not see
i trust my sense to dullness then
i kill my joy & cease to be
| Andrei Codrescu | Living,The Mind,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity | null |
A Geography of Poets
|
is all wrong, ed
what poets now live
where they say they do
where they started out
where they want to
half the midwesterners
did time in new york
the other half in california
only new yorkers write
as if they are from new york
and mostly they are not
the ones in california
were wounded elsewhere
when they feel better
or can't afford the rent
they'll go back where
they came from
this is america
you get hurt where you are born
you make poetry out of it
as far from home as you can get
you die somewhere in between
the only geography of poets
is greyhound
general motors rules them all
ubi patria ibi bene
or ibi bene ubi patria
bread out of nostalgia
not a lot of it either
some of us came from very far
maps don't help much
| Andrei Codrescu | Living,Life Choices,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
The Obvious Tradition
|
I haven’t remembered anything, only the names
and that their dates have been replaced by fees
toted up out of mischief:
a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard,
a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse.
But now you see it, she’s supposed to call.
Surely neither will converse, they merely tell,
succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June.
Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was.
Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts,
the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth
as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine?
The phantom tugboat slips along
in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze
which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong.
Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune?
How else have I been taught to guess
and then been told to know, because matter equals good?
A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.
| Bill Berkson | Living,Time & Brevity | null |
October
|
I
It’s odd to have a separate month. It
escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm
and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The
Indians have a name for it, they call it:
“Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters
at dawn. Everything is special to them,
the colorful ones.
II
Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle.
Is she angry because her husband likes October?
Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes?
The nest eggs have captured her,
but April rises from her bed.
III
“The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester.
Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons.
The October wind . . . nests
IV
Why do I think October is beautiful?
It is not, is not beautiful.
But then
what is there to hold one’s interest
between the various drifts of a day’s
work, but to search out the differences
the window and grate—
but it is not, is not
beautiful.
V
I think your face is beautiful, the way it is
close to my face, and I think you are the real
October with your transparence and the stone of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.
| Bill Berkson | Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Fall | null |
Christmas Eve
|
for Vincent Warren
Behind the black water tower
under the grey
of the sky that feeds it
smoke speeds to where a pigeon
spreads its wings
This is no great feat
Cold pushes out its lust
We walk we drink we cast
our giggling insults
Would you please
leave the $2.50 you owe me
I would rather not talk about it
just now Money bores me I would like
to visit someone who will stay
in bed all day A forest is rising
imperceptibly in my head
not a civilized park
I think it would be nice this “new
moral odor” no it would not mean
“everything marching to its tomb”
The water tower
watches over us Is there someone
you would like to invite no one.
| Bill Berkson | Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Winter,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture,Christmas | null |
Variation
|
Half-ended melodies are purer.
To no longer perform in broad daylight,
the apple’s a radish for it,
the winter chill a living thing.
But take your brother into later learning:
Let the girls who will smell the buried cloves there.
So I am only beginning to learn what I from time to time forget.
But throw away these childish things!
Barney’s coffin disappeared,
and luckily you said the right thing
for the sky mentioned for the last time.
The little master of small talk
is really the seducer of your every move,
taking you into his confidence the way a cat his mouse.
And still young Lycidas cannot express himself fully.
And: “Everyone is the same,”
even down to his jockey shorts, dolce far niente, as they say.
| Bill Berkson | Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets | null |
Thuringian Equals
|
Crossed fingers gird the planet, though small optimism obtains.
Will I read The Serious Doll in wraps, with its roller slur?
A book where everybody, reader and writer included, dies.
The kind of thing people said in the 1970s: “Hello, I’m back being me again.”
My first and last names and the first and last names of both my parents have the same number of letters.
The wasp waist, the tennis dress, the shirtwaist, the dirndl (Mainbocher).
A distant yet achingly distinct whinny: et voila! the walking buckboard.
Dustin Hoffman’s bookcase hanging by one hinge in air of Eleventh Street, dawn 1969.
Telephone solicitation for a ballet school in need of “serious floors.”
The thought of someone flat on his back on the carpet, tossing and giggling.
If it hurts don’t do it. (There are several unlesses to this caution.)
For the second time in two millennia slept through the meteor shower, results of last night’s talk.
| Bill Berkson | Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Relationships,Home Life | null |
Addiction
|
Fighting a losing battle
lives next door
to a vibrant woman
in her 30’s.
When he talks to her
sub-mediocre takes over
in a big way.
Zombie-ized by the big eye
she even sleeps with it on.
Just sign me: concerned.
| Ken Mikolowski | Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Social Commentaries | null |
Little or Nothing
|
there are these trees.
and beyond these trees,
trees. and beyond that
little or nothing. little
fields and nothing but sky.
| Ken Mikolowski | Living,The Mind,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
January in Detroit or Search for Tomorrow Starring Ken and Ann
|
I think it is interesting
though not exactly amusing
how we go from day to day
with no money. How do we
do it, friends ask, suspecting
we really have some stash
stacked away somewhere.
But we certainly do not
and we also do not know
how we do it either.
You sure are lucky,
some of our friends say. I am
none too sure of that though,
as I wait for the winning
lottery numbers to be announced
on CKLW. Thursday in Detroit
is the day of dreams. We have
been dreaming of a place
in the country lately and I’m
none too sure that is very healthy.
And speaking of health that’s
also been a problem that probably
has something to do with no money,
since we’ve all been sick lately,
taking turns politely of course.
Could you bring me some more
tea one of us will ask,
and the other will.
In between the coughing and
worrying our thoughts
have often turned to crime.
We seriously wonder how we can
get away with a bundle with
as little risk as possible.
Last week we took our last
$12 out of the bank
and noticed how much more
they had there though
we had none. Of course
we wouldn’t rob that bank,
they know us there
as the ones who bring
the rolls of pennies in.
And just yesterday they
fish-eyed us for trying
to cash our son’s xmas bond
from his grandparents
after only one month.
So we wouldn’t try to rob that bank,
but I do know of one up north
that may be possible. . .
I know this just seems like
romantic dreaming
but I practically make a career
of reading detective stories,
and God knows, I have no other.
Anyway if the right opportunity
comes along, we are more
than ready to meet it.
But this is a time of waiting,
the I Ching says, though it does
not say how we are to eat
while waiting. And soon
we will have another mouth to feed—
Ann now in her seventh month,
and that is often in our thoughts.
Besides all that we are both
over thirty, artist and poet,
still waiting to cross the great water.
Meanwhile, day after day,
there is still Detroit
to be dealt with — a small pond
says our friend Snee.
Big fish we used to answer him,
but that was a while back.
Now we think maybe Lake Erie
is the great water referred to
in the I Ching, and if we wait
long enough we can
walk across — to Buffalo
or Cleveland. In a healthy person,
says the philosopher, self-pity
can be a forerunner to action:
once the problem is seen clearly,
a solution may be found at hand.
And as I said, I think it is interesting
though not exactly amusing.
| Ken Mikolowski | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Midlife,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Money & Economics | null |
Nothing
|
can replace
poetry
in my life
and one day
surely
it will
| Ken Mikolowski | Living,Life Choices,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets | null |
The Flower-Fed Buffaloes
|
The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:—
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by the wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us, long ago.
They gore no more, they bellow no more,
They trundle around the hills no more:—
With the Blackfeet, lying low,
With the Pawnees, lying low,
Lying low.
| Vachel Lindsay | null | null |
Potato Soup
|
I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice as I cook soup for the first time alone. My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary. I show the onions to my mother with the webcam. “Cut them smaller,” she advises. “You only need a taste.” I chop potatoes as the onions fry in my pan. When I say I have no paprika to add to the broth, they argue whether it can be called potato soup. My mother says it will be white potato soup, my aunt says potato soup must be red. When I add sliced peppers, I ask many times if I should put the water in now, but they both say to wait until I add the potatoes. I add Polish sausage because I can’t find Hungarian, and I cook it so long the potatoes fall apart. “You’ve made stew,” my mother says when I hold up the whole pot to the camera. They laugh and say I must get married soon. I turn off the computer and eat alone.
| Daniel Nyikos | null | null |
Mockingbird
|
I can hear him, now, even in darkness, a trickster under the moon, bristling his feathers, sounding as merry as a man whistling in a straw hat, or a squeaky gate to the playground, left ajar or the jingling of a star, having wandered too far from the pasture.
| Judith Harris | null | null |
The Test of Fantasy
|
1.
It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward. All the stories
come folding out. The smells and flowers begin to come back, as
the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded. Rabbits and violets.
Who asked you to come over? She got her foot in the door and
would not remove it, elbowing and talking swiftly. Gas leak?
that sounds like a very existential position; perhaps you had
better check with the landlord.
This was no better than the
predicament I had just read about. Now it was actually changing
before my eyes. Sometimes it will come to a standstill though,
and finally the reflection can begin.
Selfless—that was the proposition. Smiling and moving instantly
there was no other purpose than that which brought them there,
to be in a particular place.
2.
This time the mule gave its face away. Take your cadillac
where you want to go in the morning, convertible as it might be,
and enjoy a good bottle of rum.
Running on this way she used various modes of expression that
were current. Nothing seemed to bring the woods any closer.
What Woods, she was questioned, realizing that as far as the
woods went, they were largely inhabitable through the facility
of her mind. At the Philadelphia Flower Show, an ideal situation
was built up. Here through various regulated artificial conditions,
spring grass, waterfalls, the newly-sprouted bulbs completed
her ideal concept of nature. The smell was overpowering.
All right then. She had a thing about nature, from flower
show glamor and enormous greenhouses the rich cultivated.
A beauty of cultivation—in living? Hastiness did not prevent
her from rising quick and ready to misnomers and other odd
conclusions, throwing the telephone book to the floor, “OH OH
the life I am entangled in.” Four sides of it.
Above was a paradisical
level, incompleted. With working possibilities.
Below, endless preoccupations and variations were possible.
Currently in vogue were shelves, the vacuum cleaner, a new
bedspread and color scheme for pillows.
Taste treats were
unresponsive. Glamor do’s were out. Conversation was nil.
Languid
she could not even find a place to languish upon that was
fulfilling in its own way.
So out of the lifelessness that was around her,
the grape leaves drying out, and even though the avocado was
sprouting,
she thought, Why not fantasy? Tugging at this character and
that, trying to push a little life in a prince or a charmer, a half-
blind bat, dryad, the works of the story teller. Here the four
walls of the room and ceiling became apparent again. “I ought
to tighten down and make sure I say exactly what I mean.”
And her face took on a tight pinched expression, and thrifty scotch
economy gave her shrewd eyes in the prescribed way. Use every
tidbit, usefully. Once upon a time there was a princess who
had a long white fur coat with a high fluffy collar, and inside the
coat were stitched beautiful butterflies in many bright colors.
The princess languished. She was not sure where to sit to her best
advantage to enjoy herself the most. She could not go in her mind
or out. She looked at her long white hand, I am the Queen of the
High Mountain Hag, she murmured to herself, still knowing she was
a princess. She lay down upon the floor as if it were the garden of
eden, the coat spread around her.
No, that poor little house she
had built was a bore. It’s better that it go up in flames, as it did.
She went down to Grand Central Station and gave away flowers.
Some people took them and some people didn’t.
3.
I’m glad to get back. I had to repeat a rough discontinuous journey.
Questioning myself all along the way. Was I jumping on her because
her time had come to an end. Indeed I pounded on his arm all night,
over his concern for this soft-spoken individual, I can see nothing
but their softness. Me ME, and the time we might spend together,
reading and talking, to tear away that putrid husk.
My flippancy is gone. Now I have started my secret life again,
in transition, reminding. As the moth reminds, its feeble antenna
groping, taken like a stalk of fern, coins of money.
All over I was shaking as the fear and tension made itself apparent.
It was a cold night out. It was colder still between the airy gaps,
between blankets.
You can see she is thoughtful
as she draws the string to the bow. Where to go indeed. The
point is brought forward and discussed very cleverly.
A sleeping angel or a sleeping troll? I was rather proud of being
used, pushing the clothing hampers up and down the downtown
street. Here, pleasant mentors conveyed their anxious solicitations,
drawing from their bags, long lists of memorandum due, what I owed.
It was a lot, if I hesitated. I choose to go on, saying this is the
way I go, owing nothing, being that kind of person. Hung up?
That thought intrudes as the clearly marked vista is not so clearly
marked. Certainly one supposes in all honesty, that an essential
core of feeling blooms in each encounter. Lost under the weight
of the garbage of who are you that you are not making apparent.
Thus unhappy, I don’t want it to be this way, and so forth.
Not costumes, or paraphernalia, the immediate reactions.
4.
We of course are in a family situation. Anything I wish might
happen, but the larger situations are not real, not to be
considered possible, discussable as to what sense of reality
they possessed.
In the snow, the wood piled up underneath. Oh those drifting
sensibilities. At this point it is scarcely believable that people
gather and like each other. Eating chocolate pudding, getting
in touch with some other sense of alikeness. The form is no
longer obvious to me. Whether they meander or are joined together
in their senses in the mechanics or regular grooves they run along.
I suspect that in this house, this
place that is musty and left as it was some years ago, there is
no real fear; the objects are old and I am not familiar with them,
only the sense that the Ghost or spirit world strikes you with
its familiarity, pleasurable fear.
Here the familiar
is apt to make its presence known, at any moment the unexpected
lurk in the hall, into the room. Pieces of leather, old silken fans
laid upon the table top, rooms filled with something left unexpectedly
terror is the wrong combination of ignorance. It contains its own
self with dusty fragments of velvet and fringe. 100 pieces of voice
with no name, called it myself, as they spoke all day, sucking the
soft slush, admitting their real deficiencies as—
I am never sure; Oh it’s that power
and disease of believing in the stale that doesn’t demand a real
climate, takes its capacity when the demons come down.
5.
The night passes in night time. The head moving to the shoulder,
the head rising with a frown.
In a firm voice, it doesn’t matter if the hair is flying from undue
spring breezes, the self has been raptured on the wine that produces
appropriate madness, and sad she says, my dear the bacchanal is a
lovely way to be rid of waste.
However, in seeing the house more manageable, one cannot even have
fear larger than the unknown portions of the continent which
refuses to sink.
There once was a woman
who grew older, not that she minded, but the passage of time was
always constant. Why does one have to contend with that she said,
puzzled, as she got carried along, and constantly had to think up
new coping modes of behavior. If he behaved to me thus when he was
40, now that I am 30, I can hardly behave like that to those that are
20, and so forth. There wasn’t any model except the one she built,
and one could scarcely believe there was no established pattern. This
offered wonderful possibilities, but also indecision and gutlessness.
6.
You can’t see them, all bundled up, all those that choose
to move other than where the distance seems appealing. Knowledge
has no depth. There isn’t any message to be spoken.
Wrangling, she speaks ill-advised my dear, as the cat has no
point in laying its head down. She ought to watch carefully.
The claws. It could be
the bent hands, as they grow, that as the fur impeaches the
rose, doesn’t make the thing she hangs her body on any realer.
What could it be all about? The necessity to follow, balancing,
contemplating words, as the basis of why we move at all.
Just a little touch. The leader cautioned further progression.
I could hardly listen to the music for long. Now there
seemed to be interruptions, pleasurable interludes, nothing
definite, of a fragmented nature.
Certainly I wished the best
for all. The sadder soldiers stumbled idly, as I also in the
profound reaches of my slumber noted the elegant turns, the
twisting statements grooving into the language building something
to listen to. The dress made from silk. Trusting was awkward
and not of a nature to ease any further building. Whosoever
you revere will come back tenfold upon you and lighten the
burden carried as those who desire the warmth and necessity of
communication.
7.
I am sure my dreams must have been of the wrong sort. However, as
dreams are reflections of inner dilemmas, how did those arise, from
a day of relaxation and summer enjoyment of the fund.
Knowledge comes from what purported strike? From that which cleanses,
and let us knot say “heart” but tissue. Hopefully and helpfully I have
built up a language in which to talk myself to sleep. Not for purposes
of letting in the cold.
However, I have found that not all blockaded
against is the cold, the dreary reign of the dead, etc., and tasteless
realm of the mushroom. As much can be denied as the bilious sun
strives to cause an enlargement of singing in the back of the neck and
the head. That is uncorraled ecstasy. I call it enthusiasm, free energy.
But it has no place to land, it is bursting and unfocused; it is a real force
and the counterpart of the gloomy depths.
As the pieces of the house
ooze sap, blossoms and green twigs burst from the cracks. Whether or
not to join in what I was half committed to see and do.
8.
At this point, when Jack picked up the pussy willow branches, I said
they can’t possibly be ours for the taking, and smiled with dedication
to an older Con Edison man. The buildings were like the unexplored
garbage in my mind, fascinating and dirty, pulling pieces of cloth
from boxes left overnight. Energy as limitless possibility, in
the attempt to transmit non-energy situations.
For example, if once I stop to realize what little gets through, I am
much more interested in the cover than the contents; it is difficult
to find any interest in anything. Good energy displaces bad karma.
And other non entities like that sort, producing flow that in its own
place has a good bed, stocked well with what can be called fleet-footed
fishes, and approaching places of investigation, such as relations
between.
As I saw the blood flow to the surface of his skin, I
forgot to watch for the telltale visions that again might come from
something I have never seen; more possibly the components of what
every man views. If this was a possibility, the rays from every person
converging pass through the state of shock to numbness to unity without
any mind at all, for this horror fits the cat on the stairs, between
the fifth and sixth rung. This is the way people glow and pulse similar
to an inlet of jellyfish blocking the way, full of human life; until
I who will name myself a swimmer come along and refuse to be
blocked on the way, although I turn back gladly, and will again swim
through for it is possible they do not kill, the sting’s compounded measure
is fear, and thus one not need join the broad expanse of human mouths
calling people to join their ranks to comfort their newfound recognition
or orifices, stomachs and legs.
I reminded myself twice there were several stories that kept continuing
themselves. She ignored her face, blotched and red upon times, but
fuller. Did you forget to wax and wane? Her head was full of energy
brought forward and positively that what was said would turn the obvious
into color, but no sense. Sense was for the thinkers. Here the thinkers
forgot their word orders or sense; it was better to give them coffee,
and those off worse could smoke.
I had felt very
foolish when I leaned forward and grasped his hand, with effort, and
his cloak slipped down over one shoulder as he shouted, which is the
way. And I followed for certainly no one would follow me. As the day
is cold and colder, and what comes out of the head is of its own sort and
nature. These words, like Nature, and Head, Thinking and Words,
repeat themselves, as the lines of landscape, attics and other closed-off
sections have reprimanded themselves by repetition. Light
was such an enormous possibility. Taking sight into a frenzy, it was
possible that just to look was full of excitement and wonder, for
ages at a time, things appeared as beautiful, the sky, the street
where cars had gone by.
I worried about certain characters: ones
that never seemed to be other than puzzles to me but I was drawn to
them with certainty only because there seemed to be no understanding?
As when the mysteries were performed, the house then itself became
distilled with reason as the pots and pans were used apparently filled
with the stuff of continuity. The sorrow that each day sinks into the
infertile other side of day, where voice comes out of the dark, and
does its rituals. Memory has its own screen across the room to view
itself, and the continuous dwelling of conjecture takes permanent form
in stiff-legged walks to remind, thus on and on the breathing goes.
New York. January – March, 1967
| Joanne Kyger | Living,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Nature,Social Commentaries | null |
The Crystal in Tamalpais
|
In Tamalpais is a big crystal. An acquaintance told
me the story. A Miwok was giving his grandfather’s medicine
bag to the Kroeber Museum in Berkeley. He said this man
took him over the mountain Tamalpais, at a certain time
in the year. I believe it was about the time of the
Winter Solstice, because then the tides are really low.
They stopped and gathered a certain plant on the way over
the mountain. On their way to the Bolinas Beach clam patch,
where there is a big rock way out there.
Go out to
the rock. Take out of the medicine bag the crystal
that matches the crystal in Tamalpais. And
if your heart is not true
if your heart is not true
when you tap the rock in the clam patch
a little piece of it will fly off
and strike you in the heart
and strike you dead.
And that’s the first story I ever heard about Bolinas.
| Joanne Kyger | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
September
|
The grasses are light brown
and the ocean comes in
long shimmering lines
under the fleet from last night
which dozes now in the early morning
Here and there horses graze
on somebody’s acreage
Strangely, it was not my desire
that bade me speak in church to be released
but memory of the way it used to be in
careless and exotic play
when characters were promises
then recognitions. The world of transformation
is real and not real but trusting.
Enough of these lessons? I mean
didactic phrases to take you in and out of
love’s mysterious bonds?
Well I myself am not myself
and which power of survival I speak
for is not made of houses.
It is inner luxury, of golden figures
that breathe like mountains do
and whose skin is made dusky by stars.
| Joanne Kyger | Love,Nature,Animals,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
"When I used to focus on the worries, everybody"
|
When I used to focus on the worries, everybody
was ahead of me, I was the bottom
of the totem pole,
a largely spread squat animal.
How about a quick massage now, he said to me.
I don’t think it’s cool, I replied.
Oh, said he, after a pause, I should have waited
for you to ask me.
The waves came in closer and closer.
When I fall into the gap of suspicion I am no longer here.
In this world that has got closed over by houses
and networks, I fly out
from under the belly. Life’s dizzy crown
of whirling lights, circles this head. Pure
with wonder, hot
with wonder. The streets become golden. All
size increases, the colors glow, we are in myth.
We are in easy understanding.
Scarcely talking, thoughts pass between us.
It is memory. As I search to find
this day’s sweet drifting. The fog out to sea, the wind.
| Joanne Kyger | null | null |
[He is pruning the privet]
|
He is pruning the privet
of sickly sorrow desolation
in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip
the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out
of hand’ delirious and adorable what a switch
we perceive multiple
identities when you sing so beautifully the shifting
clouds You are not alone is this world
not a lone a parallel world of reflection
in a window keeps the fire burning
in the framed mandala, the red shafted flicker
sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain
the red robed monks downtown in the rain a rainbow arises
simple country practices thunder
lightning, hail and rain eight Douglas Iris
ribbon layers of attention
So constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky
mess He is pruning the loquat, the olive
which looks real enough in the damp late morning air
May 15, 1995
| Joanne Kyger | Activities,Gardening,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Religion,Buddhism,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Trophies
|
I
How can we accommodate these reforms? The nights of bell-flowers are as finished as the hell of water that has unrolled and become news. Pull at the ox’s ring and the wall of the sinuses falls down. Pull at the hoop in the eyelid, dormitories are felled. A marriage of fists and kites, the smile is hammered so painstakingly into the gut it forms a ring.
II
I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids. Art Deco façades hem in the open-air courtyard; a black belt of skyline circles off their incandescent white waists. The sunrise pulls level with the sea. The boxers’ shadows furl and unfurl, drawing into cups.
III
You open your heart’s wings like a bread riot, split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat. You make the hours work like fragile perceptions for the food they get, the warmth they get, for the variable, contradictory spontaneities imposed on their bodies as love or triumph in mistaken assertions.
| Robert Fernandez | Living,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries | null |
Wave Trough
|
Sets the folds in alignment;
this a shallow, a constitution of drops
that moves to displace itself
and unconsciously reverts
to image.
In such a state,
the wave has become a setting—
a table across which cups
with propositions rolled inside them
are passed.
The passage of cups does not limit
the range of potential outcomes,
and yet at no point does the wave
dissolve into abstraction.
The shades
are drawn and we are
overwhelmed by flags
crossing the black divan.
An axis of rotation,
gliding a fraction of an inch
and yet unveiling its total mass.
Advancing, the disc of its body
shimmers. Alighting on the sand,
it reveals itself in a cluster of pulses.
Dilated, it lifts from the sea floor:
fine spokes radiating on a wheel.
It passes between bands of bright
water, a kiss or a plow.
| Robert Fernandez | Living,The Body,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics | null |
Epithalamion
|
At once this dragnet of cousins
Whips its way into your presence saying None of them among us. They are
Oracles on the court of midnight,
The tight filigree of a mind or your
Splashing around in, your pandemonium
Of copper graffiti inexpertly put up.
They make weapons of furled hands.
“We will walk, but our bones will carry
Ribbons of lead, or we will, like
Acrobats mill-headed in 3s (3 blades,
3 hips, 3 tongues), answer to what comes
Before, what comes before?” Eleousa,
Master of Dark Eyelids, eye opening
Like a fennel seed, you are generous
Or are you not, do you shore up and
Wink at the soul? What does the soul say
Other than “my divorce from . . .,” “tan
Holiday . . .,” “smoking crystal in teak rooms . . .”
But should have asked, “What do you
See?” The sun a sequence of fans, a bridge,
Only so exquisitely cabled as to make us
Still—shall we fall
Or travel between bridges
Among the robust, sane clouds,
A face cut from smoke, heat, and light?
The sun, dancing in a vial, the initial
Memory of what it was to be born—
Doberman of a sheer-white universe—
To school out—the audacity of rising
Without name or color to new rooms,
New youth, fruitful, born singularly
To precise moments not in epiphany
But duration—as under new weather
We become—in action, receive—our
Bodies uncasked like umbrellas under
The flamingo-red light of the racing day.
| Robert Fernandez | Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Romantic Love,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict | null |
Fairy Tales from the Web
|
Somebody who would never refuse money told me this—
about the syncretic effect when each person plugs
their attention into a field to read ad copy, let’s just say
they become opened up and other beings can see into
their minds. This was considered a science fiction idea
to many people, but not to me.
In my negative space construction is always occurring.
The liftoff from awful to tolerable
to positive and then finally to bright new beautiful
has been my most difficult task to swing.
But swing I will; there’s nothing else to do.
I live here and being here and hearing myself
or my mind’s divide through others convinces me
that I must do everything I can to save us from the pit.
That is, until the pit splits and the fruit tree finally grows.
You may have a tree of your own—you may have a home
in your own tree. Congratulations. If you write an instructive
pamphlet you can bet I will read it.
I do not want to go out in darkness.
I am doing everything I know to prevent this,
and thank you, by the way, if you’ve written a pamphlet.
The shared information system
and each being at the end of its screen
emits an LED (light emitting diode) on an often
green screen—you say I should give my
father up to the authorities. You blame your
circumstances on my choice—but it’s the authorities who
did this to him. How do you think a person loses his mind?
He let someone take it.
He is sort of my mind and you are too,
God help me.
The green screen is an ingenious discovery.
You can record events in a studio before the screen
and then key in whatever environment you like.
It’s a special color: Chroma Green,
but it can be blue too.
The experience of things is determined by our
feelings about them. Information is colored
by us. You may see remotely, in a photograph
for instance, the image of an ambush victim.
Maybe it is a war and/or she is caught naked.
If she is unhappy—indicated by face and body
arrangement—you may feel that.
Some people will hate the state of things that made her
so alone and vulnerable but few will do anything about it.
How do you find her? What guns surround her country?
And after all, maybe she would hate it.
To have to feel grateful to someone moved by her humiliation.
She may only be thinking about humiliation.
That is a tough feeling to shake.
Then, and I need not go too far into this,
then there are those who see the pain of someone
and they just love it. This may have something
to do with a revenge sentiment over their own unclosed wound.
The wound, they think, is everyone else’s fault
and they cannot forgive. This is only information,
in the form of speculation.
Some feelings you get when you consider
“What if this happened to me?” and you will want to remedy
the situation to secure yourself from the (negative) condition of it.
Together, humans create one body—the planet earth
and its projections. The things in the stomach
affect what goes on in the head. On the web
many people make money with miracle potions.
Some curb the human appetite.
Some say you can lose while consuming whatever you want.
I heard the other girl refer to me as a skull.
She was very angry and did not look or say hello.
There is a prevalent competitive notion
that each only has one place. That her face is only
hers and that I don’t have a face or to her it is death.
This she reads as me—the death of her.
Obviously I am not. I write and read and
then roll on. I wear an ordinary human face,
some could compare me to a bird of prey
because my nose is hooked and my fingers are long
and I like to ride my bicycle with the wind at my back.
I am not here to attack.
You are also a mutant.
Do you think you can keep the heavy metals outside of you?
Do you think you can go to sleep here
and wake up the same?
The screen is framed by plastic,
beneath that you use words to issue commandments
or call-outs.
Most people use the web to send messages
to people who are already their friends.
They make arrangements for later and
detail what happened in the past.
This information may be not true.
The web cannot know intention.
It records and is open to influence.
People make money through advertisements,
or so they think—well, selling ads, that’s quantifiable—
if ads make money, that is more difficult
to know unless there are special offers.
The web is full of special offers and 30-day
trials. If you fall for those, or I should say,
if you respond to the offer
what often happens is that your information
is shared with other companies who will fill your inbox
with offers (that which is known as spam).
Because you are someone who wants to look great
and there are other companies with products compatible
with your stated desire. Ways for you to achieve
the prevailing notion of beauty.
It is my job to tell you the models
are selected because they are physically improbable.
They are elevated to be made desirable.
Their desirability is physical because they are models.
If it were easy to be like that, they would not
be sought-after by manufacturers.
Generally, working people need to be sturdy.
Advertisers want to make money.
They go with psychology and so create a sort of
self-rejection by advocating forms not reflected in most people.
They know that people will pay in to be of an elevated form
no matter what station they are from.
Everyone wants to be beautiful.
Everyone wants to be the agreed-upon beautiful thing.
Probably everyone is beautiful somewhere inside
if not outside. You can create an excellent argument
for your being and improve upon ability. That is my opinion.
If you live alone, you may know how great the web can be.
On it there is information and pornography.
Information includes
the prospects.
Pornography is the biggest industry in America.
It is designed to bring about a certain state
of arousal, generally, couched in anger
that will allow the person to fuck exactly how they want to
without worrying about the one fucked.
Pornography is addictive for many.
Of course, sometimes people want to touch, to hear a voice
to imagine a partner and what they can do together.
The web has many dating services. My ex-psychiatrist
advised me against trying them.
She had transferred the daughter role onto me.
I do appreciate the dangers of strangers.
I am prepared with the information that pictures
are not people in both obvious and non-obvious ways.
I know at least three people who have been in love
with people they met online.
Each one is intelligent and down-to-earth.
I’ve gleaned from their descriptions of online courting
that the early questions are essential.
That and no expectation and somehow you have
to withhold your own personal information.
That is, until you meet up in a non-threatening place.
You will have to have someone know where you are,
a point person. And you will need a defense; mace, for instance
or a rape whistle or a dog leashed nearby
or in the car.
It will be important for him or her to know you have a dog.
They should meet each other as soon as possible.
This is the magic of the machine.
The meeting and love trial and,
if it works, the love made.
Well, that really is amazing.
Objectively amazing.
And good for the machine.
Good for the machine.
The electric web courses heavily through me.
This may be how we make history:
we can put up our movies, our words, or costume dramas.
We say we are so and so
and people follow the saga.
Do you ever get the problem which is opposite
to the problem of the watcher?
Have you ever only seen yourself through other people?
Or thought that’s what it was but it was really your
thought processes transferred through them?
I should look up the word rubric again.
That and lacuna and devi.
In the thrift store nobody looked at me.
But the woman said, “Devi (hee, hee) Devi.”
A celestial being: what we all are.
True she might have meant devil.
I am not a devil.
I love my friends most of the time.
I love animals—I don’t think devils do that.
My friend sends me pictures
of jackrabbits and frogs.
Yesterday, he said he saw buttercups, a type of flower.
You go over the tracks first, on the other side of the river
and there they are.
| Ish Klein | Living,Life Choices,The Body,The Mind,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Popular Culture | null |
No Promissory Notes
|
The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in
English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one.
The standards are made in Japanese or German factories.
Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine.
Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets.
I was shocked too when I heard this.
I do not have an actual either but they called
me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal
lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets
now that there’s no money? Only barter.
I do not know what the inside of this thing looks like
but I think it looks like a brain made of mozzarella cheese.
Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant.
An ocean weed and how it’s fitted is by body weight
at birth which is why you shouldn’t smoke
if you are pregnant, you will be blamed
even though it’s complicated to know exact reasons
as we all in the new world know better each day.
They’ve made new lingo to go with the genuine penis.
They say unicorn, I say wasabi.
Apparently, almost everyone gets green horseradish with sushi.
Wasabi takes several million years to grow,
its taste is delicate. When I mentioned Japan
earlier, I meant the motor city.
When I say Wasabi near Japan; it’s island
of slow unit dance or Remarkable Mask.
When I say new world, it’s where the newly suited go.
T-cell robots, we of lambs and plants and jellyfish that are
in our eyes which are colored by their place in the ocean.
Really, if you broke us down, you’d have quite a collection:
resins from pine, precious stones,
silver dust, and sea grass filaments,
stalks, pig livers, skin, a milk protein.
This is the equipment for the dominant standard penis holders
of the unreal, and I would love to be one with a genuine
but I have not the stomach to pull off the cunning necessary
for the genuine purse/penis license.
You barter for it; you lie.
Don’t get me wrong, it must be nice
to have options. But to get them dishonestly?
It’s bothering. I know, I know!
I have got to say goodbye to the babyhood phase.
Learn to thrive! Nobody has a father or a mother.
I know this means to thrive!
To be one’s own lover.
My sheepskin wallet is . . .
What could a person say? Stuck in the past,
tripped up by the concept of wallet?
It’s not like anything gets taken out
unless it’s rotten which it probably isn’t
because I feel okay and you look alright.
It’s that it wants to be ultimate although
a new and genuine vagina/womb set from a biped
has not been recorded in over 180 years
which means billions of here/now moments.
Which means forgotten a trillion times
and remembered exactly one plus that.
There’s not as much empty space as we thought
in the old blueprints that made donuts
in space—the halo, the Homeric lure.
The one electron penis and the drone.
I’ve been sick and found all this out because I couldn’t
get out of bed and there was a diamond near my head.
I was reading about moray eels,
their hydraulics. How they practically
fly-fish with agility.
It’s the forward going.
I’d like to go boldly.
I’ve kept a card of energy.
Wilderness saved from childhood.
Of this secret, one must be silent
so the sun can trust us.
Kids need each other.
Better they never get
separated entirely.
Contra this, I do want to fly fish.
To cast off and plant it then go with
the nylon line. Where to take off
the old wallet and give it back
to a lamb. I’ll be the promo homo
making arrangements to go to the show
where we trade our new pieces congenially
and find others, depleted by scavengers,
and get them up-and-running to better suns,
not the promised land, exactly
the opposite. Exactly the opposite
of anything promised.
| Ish Klein | Living,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Money & Economics,Popular Culture | null |
Reading
|
—For My Students
Breakfast, and I’m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey.
I’m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio—
life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages
of a book remind me of Tucson
and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home.
There was a sofa in front of my one window
where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings
stirred in the trees with their admonishments.
Stepping back there now, I remember feeling hopeless after reading
Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.”
I recall how I put the book on the coffee table and closed my eyes
and saw blood glowing in my arteries.
In the leaves, the starlings went on with their disconnected chatter,
and I said to myself, “I’ll never write anything like
‘And the bull alone with a high heart! At five o’clock in the afternoon.’”
For three months, I didn’t write one word
but instead passed the days swimming in the public pool where,
from my half-closed eyes, I watched light ride
the splashing water or resting on the surface when I floated, face down,
sinking with fear: “What do I do now?” I asked.
Some nights, I filled my red truck with gas and drove west on the 19
until my headlights flooded the desert, and when
the city was less than pinpoints of glitter, and when all I could hear
was the whine of silence in my ears,
I parked alongside the highway, leaned against my pickup, and stared
at stars so sure of themselves as they shone
that I believed they couldn’t help but give me something that would
make me sit at my desk and write.
I felt directionless and wanted to walk out into the landscape,
but I feared snakes and scorpions
hiding in the buckhorn and staghorn as I recalled my father’s words,
“You’ll be lost forever on the far side of the moon”—
words that haunted me as I imagined slipping into lunar shadows
that no human telescope would spot
as I wandered lost and ripped with nostalgia for the nights I read
in used bookstores on Campbell—a time when
the future seemed so clear I smelled it in dirt that somebody
rinsed from the sidewalk as I walked home.
Then, one night while sipping black coffee along the side of the 19,
I remembered lying on the living room floor
as my father and I listened to Brahms’s “Lullaby,” which inspired me
to practice “Away in a Manger” on my trumpet:
“It’s a lullaby. Play it like that,” my father said as my sixth grade lips
struggled to phrase notes that would
please a child under the beating stars, and remembering this,
I looked up to the oblivious heavens
and tied words to images—Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, Pegasus—
and let them sing clearly through my mind.
| David Dominguez | Living,Life Choices,The Mind,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Music,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books | null |
Wedding Portrait
|
Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room—
a task that took two head-throbbing hours.
It’s a wedding portrait that we love: Frida and Diego Rivera.
I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other,
but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust?
Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life;
before his death, Diego did too.
I want to believe that those paintings were composed
during parallel moments because of their undying devotion.
If I close my eyes, I can see melon wedges left like
centerpieces except for the slice
Diego put on the table’s corner—
one piece of fruit pecked at by a dove
that passed through a window.
I know that I won’t be building a bookshelf anytime soon
and that the chances of me constructing a roll-top desk
are as slim as me building an Adirondack chair that sits plumb,
but I’m good with the spackle and putty knives in my tool belt.
The knots in my back might not be there
if I had listened to her suggestions,
and I could well have done without two hours of silence
over a few holes in the wall.
But somehow, life has its ways of working things out.
This afternoon, I shut the blinds,
turned off the TV, lights, and phone,
and massaged my wife’s feet to fight off a migraine—
her second one this week despite
the prophylactics and pain killers that we store in the breadbox.
For once, I’d like to experience what she feels:
nausea, blindness, and pain that strike
when the cranial vessels dilate,
fill with blood, leak, and make the brain swell.
Earlier, an MRI triggered the reaction as it mapped her head
with electrical current, gradient magnets, and radio waves
hammering her floundering eyes.
For now, we have our room, the bed frame, and the mattress
where she lies as I knead her toes.
Come nightfall, I hope that we’ll sit in the patio and watch
the breeze stirring the lemon, lime, and orange trees
that I planted along the back fence.
On certain nights, the moon turns our lawn
into green acrylic where we sip Syrah and mint tea
until all we know is the sound
of our breathing among the whispering leaves.
| David Dominguez | Living,Marriage & Companionship,The Body,The Mind,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Home Life,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture | null |
October
|
I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.
Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.
Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.
This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.
| Don Thompson | null | null |
Woman Feeding Chickens
|
Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quitegot used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.
| Roy Scheele | null | null |
The Pointless Nether Plow
|
It is farming in an inclement sun system
like a powerless nether beast
fallen amidst random stellar debris
fruit changes form
light then quavers across distorted mural relics
the farmer then living as a clarified adder
his land forms compressed
his wheat suspended & flaring
his unstable forms
carving his soil with volcanic blue seeds
| Will Alexander | Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life | null |
On Anti-Biography
|
For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.
Me, I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.
It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars.
So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.
| Will Alexander | Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets | null |
Coping Prana
|
It is the way I breathe
through chronic terrifying ferns
through a black ungracious stoma
it is this uranium rejoinder
this impact pointing backwards
& when witnessed
causes observers to panic
to blur
& forget
& to flee
they can’t see my approach
my wayward dorsal looming
my lettering in black drizzle
it is my approach
my weaving
my sigil as curved embankment
therefore
I can never name myself
or plot myself
according to the sparks or the splinters from the work bench
dazed
ruthless with salivation
with my awkward insular roaming
I am like a few darkened eaglets riveted against the moon
then I am brought to a table by deafness
feasting with herons
which spins me by embranglement
by in-circular abatement
always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma
so as to talk to myself
so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny
they speak of me as lawless
as despicable
as a typhoon in a sea well
as to morals
as to fixed & accelerated combination
they fix me
as deserted
bereft
as a fragment from a starving lion’s compendium
I am considered
as pointless positron without image
as hieroglyph
as sundial
as martyr
being leakage from a barbarous index province
| Will Alexander | Living,The Body,The Mind | null |
Wayfaring
|
I see into them
as they see out of me
& dissolve the wattage
to avoid future legends
young pharaohs on Fillmore cracking dutches
it is a lonely frontier by contrast
forgotten game skulking around
big hearts, small temper
thine absence overflows
thine presence undoes
do not attempt to circle the inferno
a tremor in the throne
is a tremor in the throne
| Micah Ballard | Living,The Mind,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture | null |
First Rites
|
Besides Sundays there were Wednesday evenings and the occasional Tuesday. They called Tuesdays “visitation” and we would meet in the parking lot and load into a van. There were little cards with peoples’ names and addresses on them and we’d drive around until contact was made. I always managed to hide a few cards and claimed carsickness but it was too humid to stay in the van. Oftentimes I’d recognize someone from school and felt like apologizing but couldn’t. On Wednesdays, it was a bit easier because we arrived early so my mom could volunteer. I skated the parking curbs on the side of the building and could hear the choir practice. Other times I’d wait on the stairs at the cosmetology school next door. There was this kid who dropped out of eighth grade, and I was his lookout while he smoked. He preferred to be called Fluid and got kicked out of youth group more than once. The youth minister was large and pale and wore tight shirts that made sweat stains around his belly. One day we went on a retreat that turned out to be a rented trailer in the country. In the afternoon we watched films inside and at night played games in the dark. I wound up sleeping under a table listening to Sanitarium from Master of Puppets on repeat. The following morning my headphones were taken away so I could be open to the message. Other retreats included all night bowling and Friday night lock-up. Arrival was at ten and they would keep us awake with caffeine, sweets, and more games. I frequently got nervous being separated into groups and remember once winning a race in the foyer wearing high-heels. Later I escaped to the pews of the sanctuary. It was pitch black and I found myself standing in a drained baptismal with white robes hanging over the windows. It was strange to see where all those people went after the altar calls. Those were on Sunday mornings and the services were very long and formal. It was important to sit behind the older ladies so you could sleep behind their hair. After the closing song I’d wait in the car seemingly for hours, listening to mix tapes, mostly Suicidal Tendencies or Maiden. Then we’d drive to a Chinese restaurant or go to this pizza place that had a buffet. I’d watch the others play video games but most of the time I’d just go outside. The clouds were always cumulus and some afternoons you could hear the wind and think about what it’d be like to be somewhere else. It really didn’t matter though, maybe I could get dropped off at a friend’s, watch Kung-Fu Theater, or skate the mini-ramp in the backyard. He had twin sisters and we could do whatever we wanted.
| Micah Ballard | Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Religion,Christianity,Philosophy | null |
A Few Miles Off
|
Too many are leaving
usually they greet in sleep before dashing
as in today with this gentleman
(awkward not to type his name)
when yesterday in the shower
I remembered his face in Aardvark
something about NWA but not about them
just a played reference
There were newspaper clips
all police brutality, all framed with snow
& I vaguely recalled something
about Uma Thurman & the Menils
when the guard ushered me out
for touching the African sculptures
I waited in the lobby for hours
like this morning reading
that he overdosed. It was a hotel
& I didn’t even know him
I don’t even know his work
| Micah Ballard | Living,Death,Arts & Sciences,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture | null |
Just Sepia
|
I refuse to settle
out of the true
choose to communicate
through pay phones and paper
out here in the country of McAllister & Steiner
we are the only Victorians left
& I wish I wouldn’t have said
that one something that one time
when what I really wanted
was to finish cutting the okra for the gumbo
& read Baudelaire again
his L’Invitation au Voyage
backwards reveals all of the magic
in writing that one can endure
each line out loud resounds perfect
all week I’ve been thinking about printing
a pirated book of such, nothing grand
typed on the Remington, 3x4, no address
no copyright and fifty limited
for whomever I run into
| Micah Ballard | Living,Life Choices,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries | null |
Song for Baby-O, Unborn
|
Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.
I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe
but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever
| Diane di Prima | Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
The Window
|
you are my bread
and the hairline
noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea
you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands
this kind of bird flies backward
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks
this is not time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here
never shifts)
I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground
| Diane di Prima | Living,Love,Relationships | null |