The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.

Feeling all Tagoreish today. Feeling like true-profundity and outside my whiny world-view.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. (what a delicious thing to say!)

While God waits for his temple to be built of love, men bring stones.
(this quote made me want to dish up some Tagore and this quote might be my answer as to how I feel about religion.)

It's Thursday. I am lunching. I am click-clicking down the street in high-heeled sandals and a simple cotton black dress. I have written a poem about New York. I am planning a trip somewhere soon. I am living anyway or in spite or like a John Cage song finds a way to route its river both to and from any sea, it's all the same, going with or fighting gravity is doing something. Anything but stasis, says she.

Never about Birdcages

just houses, a place to nest, rest, and so on.
This post will make sense to nearly no one, it's part of an ongoing discussion I am having with myself and with a person or two experiencing the cruelty of doubt, so bear with me or skip this one, it isn't all that, I assure you. For yes, I have been known to see facts with flaws to my seeing, not deliberate, just human frailty at work or play there. I have been known to doubt where I walk or stand if the ground was pulled out from under me. I have been known to be flawed but never to make those that I love feel doubt about that. It might have been good for them or me at times but I could not bear to see their suffering. Which brings me to our talk over shades of coral, red, salmon and an indigo backdrop, a windmill and a spider lily, so much vivid and so much blue.

Friend, I am beginning to think that caring is really at least that which makes it so that it pains someone to know that we are hurting. That seems like a minor requirement, the kind of thing that one cannot let slide. It is the middle of the night again.

Copied this info. from L-Bo's blog--thanks for the heads-up. This poem must be read. A jewel.

The Barricade
François Couperin must have loved some girl
and known how to argue, how to twine fingers
in a dance—how one idea will break onto another
like waves that rear and kneel, how the sea's curls must rise
in time to the moon, how a girl can kiss back.

This is what you hear in music that turns
with the steadiness of a merry-go-round,
the ornate horses ready to burst from their glass
bodies and race each other across a hill
in their real shapes—they are that excited,
ready to bolt except for this composition
the composer called a "musical barricade,"
this maze with turnings through a trimmed
suspense: the coy vistas of old boxwood,
this fond and winding argument designed to hold
a loved one fast and keep those horses,
those good horses, from galloping away.

LaWanda Walters
The Georgia Review

Brass Knuckle Belt Buckle

for KAR

Because one never knows when
brass knuckles are called-for
and so like a good boy scout
one prepares for brass knuckle

weather and the way pants
must be disciplined into staying
on the body. Not so with love, Friend.
Or so I thought, I said over chocolate

ice cream and coffee that we'd ordered
at a place one goes to eat cucumber
cayenne yogurt, Thai chili peanut ice cream,
berry bergamot or goats milk lingonberry.

A shop about novelty, fleeting sweetnesses
various, while we, two devotees who ordered
for loyalty off the menu and pondered
the fickleness of love, the way someone

walks out the door in figurative brass knuckles
and someone waits to feel the blows and that it
should only be summer frozen on a stick, a plan
to build birdhouses, to find music in the deliberate

songlessness of certain songbooks, a way to fly north
and not worry at which weapons get declared, stored
and which should be worn.

happyhappyhappyhappy

July has always been

heavy with sorrow or the sensuous. Simone Muench's work reminds me of both and their love-children various are what I turn to when I want to think about how luscious any single taste of language can be. From her upcoming collection, Orange Crush, I offer a tease:

Orange Girl Suite

1:
|Young women carrying baskets of oranges used to stand near the stage in London theatres and sell oranges at sixpence apiece and themselves for little more|

between dresses we came.
between naked and nothing
we slipped into the delirious
coils of perfected ears,

pear dust on our skin
sarsparilla sounding our
fizzied song in sailor mouths.

we were translated by churchwomen
who placed umlauts over our words.

when we recovered, we were sold
in beautiful clothes, sent sailing into the gulf
where the moon pitched
its lemon-lateness over the celluloid

slickness of sea. we were movie stars
who never entered the frame.
we were green and gone

lisping "o" words in the air:
ode, odalisque, obituary.



Orange Girl Cast

1: the fever
(starring kristy b)

Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks. In this metropolis of binoculars and chicken bones, in this city black with chicken-wire alchemists and bloody gutters, she feigns a fever in her red brassiere, her lavender dress lilting across headlights of chrome sedans: skin livid-exquisite with light bulbs and batteries beneath sinister-shouldered men, zombie drunk from fermented peaches and her silk stocking smell. Sweet Kristy of the corset, born of Anne Boleyn and a bird collector, born of alum and blindfolds, born to unzip men's breath, their clamorous wrists with an alphabet on her breast, a switchblade pinned to her taffeta thigh. Where are you leading with your eyelets and hooks, catching men with clothespins and rain in the perfect sphere of your dance hall mouth.



4: the train track
(starring mary b)

Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man's neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all the boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your ankle, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign bells with danger, citronella girls smoke Parliaments with a felon; your campfire jaw, a kerosene swoon.

Bliss Bliss Bliss

That's all. What else is there to say about that? Except, for now, world, I thank thee.

Fireworks Galore

Have not had a happier fourth ever. Lemon meringue cupcakes and sweet company and King of Hearts (a movie I'd never heard of and adored.)

July, July, a month that owed me a bunch of redemption, I high five thee.