Your tongue is shaped how lizards change color and I like to hear you read my words and I don't care who else you've touched and I don't care that the fondness handcuffs me and If you were a pair of pants that were too large I would gain weight in the winter time and wear you out and If you were a caged locker room and I was a young animal in young fur I'd get naked inside of you and I wouldn't be ashamed to hard wire your vestibular bulbs to my brainstorms or drill my lightning in to you to power you and lay my impressions across your forehead and If you were a weather balloon I'd bellow a thunder you could understand from end to end and Maybe I'd let you float through my violence but All this talk makes me want a massage and marijuana and I want to know the way around it and It makes me want to gum the the blood of my fat mind with your corn starch because You love corn and when I claw my way north like winter and hide on the surface of your gloves our Sleep is six of our ten commandments for drinking the slow hours and never getting distracted by what's passing definition down the pue and up The dangerous powers that yield our crosswalk grind me against the pillow in your name and My fat mind is young and knows it and likes to be served too hot for consumption and Your daring coyness enthralls me like why do you stand there and Who put your legs like that and I'd eat without utensils if your cake body was at the wedding I attended and I'd abridge nothing to live the fat fantasy of barking and drooling and reading and Out the door you'd go with the sun shining through your gravy and It moves slow and mechanically like a pinwheel in a tar pit and it's beautiful and I want my face an inch from yours and I want the breath of every morning we've shared to be put in a spoon so that I can freebase it and Feed my fat heart little bubbles of air from your fat lungs But the iron eyelashes of our real lives stop us from really getting close enough to dig our fingertips in to each other but I don't mind ignoring that because it hurts much less than pretending like I don't care about you
©2009 ~lasagnabomb
Friday, August 07, 2009
Night at the Fair Once again the fair–but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Not new-news but felt like indulging myself this blah-day
ELIOT KHALIL WILSON of Norfolk, Virginia
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
The Tailor of Al Hamdaniyah
Because he wore a suit and seemed
of high-value and would name no terrorists,
knowing none, they stripped and hooded the old man,
the village tailor, and hung him by his wrists
from a mulberry tree that grew by the river
The old man knew only thank you and please
in English which he said through the night
to the sound of the Tigris and the sound of the wind.
He hung from the tree, strange fruit, five days.
Piñata man or Muslim ham, the Americans called him
and burned his feet with their lighters
when he seemed to sleep
Five days it took for his brother to get word
and travel to Mosul and bring his release
but by then the hands of the tailor had ripened.
His hands had changed, like the fruit of the tree,
from white to red to withered black and past saving.
They carried him to the clinic and cut them off.
Nine hundred dollars they issued him,
to which he said neither thank you nor please.
Henri Cole on Eliot Khalil Wilson
There is something close to the vivid cruelty of an Hieronymus Bosch painting in some of the poems of Eliot Khalil Wilson, where we encounter a pilot dropping incendiary bombs, a gunner shooting children and dogs (but not women or birds—"Bad luck.... Even when they are dead, they remember."), a village tailor stripped and hooded, hung from a tree like a "Piñata Man," and a man thrown from a helicopter. Yet even while depicting Bosch-like experiences from the "Descent of Man into Hell," Khalil Wilson, in his unforgettable poems, deploys a voice that has the sympathetic beauty of candlelight and of singing in darkness.
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
The Tailor of Al Hamdaniyah
Because he wore a suit and seemed
of high-value and would name no terrorists,
knowing none, they stripped and hooded the old man,
the village tailor, and hung him by his wrists
from a mulberry tree that grew by the river
The old man knew only thank you and please
in English which he said through the night
to the sound of the Tigris and the sound of the wind.
He hung from the tree, strange fruit, five days.
Piñata man or Muslim ham, the Americans called him
and burned his feet with their lighters
when he seemed to sleep
Five days it took for his brother to get word
and travel to Mosul and bring his release
but by then the hands of the tailor had ripened.
His hands had changed, like the fruit of the tree,
from white to red to withered black and past saving.
They carried him to the clinic and cut them off.
Nine hundred dollars they issued him,
to which he said neither thank you nor please.
Henri Cole on Eliot Khalil Wilson
There is something close to the vivid cruelty of an Hieronymus Bosch painting in some of the poems of Eliot Khalil Wilson, where we encounter a pilot dropping incendiary bombs, a gunner shooting children and dogs (but not women or birds—"Bad luck.... Even when they are dead, they remember."), a village tailor stripped and hooded, hung from a tree like a "Piñata Man," and a man thrown from a helicopter. Yet even while depicting Bosch-like experiences from the "Descent of Man into Hell," Khalil Wilson, in his unforgettable poems, deploys a voice that has the sympathetic beauty of candlelight and of singing in darkness.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Unburdening
by Octavio Quintanilla
I wait for you in a room
where the howls of dogs are mute.
Here, where there's no flight.
Where the clock gathers your eyelashes
with its tongue.
I wait for you without daybreak,
naked because everything is hunger,
thirsty because you have named everything.
I wait for you as your mother fills
my forehead with kisses. She discovers
my poverty and her tongue turns to foam
when she says I am lucky.
There's no such thing as luck.
There's waiting and this life
that never shuts up. It falls in love
with my blood.
Owns the cry that I swallow.
by Octavio Quintanilla
I wait for you in a room
where the howls of dogs are mute.
Here, where there's no flight.
Where the clock gathers your eyelashes
with its tongue.
I wait for you without daybreak,
naked because everything is hunger,
thirsty because you have named everything.
I wait for you as your mother fills
my forehead with kisses. She discovers
my poverty and her tongue turns to foam
when she says I am lucky.
There's no such thing as luck.
There's waiting and this life
that never shuts up. It falls in love
with my blood.
Owns the cry that I swallow.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Spider Lily Love
Talking to my buddy Kate today and thinking about this flower again, the sudden firework on a stem, like if flowers were a carnival treat, these would that: sprouting crazy, sputtering petals like sparklers off a green stick, the leafless stem that seems too thin to hold such a storm of petal.
The Velocity of Love
1. Particle Physics
On the scale we're now talking,
we know nothing is solid,
matter riddled with the fretwork
of subatomic tumult.
Even the smooth, gold bands
we've wrapped around our fingers
are turbulent inside
as the rings of Saturn,
that orbiting debris field
that was once a moon, broken up
by the tug and welter
of gravitational tides.
Even our bodies,
which we vowed in unison
to love for all our days,
are made up
on their deepest level
of a chaotic stew of particles
that don't answer to anything
but a conflicting set of rules:
to attract when apart
but once linked, repel.
2. The Uncertainty Principle
We know now that we can't know
the velocity of love
at the same time
that we pin down its position.
Measuring changes everything.
Being able to say
where love stands
alters its momentum.
No wonder it makes me nervous
to mark our seventh year together,
spreading out a blanket
under the bright dice of stars
where those that burn hottest
are the most prone to going out
in a supernova explosion,
Rigel in Orion
or Polaris in The Bear,
someday vanishing from the story
where we imagined them
linked forever.
No wonder it makes me nervous,
knowing what we know
about Schrödinger's cat
and how the stars,
in whose light
our love shimmers tonight,
may or may not
be already dead.
3. Towards a Unified Field
The universe may be made of music
after all, countless
miniscule strands of energy
vibrating and bombinating
in a subatomic hum
where we thought nothing was.
Unruly music,
lurking under the level
of the Planck scale:
the bosons and gluons,
the messenger particles
love can still set thrumming
in your body, mine,
the superpartners
with their incompatible spins
held moment-
to-moment
in a delicate symmetry.
Isn't that how we hold
each other these days,
the way breath
can be held,
or the strings
they're now saying
might make everything
unified
but aren't necessarily tied
to anything.
Copyright © 2009 Kate Gleason All rights reserved
1. Particle Physics
On the scale we're now talking,
we know nothing is solid,
matter riddled with the fretwork
of subatomic tumult.
Even the smooth, gold bands
we've wrapped around our fingers
are turbulent inside
as the rings of Saturn,
that orbiting debris field
that was once a moon, broken up
by the tug and welter
of gravitational tides.
Even our bodies,
which we vowed in unison
to love for all our days,
are made up
on their deepest level
of a chaotic stew of particles
that don't answer to anything
but a conflicting set of rules:
to attract when apart
but once linked, repel.
2. The Uncertainty Principle
We know now that we can't know
the velocity of love
at the same time
that we pin down its position.
Measuring changes everything.
Being able to say
where love stands
alters its momentum.
No wonder it makes me nervous
to mark our seventh year together,
spreading out a blanket
under the bright dice of stars
where those that burn hottest
are the most prone to going out
in a supernova explosion,
Rigel in Orion
or Polaris in The Bear,
someday vanishing from the story
where we imagined them
linked forever.
No wonder it makes me nervous,
knowing what we know
about Schrödinger's cat
and how the stars,
in whose light
our love shimmers tonight,
may or may not
be already dead.
3. Towards a Unified Field
The universe may be made of music
after all, countless
miniscule strands of energy
vibrating and bombinating
in a subatomic hum
where we thought nothing was.
Unruly music,
lurking under the level
of the Planck scale:
the bosons and gluons,
the messenger particles
love can still set thrumming
in your body, mine,
the superpartners
with their incompatible spins
held moment-
to-moment
in a delicate symmetry.
Isn't that how we hold
each other these days,
the way breath
can be held,
or the strings
they're now saying
might make everything
unified
but aren't necessarily tied
to anything.
Copyright © 2009 Kate Gleason All rights reserved
Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm
For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding
Olive Street and softening the dawn,
the windows flung open in a yawn,
billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze,
the sounds of Procul Harum entering the air,
and fifty girls rising in their underwear.
O lost love. My girl and I had just split up.
The leaves of chestnut trees were rinsed in black,
the wind moaned grief, the moon was on the rack.
Humped over, stacking egg-crates in my Ford,
I was Charles Laughton ringing bells at Notre Dame--
spurned, wounded, but still in love with Sheila Baum.
Arriving at the gates of paradise,
I rang the service bell to wait on
Mrs. Cornish in her saintly apron
fumbling at the door, and the raucous gush
of female voices when she opened it. The flour
in her beard announced the darkness of the hour:
You're late. The hiss of bacon, pancake batter
as it kissed the grill, were a swarm of snakes to warn
the innocent away. Inside were virgins born,
like Sheila Baum, to stay that way. Outside
stood the egg man, despairing in his oval fate:
fifty girls staring, eggless, at an empty plate.
They may still be staring there. For emptiness
became my theme, sweeping eggshells
from my car, driving empty streets, fall's
cherry trees as bare as dormitory walls
washed by September rains. And the bells of Notre Dame
were as still as the broken shell of my dream of Sheila Baum.
B.H. Fairchild (as gracious & authentic as he is talented--reminds me of my favorite, living poet...)
For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding
Olive Street and softening the dawn,
the windows flung open in a yawn,
billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze,
the sounds of Procul Harum entering the air,
and fifty girls rising in their underwear.
O lost love. My girl and I had just split up.
The leaves of chestnut trees were rinsed in black,
the wind moaned grief, the moon was on the rack.
Humped over, stacking egg-crates in my Ford,
I was Charles Laughton ringing bells at Notre Dame--
spurned, wounded, but still in love with Sheila Baum.
Arriving at the gates of paradise,
I rang the service bell to wait on
Mrs. Cornish in her saintly apron
fumbling at the door, and the raucous gush
of female voices when she opened it. The flour
in her beard announced the darkness of the hour:
You're late. The hiss of bacon, pancake batter
as it kissed the grill, were a swarm of snakes to warn
the innocent away. Inside were virgins born,
like Sheila Baum, to stay that way. Outside
stood the egg man, despairing in his oval fate:
fifty girls staring, eggless, at an empty plate.
They may still be staring there. For emptiness
became my theme, sweeping eggshells
from my car, driving empty streets, fall's
cherry trees as bare as dormitory walls
washed by September rains. And the bells of Notre Dame
were as still as the broken shell of my dream of Sheila Baum.
B.H. Fairchild (as gracious & authentic as he is talented--reminds me of my favorite, living poet...)
From Bear 2 Bear
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
------------------
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
------------------
Thursday, July 30, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Bliss Bliss Bliss
That's all. What else is there to say about that? Except, for now, world, I thank thee.
Monday, July 06, 2009
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.
July, July, a month that owed me a bunch of redemption, I high five thee.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Earle Grey Ice Cream
To lift the bergamot from your cold mouth.
Sun Bicycle in a Color Called Overjoyed or Over You.
To spin the spokes to a daisy wish with an odd number of petals
Time to watch Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley in another Elegy.
Sun Bicycle in a Color Called Overjoyed or Over You.
To spin the spokes to a daisy wish with an odd number of petals
Time to watch Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley in another Elegy.
To Lift the Pain Whole from You
I am thinking of my sister here, how hard this lately is and how hard to say the right words about love, what it means, how to get it and how to get it and so on. I am packing up all the Mary Oliver and Anais Nin I can. I am reminding her, reminding me, reminding all the good architects of all the good houses for birds that it's not all for the birds. But some days, Chickadees.
Roberta Flack singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. The rain pouring hard outside. The Zelda room's good memories, if achey. The ginger-green tea I drank on the way back from the gym (in the rain) and the so many "me-toos" we kiss goodbye when we lose someone.
Oh Sister, I wish I could band-aid this for you. I am full of missings and musings but the world does "offer itself up to your imagination" and that makes everything possible once you pull anchor and sail.
ELEGY FOR THE UNSAID
after Neruda
In this mouth I gather darkness, an aria,
rosewater tongue, tympanic bone,
a poem more quiet than quietness,
a bronze song, something undone, salvia,
a crushed butterfly.
It is the blood on a light bulb, the seventh sadness,
a fluctuation that closes oceans and eyes.
The vermilion and solitary luminary
shimmies and singes the feathers of the aviary.
Moon, the clock's word, dear mother, ruin, rain.
Simone Muench
Roberta Flack singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. The rain pouring hard outside. The Zelda room's good memories, if achey. The ginger-green tea I drank on the way back from the gym (in the rain) and the so many "me-toos" we kiss goodbye when we lose someone.
Oh Sister, I wish I could band-aid this for you. I am full of missings and musings but the world does "offer itself up to your imagination" and that makes everything possible once you pull anchor and sail.
ELEGY FOR THE UNSAID
after Neruda
In this mouth I gather darkness, an aria,
rosewater tongue, tympanic bone,
a poem more quiet than quietness,
a bronze song, something undone, salvia,
a crushed butterfly.
It is the blood on a light bulb, the seventh sadness,
a fluctuation that closes oceans and eyes.
The vermilion and solitary luminary
shimmies and singes the feathers of the aviary.
Moon, the clock's word, dear mother, ruin, rain.
Simone Muench
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
I'll Run Away with You
The shuffle saved me tonight while the mood was a blender set to frappe, and my insides all cycloning, I tore out the door running and out to the park where the songs of infinite cheez-whiz kept my feet as angry as they were sad and as sad as could keep them churning (which kept the blender switched off in the stomach). I came home awash in sweat and just enough endorphin-buzz to keep me from weeping. Yes, one of those days, but not without good reason and not without gains. For a minute, I could see how much was possible and how wrong so many of the previous places had been for finding it. There's that and that's not nothing.
So,I am a sea of self-indulgence tonight and self-indulgence makes a great bedfellow for Ms. Nin's various wisdoms.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
That last one is a feeling I had for nearly six whole months. Then I risked it, and for good worth-it reason and I tripped, but I'm good for it, a little scraped but only flesh wounded. It's only Wednesday night, after all, and not the end of the world. Beginning with Anais and ending with The Cure, how odd that journey.
...a raging sea Stole the only girl I loved, drowned her deep inside of me
So,I am a sea of self-indulgence tonight and self-indulgence makes a great bedfellow for Ms. Nin's various wisdoms.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
That last one is a feeling I had for nearly six whole months. Then I risked it, and for good worth-it reason and I tripped, but I'm good for it, a little scraped but only flesh wounded. It's only Wednesday night, after all, and not the end of the world. Beginning with Anais and ending with The Cure, how odd that journey.
...a raging sea Stole the only girl I loved, drowned her deep inside of me
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Found a friend's blog and was reminded of what I told myself the beginning of this year and how lately, I have been reminded that getting what one wants is one thing, knowing about the care and feeding of it is another.
Something happy-making happened and it was so good for me. I am determined to be good for this sort of thing, and the next few weeks and this summer schedule are all going to be devoted to finding my way to that, to finishing the novel's first fifty and sending out my new story, to getting the gym schedule solid again and with yoga and trying very hard to learn from my losses.
I am posting the poem I most need to remember right now. It is, admittedly, repost, but I need it--(like diaquiri ice and movie nights of late and so much that I had, not long ago and deeply-cherished but not well enough or correctly)--close at hand.
AT THIS MOMENT OF TIME
Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Love offered suddenly, turning from the
mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the coloured lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it.
Their eyes
Are haunted by water.
Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That ‘no man is happy,’ but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight.
Something happy-making happened and it was so good for me. I am determined to be good for this sort of thing, and the next few weeks and this summer schedule are all going to be devoted to finding my way to that, to finishing the novel's first fifty and sending out my new story, to getting the gym schedule solid again and with yoga and trying very hard to learn from my losses.
I am posting the poem I most need to remember right now. It is, admittedly, repost, but I need it--(like diaquiri ice and movie nights of late and so much that I had, not long ago and deeply-cherished but not well enough or correctly)--close at hand.
AT THIS MOMENT OF TIME
Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Love offered suddenly, turning from the
mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the coloured lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it.
Their eyes
Are haunted by water.
Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That ‘no man is happy,’ but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Our Own Phillipsburgs
I owe my students a poem about my Phillipsburg. I thought it was the Fr. Quarter in my lovely, sad Nola. But that town is so bear-linked and right now I am all about the present-moment, the present in the moment and being happy with the bright-eyed feeling I am trying to learn to believe. The sandcastle-boots have been put away for the season and the fragile beginnings of a house near the sea and the little frail visits are forming their own summer memories. Maybe just maybe, this kid can stay happy with being happy long enough to shore it all up, resin or whatnot and brave it, prepare it, bring it in for the upcoming cold. After all, even Phillipsburg, as was pointed out to me, ends with the flash of red hair on a wall, lighting it all up with something like a brand of hope.
Tonight is wine and Wednesday wonder. (And sappy alliteration.)
Tonight is wine and Wednesday wonder. (And sappy alliteration.)
Monday, June 15, 2009
Who Writes Better than Bobby?
Now if you see Saint Annie
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don't have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won't even say what it is I've got
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don't have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won't even say what it is I've got
Friday, June 12, 2009
Goodbye UC
So I am officially through with all the ceremony of the degree. Family here. Pretty red robe, periwinkle velvet hood and a dress beneath: peacock blue velvet and shoes with little blueberries at the toes.
I am a tangle of feelings. Missing one someone surprisingly-much. Grateful for so many someones, family not the least of that, and that bird and all of the help to get me this far, and that bear, whom I have always known and never long enough.
This day contained another magic, as out of the blue as the chicken that dropped onto our windshield on a North Carolina highway late one night. As out of the blue as the connections that I feel years and years later to people and that I imagine are one-sided until a day like today when a woman I admire so and think of often, but whom I have not spoken to in over a decade and at last hearing lived in North Carolina, calls out to me and is there, Cincy, both of us in our robes and time just circled forward, reared up and kissed me gently on the forehead as if to say: some things are worth it, some are not, and time, like a dutiful child learning arthrimetic, carries over the surplus and reminds you when you hit the next column, just how much you still have to figure in.
I'm saying it felt a little miraculous.
I am a tangle of feelings. Missing one someone surprisingly-much. Grateful for so many someones, family not the least of that, and that bird and all of the help to get me this far, and that bear, whom I have always known and never long enough.
This day contained another magic, as out of the blue as the chicken that dropped onto our windshield on a North Carolina highway late one night. As out of the blue as the connections that I feel years and years later to people and that I imagine are one-sided until a day like today when a woman I admire so and think of often, but whom I have not spoken to in over a decade and at last hearing lived in North Carolina, calls out to me and is there, Cincy, both of us in our robes and time just circled forward, reared up and kissed me gently on the forehead as if to say: some things are worth it, some are not, and time, like a dutiful child learning arthrimetic, carries over the surplus and reminds you when you hit the next column, just how much you still have to figure in.
I'm saying it felt a little miraculous.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Oldies for a Week Overlaundered
I'm feeling the way I do after a tender, well-meaning failure of the heart or head or both: somewhere between washed over and wrung out. Two old, old favorites are the dose for such feelings. At least today, neck-deep in dreary sky and waiting to celebrate an old happening and missing my family so much before they get here and leave again, these poems are in order.
Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs--
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.
Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
Richard Hugo
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''
Richard Wilbur
Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs--
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.
Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
Richard Hugo
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''
Richard Wilbur
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Hope back up to bat strikes out
When Chicky suggested our new poem work off of her short dream that included a newspaper with the single headline "Forget" it seemed the thing to do. I started to save sudoku puzzles and crosswords, ideas for things to see, to eat, to do together and then I stopped. There were only twenty whole days to gather them, but that feeling, that someone is thinking of me right now is the stuff of the papers, the not so funny papers, and the short headlines that remind us what it's best we forget.
Soon I am hooded, then birdhoused, then teaching. Soon things will find order again and in that order, something good.
Soon I am hooded, then birdhoused, then teaching. Soon things will find order again and in that order, something good.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Why I Lost Patience
I don't spring clean out my friendship closet in the old way anymore. Okay, I did commit one recent, good, old-fashioned firing. But only one and I tried very hard to avoid it. I think it's unhealthy to decide categorically against too many people too often. It says not-great things about my initial instincts. But I have distanced myself and I find myself distancing almost before I get close to some people. If asked why, I would suggest my limited energy and the fact that this past year, two very close friends lost someone that they loved very much. In both cases, their lost-persons were people I liked a whole bunch too, and people that I liked my people having near them. In one case, the death was not unfair in terms of age and the "she had a full-life" blah-blah and in the other, it was horribly unfair, the woman young, so many new starts in her life. In both cases, strong, amazing women who were not victims and did not revel in opportunities to be victims. But it's hard to use the old "people have real problems and your antics seem selfish, inauthentic and make for a difficult empathy project" bit because it too, seems like a borrowed tragedy and illustrative in the same way as our not eating our collective brussel sprouts becomes paired with those "starving children in China." It feels like something that should feel sad instead of generating a clean, relatable parallel.
But the times bit on happiness feels more like what I am feeling lately. There's this world and we get both too little and too much of it but like that old joke about the restaurant that serves "horrible food and the portions are too small" it's a good, bad banquet and it's gone too soon or rather, we are. And that too, is not new thinking but I like that a knife in the throat is an image that I won't forget and that to think of it is to remember that I like dignity and people taking up their fair share of space and giving something back to those around them. I like people who can show up sometimes instead of have so many reasons why they are too broken, too lost, too spacey, too pained to bother. Then it's all the language and that, these days, is my priority. The phone will suffer and the phonecalls will be reduced by a lot so that the words can have some time. But they are good for it. They are the givers and lovers of happiness. And if you have not yet read Carl Dennis' poem To Happiness (from his latest book) you really should.
But the times bit on happiness feels more like what I am feeling lately. There's this world and we get both too little and too much of it but like that old joke about the restaurant that serves "horrible food and the portions are too small" it's a good, bad banquet and it's gone too soon or rather, we are. And that too, is not new thinking but I like that a knife in the throat is an image that I won't forget and that to think of it is to remember that I like dignity and people taking up their fair share of space and giving something back to those around them. I like people who can show up sometimes instead of have so many reasons why they are too broken, too lost, too spacey, too pained to bother. Then it's all the language and that, these days, is my priority. The phone will suffer and the phonecalls will be reduced by a lot so that the words can have some time. But they are good for it. They are the givers and lovers of happiness. And if you have not yet read Carl Dennis' poem To Happiness (from his latest book) you really should.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Black Tulip Zodiac
Over time, you have been sought after by many. Some weeks find you feeling forgotten. This may be one. Keep yourself busy. Maybe craigslist yourself as a potential artist's model. Find a muse to deliver you to a songwriter or a poet. Your lover flits from flower to flower and has the capacity to sting. Keep your face to the sun and a casual indifference. Do not worry if the rest of the crowd is not in sync with you--blossom in your own time. Your horoscope points to a heliotropic outlook.
To the naked eye, also science, you seem implausible--at best. Your fuel is fancy, your food: hope. You should avoid literalists, concrete thinkers and doberman pinsers.Don't allow yourself to be reduced to target practice for the dreamers. Even when no one believes in you, believe in yourself. At your core, blooms a star that no one can see.
To the naked eye, also science, you seem implausible--at best. Your fuel is fancy, your food: hope. You should avoid literalists, concrete thinkers and doberman pinsers.Don't allow yourself to be reduced to target practice for the dreamers. Even when no one believes in you, believe in yourself. At your core, blooms a star that no one can see.
Scarecrow, Black Tulip, Thyme,
I have loved you as time searched for its wristwatch
and several hours rushed over the hill or was it years
while the loss cost us all.
I meant to say the lost
(or was it lust) cut us all, in any case.
I am tired, Misters, of all this losing. I woke with song
behind my teeth but to sing it is to strain it.
Sometimes it's bearable, or Wednesday, you choose;
every universe is not universal, the stars are barstools,
and most nights sit up, elbows angled, leathery, yellow-eyed
spinning and falling off, here and there glimpses of the pets
of extinct giants, the sidewalk: a dachsund's spine,
love has gone that way, simply prehistoric, the sea
turns to tomato soup, biblical.
Understand, I have been blued, untrued,
bibled and reviled, it grows old, I grow
petunias, oregano, daisies.
One day I woke up
to the vastness, the handful of days
dashing over the hillside
like the children of nursery rhymes.
I remain unculled, uncolored
and (for all the poems,) unsung.
and several hours rushed over the hill or was it years
while the loss cost us all.
I meant to say the lost
(or was it lust) cut us all, in any case.
I am tired, Misters, of all this losing. I woke with song
behind my teeth but to sing it is to strain it.
Sometimes it's bearable, or Wednesday, you choose;
every universe is not universal, the stars are barstools,
and most nights sit up, elbows angled, leathery, yellow-eyed
spinning and falling off, here and there glimpses of the pets
of extinct giants, the sidewalk: a dachsund's spine,
love has gone that way, simply prehistoric, the sea
turns to tomato soup, biblical.
Understand, I have been blued, untrued,
bibled and reviled, it grows old, I grow
petunias, oregano, daisies.
One day I woke up
to the vastness, the handful of days
dashing over the hillside
like the children of nursery rhymes.
I remain unculled, uncolored
and (for all the poems,) unsung.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Some People
are indescribable. Their presence in the world is nothing short of a present.
Just received Abraham Smith's book in the mail and recalled what a wonder his words and Abraham, too, one of the good reasons to live.
Just received Abraham Smith's book in the mail and recalled what a wonder his words and Abraham, too, one of the good reasons to live.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Turn Up the Frequency
The flavor of the new Tori A. is: yummy.
The good thing about being born and making my way to Cincy and finding Lady L-Bo and getting to birthday with her and her lovely and talented Filo-Boy.
So much talent in one house, I raise my Amos glass to you both, you Paris-improvers.
The good thing about being born and making my way to Cincy and finding Lady L-Bo and getting to birthday with her and her lovely and talented Filo-Boy.
So much talent in one house, I raise my Amos glass to you both, you Paris-improvers.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Not a Dark Thing at All
I mean, it was a gorgeous day and I thought about every possible loveliness and how lucky I was to know who I know and to be so very loved by so many good people--thank you L-Bo and Filo for the birthday lunch. The day was spent otherwise at home, in quiet, preparing the house and the life for guests and the big yard sale
It seems fitting that a big purge take place when Chez Intaglio & Tres Intaglettes gather so much so quickly and must then, send some pretty back out for the other kids.
It seems fitting that a big purge take place when Chez Intaglio & Tres Intaglettes gather so much so quickly and must then, send some pretty back out for the other kids.
Shooting Ghosts
A thing that could look like an old midway game, the kind with the piano player and the target on his back, the kind with ducks rolling by like, well, moving targets. But for me, tonight, it is the kind that I usually use as a shield, the ghosts of what hasn't worked as a block against the living things that could. Kind of like planting a big shrub over the wildflower seeds you threw down, but a thorny one. One that scratches when you walk by and lets nothing grow in its shadow.
My friend, "Rhoda" asked me if I wrote something on my birthday and I had been writing a short story and a little note to myself but nothing so formal and captured as a birthday log, a formal account of that day every year. I wished suddenly, that I had. But this isn't that. It's too late to recapture all of those, just like I can't move forward into the sudden-promise of some good things with the old sorrows hanging from every tree. I like too much, linger too long and long, long, long after the lingering's good.
Lately there have been daisy-days glazed with the fresh sweet, shininess that hot donuts wear. A treat to the senses and something so simple to that, too. I am tired of the mean-broken who accuse the sad-broken of something sinister. I am tired of working very hard to stop seeing broken or naming broken or loving broken and having the mean-broken make ugly every possible joy.
I wish us all something light, full of color, and the promise of hope and dare-we-reach happiness. Even the ghosts I had to shoot deader so as to keep them from smothering everything that might live in their pitiful, and once-beautiful stead.
My friend, "Rhoda" asked me if I wrote something on my birthday and I had been writing a short story and a little note to myself but nothing so formal and captured as a birthday log, a formal account of that day every year. I wished suddenly, that I had. But this isn't that. It's too late to recapture all of those, just like I can't move forward into the sudden-promise of some good things with the old sorrows hanging from every tree. I like too much, linger too long and long, long, long after the lingering's good.
Lately there have been daisy-days glazed with the fresh sweet, shininess that hot donuts wear. A treat to the senses and something so simple to that, too. I am tired of the mean-broken who accuse the sad-broken of something sinister. I am tired of working very hard to stop seeing broken or naming broken or loving broken and having the mean-broken make ugly every possible joy.
I wish us all something light, full of color, and the promise of hope and dare-we-reach happiness. Even the ghosts I had to shoot deader so as to keep them from smothering everything that might live in their pitiful, and once-beautiful stead.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Forms Forgiveness Takes, a Poorly-Painted Chair the Color of Twilight
I meant to write about the movie I saw with L-Bo, how it walked such a tightrope between gratuitous sorrow, schmaltz and every danger of employing children, the old and the notion of what means and loses its means and so on.
What a tightrope walk! I said to L-Bo within moments, "I will have to own this" and I will. To retired magic and magicians, to women who dance on one leg, to the ways we find to forgive and get forgiven, I blow a stream of rainbowy bubbles.
I miss my big friend who has moved away. He is in a swirly memory blizzard from a gallery hop in January or February when the streets were wild with snow and he walked in the quiet of snow-globes, all that good quiet he contained and that he inspired and it was what winter in Ohio must be.
My garden grows prettily and the seedlings even are peeking out. I have a wooden chair that is sloppily-blue-lavender and I am sitting in it now, writing to all of you--whoever you might be--and listening to a song about chiropractors. I have eaten a bunch of mini rainbow marshmallows because it is the food of such a day.
What a tightrope walk! I said to L-Bo within moments, "I will have to own this" and I will. To retired magic and magicians, to women who dance on one leg, to the ways we find to forgive and get forgiven, I blow a stream of rainbowy bubbles.
I miss my big friend who has moved away. He is in a swirly memory blizzard from a gallery hop in January or February when the streets were wild with snow and he walked in the quiet of snow-globes, all that good quiet he contained and that he inspired and it was what winter in Ohio must be.
My garden grows prettily and the seedlings even are peeking out. I have a wooden chair that is sloppily-blue-lavender and I am sitting in it now, writing to all of you--whoever you might be--and listening to a song about chiropractors. I have eaten a bunch of mini rainbow marshmallows because it is the food of such a day.
Friday, May 15, 2009
A Rich and Varied Week
I'm floored again and again by my students and my students who are more like my friends, because, after the grading is over, why wouldn't I hang out with people who live in art and who work in the world as if they are not entitled to something more because they are artists but instead, provide the world with more beauty and wisdom because they feel lucky to be able to create art and be amongst like-minded people.
That said, I found a lot to admire in the youtube postings of katereadsbooks She is the smart cookie and funny, besides. This morning was a workshop on how to start into publishing and tonight, a movie and dinner with my dear L-bo.
I feel free of the heavy burdens of certain not-good-for-me persons and grateful at the new friends I am finally finding here.
My garden is growing so prettily and with home internet--at last! I get to go out and enjoy it and write beside it.
That said, I found a lot to admire in the youtube postings of katereadsbooks She is the smart cookie and funny, besides. This morning was a workshop on how to start into publishing and tonight, a movie and dinner with my dear L-bo.
I feel free of the heavy burdens of certain not-good-for-me persons and grateful at the new friends I am finally finding here.
My garden is growing so prettily and with home internet--at last! I get to go out and enjoy it and write beside it.
Monday, May 11, 2009
The Insipitudes
They come in like wrens and go out like finches or maybe
it’s the other way. They come in like tornadoes and exit
like divas. When we tell them about black tulips, the imagination,
Plato, the crazy things that happen there, they take-over,
want a spotlight of crazy, want to pluck the black tulips from our gardens
and arrange them in their sickrooms. Every room they enter
is a sick room and they like it that way, less pressure.
They walk by way of pity, even mercy, they press, sure,
into us like handprints on wet cement in May
and often in July. They peddle their miseries
like flowers and they watch for us, hoping we’ll buy.
When I think about suburbia, I think about streets that are named
after trees and I am reminded of my friend’s late wife
who said “love like a tree not like a bird”
Another one was born soon, they’re everywhere
and when I think to forgive one I recall that the last time
I might have seen Tom Waits and was sold-out.
They come in like wrens and go out like finches or maybe
it’s the other way. They come in like tornadoes and exit
like divas. When we tell them about black tulips, the imagination,
Plato, the crazy things that happen there, they take-over,
want a spotlight of crazy, want to pluck the black tulips from our gardens
and arrange them in their sickrooms. Every room they enter
is a sick room and they like it that way, less pressure.
They walk by way of pity, even mercy, they press, sure,
into us like handprints on wet cement in May
and often in July. They peddle their miseries
like flowers and they watch for us, hoping we’ll buy.
When I think about suburbia, I think about streets that are named
after trees and I am reminded of my friend’s late wife
who said “love like a tree not like a bird”
Another one was born soon, they’re everywhere
and when I think to forgive one I recall that the last time
I might have seen Tom Waits and was sold-out.
Because Veace was So Kind
and generous to the BT poems, I will finish some of the stragglers and post them. Perhaps we're looking at a chapbook. From where I sit, I can see the nightdarkmoist soil of the freshly tilled and watered garden. It does a heart (even a depleted, robbed one) good.
Orange Sun Oozing
like a popsicle left in a hot car,
a crayon or a lifesaver. Big star
stuck in a vast pond, big orange slice
congealed in the blueberry jell-o skies.
Her heaven’s sexy, vibrant, as the words
risqué or tangerine. Her heaven’s armed
two-lipped, black nightied, sassafrass, sweetass,
and heavened again, a twin-star: juicy
with wishes; the mind’s eye disrobing one
planet then the next, the constellated
pores sprayed out on the ever-midnight
chest, celestial shout-out to suggest:
let nothing go uncelebrated.
for KW
Orange Sun Oozing
like a popsicle left in a hot car,
a crayon or a lifesaver. Big star
stuck in a vast pond, big orange slice
congealed in the blueberry jell-o skies.
Her heaven’s sexy, vibrant, as the words
risqué or tangerine. Her heaven’s armed
two-lipped, black nightied, sassafrass, sweetass,
and heavened again, a twin-star: juicy
with wishes; the mind’s eye disrobing one
planet then the next, the constellated
pores sprayed out on the ever-midnight
chest, celestial shout-out to suggest:
let nothing go uncelebrated.
for KW
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Day of Great Gratitude
Happy Bearday! Happy Bearday! My life is a children's book and the characters include my big bear, a bird, a talking spoon, three dreadful whiskered villians, plus one a ways away with fangs and warm flames in its hot lime eyes. Some tough Utah wild-girls in the form of what? A star-gazer with a comet's risque heat, a boomerang moon-girl with spiral locks and a horse they call Wildfire back to the state that is a sheetcake with one gone piece. There are more, a veacey vixen in Brooklyn with a heart that blooms sunflowers...
The Bear is the big, gentle being that feeds the rest, by heart and by mouth. Prettiest thing, he makes the world better by casting his brilliant, lovely, talented shadow on the grateful ground. Thank something for him. Stop now and do it. May 10, 1965 was an inspired day. One day in Alabama some thirty years later would change my life forever and I never stop feeling lucky for it. Good work Gloria and Jack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy Birthday You Wonder, You!
To all my dear ones who are also Mom-ones, Happiest Day to you. How I envy you your crayoned cards, your goofy love gifts with their smudgy prints.
To Magda, Dora and Mollie, my borrowed kids. You have a great mom (who is a bit sad today, no doubt,) but special beyond, like all of you.
To my students, I happy mother's day your moms--without them, no you and that is pretty unimaginable even to a crowd like us whose thoughts are tropical birds.
The gratitudes stroll by in twos and twos of twos like Noah-beasts or the participants in a mass cult wedding. They are vintage salt shaker you toaster, you two slices of bread, perforated. Birthday cake. Meringue. The park with the pond at the center and the fountain that spouts a true water lily. The seed pods left behind in late winter that rattle like maracas. The December day when I wintered there, warmly and wishing.
The Bear is the big, gentle being that feeds the rest, by heart and by mouth. Prettiest thing, he makes the world better by casting his brilliant, lovely, talented shadow on the grateful ground. Thank something for him. Stop now and do it. May 10, 1965 was an inspired day. One day in Alabama some thirty years later would change my life forever and I never stop feeling lucky for it. Good work Gloria and Jack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy Birthday You Wonder, You!
To all my dear ones who are also Mom-ones, Happiest Day to you. How I envy you your crayoned cards, your goofy love gifts with their smudgy prints.
To Magda, Dora and Mollie, my borrowed kids. You have a great mom (who is a bit sad today, no doubt,) but special beyond, like all of you.
To my students, I happy mother's day your moms--without them, no you and that is pretty unimaginable even to a crowd like us whose thoughts are tropical birds.
The gratitudes stroll by in twos and twos of twos like Noah-beasts or the participants in a mass cult wedding. They are vintage salt shaker you toaster, you two slices of bread, perforated. Birthday cake. Meringue. The park with the pond at the center and the fountain that spouts a true water lily. The seed pods left behind in late winter that rattle like maracas. The December day when I wintered there, warmly and wishing.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Ah Craig, Rebecca, Jackie, and World, Most of all You...
Terrible news just found me.
from A Place of First Permission
AT a still point of the turning floor
there is a dancer you would know her
even across a crowded room
the way she sways is so familiar
She weaves with the easiness and grace
of someone so completely in
possession of her body the beat
she lays down with her hands and feet
is all that keeps the cosmos in its groove
She is a lash of flame
spiraled to fire-colored hair
Her hands unfold a flower out of the air
If you reached out to take it if you came
closer you would liquefy like wax
pooled in a candle's crater you would spill
past possibility of shame
She says
Smoke me a bass line to go with that
thick as blackstrap molasses she says
Give me the buzz of oboe between your lips
the tingling tambourines the sweet
percussive patter of palm on palm she says
The whole world is poured into the deep bowl of my hips
Now get on up she says and shake
the creases out of your clothes she says
Your life is nothing but the thread
you spin behind you every step
a turn a loop a figure-eight
until the day that blind witch Fate
opens her scissors and snips you dead
What would you do if you could take it
between your fingers if you could feel
every knot and snag and tangle
loosen and gather softly round the spool
What would you do with such permission
how far would you wind it what decision
you made or didn't make
You can sit the next one out together
here at this table you can share
a glass of white vermouth pretend it's absinthe
green as venom green as Eden
seawater wormwood pine-needle
and watch the dramas and the comedies
playing around you you can ease
into one of those silences
that never feel the need to fill
And you can say what you've been so afraid
to put in words what's tied your tongue
for years of useless reasons and excuses
the apology you never made
Love from you I learned
to dance you taught me with your body
and not words your movement answered
mine and mine yours you gave me back
to my own body we passed between us
all the speechless gestures of admiration
of those early in love who aren't yet
careful to say so much and no further
But each time we kissed you kept your lips
closed however much I pleaded
Open the petals of your mouth for me
you never let them part I thought your heart
too was closed I was afraid to see
how happily you would have offered
everything had I done the same
Love forgive me all I've given
has been a form of taking
talking over a table of scarred wood
talking always about the table
I've held out my hand and drawn it back
in case you took it always afraid
to take away the table altogether
You laid a coal on my lips you made me
bend my chromatic into blue
You taught me how to spin my line
back and forth in a broken prayer
and give it to the all-assuming air
Now here it is my gift to you
if you will take it oh my Ariadne
my muse my lady jane my valentine
She takes your hand her thumb circles
lightly over the backs of your fingers
How have you never noticed
the sweetest galaxy of freckles
scattered across the fine skin of her wrist
Outside the ragged trickle of the rain
the dark snarl of branches the blades of grass
bend and flutter caught in the wind
that sweeps over the wake you leave behind
As if it all were bowing briefly
toward your passage nodding as if to say
Yes you're going to get away
with everything
As if the dancers
happy or disappointed loving or leaving
their voices the red velvet curtain
swaying from side to side the broken glass
the girl you loved and you and the whole train
were nothing but a line of thread
licked twisted drawn through
the eye of a needle and slowly pulled
another stitch in the cloth of the world
that is all stitches a piece of string
lost in the weave never to be untangled
Look did you see it
The eye blinks
and the bud of the moment blows open
shakes off its sleepy petals
and you are sitting there
listening to a girl in a pink sweater
gossip into a phone
and she gets off
at the next stop (there is no keeping her)
leaving a dimpled seat a hole
shaped like her in the air a long blonde hair
and the smell of rain in wet wool
Craig Arnold
Made Flesh
from A Place of First Permission
AT a still point of the turning floor
there is a dancer you would know her
even across a crowded room
the way she sways is so familiar
She weaves with the easiness and grace
of someone so completely in
possession of her body the beat
she lays down with her hands and feet
is all that keeps the cosmos in its groove
She is a lash of flame
spiraled to fire-colored hair
Her hands unfold a flower out of the air
If you reached out to take it if you came
closer you would liquefy like wax
pooled in a candle's crater you would spill
past possibility of shame
She says
Smoke me a bass line to go with that
thick as blackstrap molasses she says
Give me the buzz of oboe between your lips
the tingling tambourines the sweet
percussive patter of palm on palm she says
The whole world is poured into the deep bowl of my hips
Now get on up she says and shake
the creases out of your clothes she says
Your life is nothing but the thread
you spin behind you every step
a turn a loop a figure-eight
until the day that blind witch Fate
opens her scissors and snips you dead
What would you do if you could take it
between your fingers if you could feel
every knot and snag and tangle
loosen and gather softly round the spool
What would you do with such permission
how far would you wind it what decision
you made or didn't make
You can sit the next one out together
here at this table you can share
a glass of white vermouth pretend it's absinthe
green as venom green as Eden
seawater wormwood pine-needle
and watch the dramas and the comedies
playing around you you can ease
into one of those silences
that never feel the need to fill
And you can say what you've been so afraid
to put in words what's tied your tongue
for years of useless reasons and excuses
the apology you never made
Love from you I learned
to dance you taught me with your body
and not words your movement answered
mine and mine yours you gave me back
to my own body we passed between us
all the speechless gestures of admiration
of those early in love who aren't yet
careful to say so much and no further
But each time we kissed you kept your lips
closed however much I pleaded
Open the petals of your mouth for me
you never let them part I thought your heart
too was closed I was afraid to see
how happily you would have offered
everything had I done the same
Love forgive me all I've given
has been a form of taking
talking over a table of scarred wood
talking always about the table
I've held out my hand and drawn it back
in case you took it always afraid
to take away the table altogether
You laid a coal on my lips you made me
bend my chromatic into blue
You taught me how to spin my line
back and forth in a broken prayer
and give it to the all-assuming air
Now here it is my gift to you
if you will take it oh my Ariadne
my muse my lady jane my valentine
She takes your hand her thumb circles
lightly over the backs of your fingers
How have you never noticed
the sweetest galaxy of freckles
scattered across the fine skin of her wrist
Outside the ragged trickle of the rain
the dark snarl of branches the blades of grass
bend and flutter caught in the wind
that sweeps over the wake you leave behind
As if it all were bowing briefly
toward your passage nodding as if to say
Yes you're going to get away
with everything
As if the dancers
happy or disappointed loving or leaving
their voices the red velvet curtain
swaying from side to side the broken glass
the girl you loved and you and the whole train
were nothing but a line of thread
licked twisted drawn through
the eye of a needle and slowly pulled
another stitch in the cloth of the world
that is all stitches a piece of string
lost in the weave never to be untangled
Look did you see it
The eye blinks
and the bud of the moment blows open
shakes off its sleepy petals
and you are sitting there
listening to a girl in a pink sweater
gossip into a phone
and she gets off
at the next stop (there is no keeping her)
leaving a dimpled seat a hole
shaped like her in the air a long blonde hair
and the smell of rain in wet wool
Craig Arnold
Made Flesh
Bonnie Prince Billy!!!
June 13 says a pink flyer with a black skeleton and that's my boy and L-Bo, Filo??
So, the worst part of my job is grading...
and my grades suffered some internet difficulties today so I had to come to an internet cafe and repost. I am sitting at the door of this great place that is all about scooters and coffee and just outside a group of people are playing kick ball in the faint drizzle of spring rain and High Street is crazy with light and bodies all doubled against the shiny streets and I am a decaf cappucino and sitting as near outside as a girl and her laptop can go and it's amazing. Sometimes I nearly simply love my life.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Update and a Request on Behalf of "Find Craig Arnold"
Rebecca Lindenberg sent a message to the members of Find Craig Arnold.
--------------------
Subject: Craig Needs Our Help
Thanks to the money raised through The Fund to Find Craig Arnold, we have been able to engage the help of an independent search and rescue team (1SRG) who arrived at Kuchino-erabu yesterday afternoon. The local authorities brought the team up to speed, and they immediately began searching; they believe they have picked up Craig's trail. They will be on the island until the 9th, looking, though obviously we all hope Craig will be found before then. However, the official search for Craig has been called off by the Japanese authorities. We need everyone's help contacting their local Congressional delegation and asking their assistance in pressuring the Fukuoka consulate to engage local US military/DOD assets on the ground in Japan. They have been thinking about it and we need them to move forward with that as quickly as possible. We would be enormously grateful if Craig's friends and supporters would help us in this effort, and we thank you all for the amazing outpouring of help, generosity, and sympathy that everyone continues to show for Craig.
-Rebecca
--------------------
Subject: Craig Needs Our Help
Thanks to the money raised through The Fund to Find Craig Arnold, we have been able to engage the help of an independent search and rescue team (1SRG) who arrived at Kuchino-erabu yesterday afternoon. The local authorities brought the team up to speed, and they immediately began searching; they believe they have picked up Craig's trail. They will be on the island until the 9th, looking, though obviously we all hope Craig will be found before then. However, the official search for Craig has been called off by the Japanese authorities. We need everyone's help contacting their local Congressional delegation and asking their assistance in pressuring the Fukuoka consulate to engage local US military/DOD assets on the ground in Japan. They have been thinking about it and we need them to move forward with that as quickly as possible. We would be enormously grateful if Craig's friends and supporters would help us in this effort, and we thank you all for the amazing outpouring of help, generosity, and sympathy that everyone continues to show for Craig.
-Rebecca
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Black Tulip Reminiscence
We went out our in best black tulip suits
washed our black tulip diner-ware, painted
all the red tulips black, the pink tulips—white.
The black tulips grew rampant and right
as the night they contained. We mouthed
words into the wrong mouths for too long
and then again always. We were ironing our
collective shirts, sighing into our collective
soup, we were collected for a time, then donated.
For one season, beyond belief, we were all the rage..
10 Friday
Good Friday We Drive Around the Synagogue Geese
the deer not yet bounding across the lot, into a stand of trees
the light suggestive of spring, the air recalling winter and it’s good,
Friday, us, the strange new year we’ve opened like a suspicious package
bore a new facet to our friendship that were it a day would be Friday
a day sipping at the rainwater puddles at the edge of the weekend pool.
A day caught like a kite in the hope-tree of the possible, where Saturday
is a breakfast served in the mind’s little cafe, the stack of pancakes
rivuleted in real maple syrup, the pats of butter--pillow-plush, your face,
Friend, Brother, Dear-Heart, Weird One, better for our ever-Fridays
when I drive the hundred miles back to where for four years we shared
a lifetime and if once one of us wished a forever tucked inside
those times, the other trafficked in Black Tulip Time, an infinite
minute if imaginary.
19 Anger
Angry Black Cloud Pretends to Tulip
He rainbowed me, abhorred me, man-o-warred me,
Then bestowed me, (then just stowed me,) What was owed me?
Who can say? Yesterdayed him then unprayed him,
If betrayed then, let it lay.
Misconnected, no one objected.
We undressed and then redressed it
Left ourselves out on display.
Sacrificed it, sliced and diced it,
Then we left it, so-bereft it skulked
towards home then lost its way.
30 Goodbye too, Love: Elegy for Karen Carpenter
Only yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
Your alto-range lovesongs put the pop in popsong.
That smile in your voice, like a good receptionist,
kept the better part of the seventies
pleasant. Karen, forgive us, we hadn’t yet seen that strained
look on the faces of all the women to starve themselves
after you. Didn’t know that a body could be both dandelion spore
and scarecrow-headed in bellbottom jeans with a t-shirt, embroidered
with many colored flowers and glinting with a rhinestone at each
of its floral-cores. Yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
to leave the past and all its tears behind you, you emptied yourself,
like a pill bottle found irony on labels that instructed you not take them
on an empty stomach. Wondered how to otherwise when you were emptiness
embodied, singing your even your own dirges in a voice careful and sweet
as a greeting card. Jagged-Girl we saw you, the gothic self, running behind
the trees in the forest—recolorized by Disney in shades that were synthetic
imitations of color—that was your soul, your slip-self creeping between pines
And watching that other-you in her bright pastels pull another smile from her
handbag and swallow it whole. Superstar, you’ll go too far, not far enough,
you’ll shoot and fall, and for a split-glitter-torn second the heavens will recall.
We went out our in best black tulip suits
washed our black tulip diner-ware, painted
all the red tulips black, the pink tulips—white.
The black tulips grew rampant and right
as the night they contained. We mouthed
words into the wrong mouths for too long
and then again always. We were ironing our
collective shirts, sighing into our collective
soup, we were collected for a time, then donated.
For one season, beyond belief, we were all the rage..
10 Friday
Good Friday We Drive Around the Synagogue Geese
the deer not yet bounding across the lot, into a stand of trees
the light suggestive of spring, the air recalling winter and it’s good,
Friday, us, the strange new year we’ve opened like a suspicious package
bore a new facet to our friendship that were it a day would be Friday
a day sipping at the rainwater puddles at the edge of the weekend pool.
A day caught like a kite in the hope-tree of the possible, where Saturday
is a breakfast served in the mind’s little cafe, the stack of pancakes
rivuleted in real maple syrup, the pats of butter--pillow-plush, your face,
Friend, Brother, Dear-Heart, Weird One, better for our ever-Fridays
when I drive the hundred miles back to where for four years we shared
a lifetime and if once one of us wished a forever tucked inside
those times, the other trafficked in Black Tulip Time, an infinite
minute if imaginary.
19 Anger
Angry Black Cloud Pretends to Tulip
He rainbowed me, abhorred me, man-o-warred me,
Then bestowed me, (then just stowed me,) What was owed me?
Who can say? Yesterdayed him then unprayed him,
If betrayed then, let it lay.
Misconnected, no one objected.
We undressed and then redressed it
Left ourselves out on display.
Sacrificed it, sliced and diced it,
Then we left it, so-bereft it skulked
towards home then lost its way.
30 Goodbye too, Love: Elegy for Karen Carpenter
Only yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
Your alto-range lovesongs put the pop in popsong.
That smile in your voice, like a good receptionist,
kept the better part of the seventies
pleasant. Karen, forgive us, we hadn’t yet seen that strained
look on the faces of all the women to starve themselves
after you. Didn’t know that a body could be both dandelion spore
and scarecrow-headed in bellbottom jeans with a t-shirt, embroidered
with many colored flowers and glinting with a rhinestone at each
of its floral-cores. Yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
to leave the past and all its tears behind you, you emptied yourself,
like a pill bottle found irony on labels that instructed you not take them
on an empty stomach. Wondered how to otherwise when you were emptiness
embodied, singing your even your own dirges in a voice careful and sweet
as a greeting card. Jagged-Girl we saw you, the gothic self, running behind
the trees in the forest—recolorized by Disney in shades that were synthetic
imitations of color—that was your soul, your slip-self creeping between pines
And watching that other-you in her bright pastels pull another smile from her
handbag and swallow it whole. Superstar, you’ll go too far, not far enough,
you’ll shoot and fall, and for a split-glitter-torn second the heavens will recall.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The B.T. Encyclopedic Entry on Longing
It isn’t what it used to be. The throngs of shadows from the tetradactylic sky made us uneasy, reminded us of the shapes of Things-Before: four score and so many years ago, we longed richly, longed like the longers of old. Consider Longfellow, thus named for his rhymed-yearnings. Longfellow knew a good longer when he tried one, the bouquet of it just-so, and the good legs it hung down the sides of a goblet. Alexandre Dumas, a longer like no longer. And Proust, and so on. These days, no longer is a good longer. Better no impact, be able, as my friend says, to insert some platypus lasagna anywhere and lose nothing and when I speak, Friends, of monkey juggling, let me say that it matters not whether I refer to that unkind sport of primate-as-bowling-pin or if I mean to say that a monkey steps on a stage and spins four chainsaws in the air, three torches of fire and we all applaud. The juggler, the juggled, nevermind. We’re in the midst of defining (and by defining, I mean dismissing,) longing as the plaything of mortals, of the tender-hearted, the bleeding hearts, the hearts-on-sleeved who hurt when they want a thing, love a thing, lose a thing. I mean to say: longing is for losers, anyway.
It isn’t what it used to be. The throngs of shadows from the tetradactylic sky made us uneasy, reminded us of the shapes of Things-Before: four score and so many years ago, we longed richly, longed like the longers of old. Consider Longfellow, thus named for his rhymed-yearnings. Longfellow knew a good longer when he tried one, the bouquet of it just-so, and the good legs it hung down the sides of a goblet. Alexandre Dumas, a longer like no longer. And Proust, and so on. These days, no longer is a good longer. Better no impact, be able, as my friend says, to insert some platypus lasagna anywhere and lose nothing and when I speak, Friends, of monkey juggling, let me say that it matters not whether I refer to that unkind sport of primate-as-bowling-pin or if I mean to say that a monkey steps on a stage and spins four chainsaws in the air, three torches of fire and we all applaud. The juggler, the juggled, nevermind. We’re in the midst of defining (and by defining, I mean dismissing,) longing as the plaything of mortals, of the tender-hearted, the bleeding hearts, the hearts-on-sleeved who hurt when they want a thing, love a thing, lose a thing. I mean to say: longing is for losers, anyway.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Tulipe Noir: As the Cosmic Hand Reaches for the Light
Like a tarantula at a square dance, I felt unwelcome.
Like a memory hanging off a bridge, precarious.
This week has the breath of a six-day’s dead wino
This town isn’t big enough for this brand of make-believer.
I felt as gold and as rusty as the sweat-corroded trinkets
on bellydancer’s waist. I drank from the flask
You’re no sunset, Dollface. You’re Sunset after hours.
a dark Merlot. I said harmony and you heard harming me
and there we had the way to go, Pigeon. This city’s seen
the last of you, gumshoe. The stars were like dewdrops
on the side of a windshield of a car left for dead
on the shoulder. The body in the trunk was as folded tidy
as a suitcase packed by a new bride. We wore blue velvet
and shiny loafers. We wore carnations in our buttonholes
like bulletholes blooming from the sides of our chests.
We were not big enough for this town, for both of us.
We’re as gone as vaudeville, as late as ever, as unwieldy
as a fish half-caught, as lost as us.
Like a tarantula at a square dance, I felt unwelcome.
Like a memory hanging off a bridge, precarious.
This week has the breath of a six-day’s dead wino
This town isn’t big enough for this brand of make-believer.
I felt as gold and as rusty as the sweat-corroded trinkets
on bellydancer’s waist. I drank from the flask
You’re no sunset, Dollface. You’re Sunset after hours.
a dark Merlot. I said harmony and you heard harming me
and there we had the way to go, Pigeon. This city’s seen
the last of you, gumshoe. The stars were like dewdrops
on the side of a windshield of a car left for dead
on the shoulder. The body in the trunk was as folded tidy
as a suitcase packed by a new bride. We wore blue velvet
and shiny loafers. We wore carnations in our buttonholes
like bulletholes blooming from the sides of our chests.
We were not big enough for this town, for both of us.
We’re as gone as vaudeville, as late as ever, as unwieldy
as a fish half-caught, as lost as us.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Wet T-Shirt Contest at the Black Tulip
Never have we given so much
thought to the body before,
then I joined that gritty, hardcore
gym and we worked out amongst
the pumped and perhaps-pumped
full of steroids and just today
the “naturals” weighed in, urinated
in the presence of a judge to assure
us that her taut frame was self-taught
not a synthetic synthesis from muscle
to tone. Our tone today is mellow,
our tone today is slack, not low
but leaning like a flower thirsting
for something to shake the eros
back into it. We spy the flyer
and the promise of water
to thin fabric, telling the secrets
of the form underneath. Midnight
rolls around, we return to see what
the transparency of water can teach
us about what we ask be revealed
just to keep concealed what we need.
Never have we given so much
thought to the body before,
then I joined that gritty, hardcore
gym and we worked out amongst
the pumped and perhaps-pumped
full of steroids and just today
the “naturals” weighed in, urinated
in the presence of a judge to assure
us that her taut frame was self-taught
not a synthetic synthesis from muscle
to tone. Our tone today is mellow,
our tone today is slack, not low
but leaning like a flower thirsting
for something to shake the eros
back into it. We spy the flyer
and the promise of water
to thin fabric, telling the secrets
of the form underneath. Midnight
rolls around, we return to see what
the transparency of water can teach
us about what we ask be revealed
just to keep concealed what we need.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Black Tulip Brogue
Once there was a way to get back homeward; once there was a way to get back to the ranch,
Meanwhile, the tulips are curling into themselves against the chill. Meanwhile, I am not going
to Scotland anytimesoon. I am not going to Anytimesoon for the swanky beachfront bacon boys,
nor the souvenirs that appear along the esplanade glued hastily, their tartans showing a swath
of plastic thigh that appears quite nearly obscene in this light: neither Scottish nor tropical.
I am not working on my Gaelic, and not priming my bikini bod for the view. I'm missing my planes.
Maps upset me, as do globes, spin them, scan them and what you'll find are the million places
where I won't be tonight. I sang a solo to the radiator and it sputtered a sick reply.
Someone asked about my whereabouts then so did I. So did I.
Meanwhile, the tulips are curling into themselves against the chill. Meanwhile, I am not going
to Scotland anytimesoon. I am not going to Anytimesoon for the swanky beachfront bacon boys,
nor the souvenirs that appear along the esplanade glued hastily, their tartans showing a swath
of plastic thigh that appears quite nearly obscene in this light: neither Scottish nor tropical.
I am not working on my Gaelic, and not priming my bikini bod for the view. I'm missing my planes.
Maps upset me, as do globes, spin them, scan them and what you'll find are the million places
where I won't be tonight. I sang a solo to the radiator and it sputtered a sick reply.
Someone asked about my whereabouts then so did I. So did I.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Black Eye, Fat Lip, Gas-Station Doghouse Roses
Randomly you occur to me;
during rain against the skylight
or seepage in the crawlspace,
During February, May or days bright
Your fingers swift to the dimmer switch.
Maybe you see me in the grocery line:
drowning in debt or gourmet coffee-beans,
my tears, or the vague drownings that fill
my lungs daily like slot machines
and find me heavy with coinage
anchored by fortune
during rain against the skylight
or seepage in the crawlspace,
During February, May or days bright
Your fingers swift to the dimmer switch.
Maybe you see me in the grocery line:
drowning in debt or gourmet coffee-beans,
my tears, or the vague drownings that fill
my lungs daily like slot machines
and find me heavy with coinage
anchored by fortune
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Otherwise they Go Unsung
Black Tulip in Love
Sometimes a simile
Finds her vehicle before tenor
(An opera singer in a corvette)
And she’s off and running like
A race horse on amphetamines
Like amphetamines on a race horse
Like this is speed with hooves
And spark, his leaving and her insides
Race around the small plastic track
like a matchbox car with a rocket-engine
like it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
and your ringtone should be emerald-cut.
She is just now inside herself, wondering,
Wandering like a child lost in a mall
Or a grown-she lost in the parking terrace
At the airport, walking level four for miles
Certain, so certain, that was where she left
The car, then recalling no, his favorite number
And the car, parking neatly on three
Waited under her preferred digit.
Because he’s leaving, the city’s gold light
Seems jaundiced, a tarnished star
Where sunlight coated the newly-planted
Tomatoes, the basil and mint arching
Towards his reach. His, a gardner’s patience,
Her’s a love for the gardener and so, for the plants,
She will tend them like preemies,
And today, someone’s birthday shivers
in the parking space of the calenders
everywhere, stretched out on walls,
sprawled on desks, tucked into
cell phones and wallets, the days
splayed out like soft porn.
In the black tulip of her heart,
he reigns and he is wanted,
she cries out and he returns.
They free the small yellow
Airplane from the décor,
Fly it out--straight out
The westerly windows of the airport
And into the sunset of the best
Of their lives. For a water landing
An inflateable slide down into
Clean, folded laundry,
excellent coffee, for drowning
One calls out throw me a lifetime
and the other never fails to comply.
Black Tulip in Love
Sometimes a simile
Finds her vehicle before tenor
(An opera singer in a corvette)
And she’s off and running like
A race horse on amphetamines
Like amphetamines on a race horse
Like this is speed with hooves
And spark, his leaving and her insides
Race around the small plastic track
like a matchbox car with a rocket-engine
like it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
and your ringtone should be emerald-cut.
She is just now inside herself, wondering,
Wandering like a child lost in a mall
Or a grown-she lost in the parking terrace
At the airport, walking level four for miles
Certain, so certain, that was where she left
The car, then recalling no, his favorite number
And the car, parking neatly on three
Waited under her preferred digit.
Because he’s leaving, the city’s gold light
Seems jaundiced, a tarnished star
Where sunlight coated the newly-planted
Tomatoes, the basil and mint arching
Towards his reach. His, a gardner’s patience,
Her’s a love for the gardener and so, for the plants,
She will tend them like preemies,
And today, someone’s birthday shivers
in the parking space of the calenders
everywhere, stretched out on walls,
sprawled on desks, tucked into
cell phones and wallets, the days
splayed out like soft porn.
In the black tulip of her heart,
he reigns and he is wanted,
she cries out and he returns.
They free the small yellow
Airplane from the décor,
Fly it out--straight out
The westerly windows of the airport
And into the sunset of the best
Of their lives. For a water landing
An inflateable slide down into
Clean, folded laundry,
excellent coffee, for drowning
One calls out throw me a lifetime
and the other never fails to comply.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Since True Black Tulips Never Die
& the Sabotage is a Perennial
So we decided today wasn’t my day to find you.
Then we decided to abandon our children,
the ones with abandonment issues, the ones
that felt cocky and overloved, the ones
we never liked too much and the ones
we loved better than our limbs (our each
precious hand held tenderly in each others’
caged fingers) became the bird whose neck
we snapped and left in the alley frequented
by the most stray cats. It follows that
we decided to wear our hearts on our sleeves
then donate all our shirts to charity.
If our methods were suspect, our reasons were sound.
We decided to find in favor of light travel and wanderlust,
against all keeping, against further loss.
& the Sabotage is a Perennial
So we decided today wasn’t my day to find you.
Then we decided to abandon our children,
the ones with abandonment issues, the ones
that felt cocky and overloved, the ones
we never liked too much and the ones
we loved better than our limbs (our each
precious hand held tenderly in each others’
caged fingers) became the bird whose neck
we snapped and left in the alley frequented
by the most stray cats. It follows that
we decided to wear our hearts on our sleeves
then donate all our shirts to charity.
If our methods were suspect, our reasons were sound.
We decided to find in favor of light travel and wanderlust,
against all keeping, against further loss.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
City Like a Sukkoth Empty and Forlorn
but clean, like the words dew and refresh.
Or the cantor's voice this morning, clear
as winter-air, the crispness to twilight
shaken off Miriam's tambourine, a circle-moon
skirted in metallic leaves clang a music--steel,
and that word--steel too, clean, clean,
clean as a wiped-down kitchen.
Like the spaces between us yield
to the black tulip hour when we remember us
pure as the day before we met, unmoved.
Our fingers yet to leave their eternal vortex
of prints swirling off that rock thrown
on the puddle of us that first time we spoke.
Disinfected, we're no longer
a crime scene, dust anything and find
that no skin cell, no hair or spit
contaminates our caesura of no longer here
nor there, so sanitized, antiseptic, it’s nearly disgusting.
But I’m meditating on cleanliness
and we’re in the midst of Passover,
the metaphor inherent too easy,
too done, and there is nothing
more immaculate than the perfect
blonde haystack of coconut macaroons,
the scent of them too, like summer
and beaches. Someone from Israel
sings in a pitch that defines the clean
but nothing so much as a very old man resting
his head against the Torah’s scroll,
eyes closed, looking like a small boy
again fallen asleep during the service,
muffled as the first day of heavy snow,
rests safe against the certain purity of the word.
Dingy as the Black Tulip Hour Dims in
How little we’ve considered
pirates these last few years
until now. Then we radio
them in and they are both
contemporary and the pirates
we imagine, eye-patched, with parrots,
and so on. We’re packing up
around the aquarium, the fish
slide back and forth in the peripheral,
where their small treasure chest
breathes in and out, the plastic gold
of doubloons, spilled strand of pearls,
the tiny skeleton lounging as if bubble-bathing,
his plastic bones cleansed on the rubies, emeralds,
and rhinestones and I consider the pillage
and remember you, Sister, your shampooed hair, unrinsed
and-crackling-dry as we talked and talked ourselves
away from that bad night, each word a brick between us
and the sandpaperdoll we’d ground ourselves against
the bitter truth, against the planetary-grime
shaped like a man (who was no man) and whose dark garden
bloomed cruel blossoms but we picked them, dried
them and from those seeds found that what is buried
breathing dirt, scooting the ground out of the way
in search of a window of sky, and far from subway rats
and city mice, a year of hard-rain grew
this good harvest, this hard-won crop.
for V, again
but clean, like the words dew and refresh.
Or the cantor's voice this morning, clear
as winter-air, the crispness to twilight
shaken off Miriam's tambourine, a circle-moon
skirted in metallic leaves clang a music--steel,
and that word--steel too, clean, clean,
clean as a wiped-down kitchen.
Like the spaces between us yield
to the black tulip hour when we remember us
pure as the day before we met, unmoved.
Our fingers yet to leave their eternal vortex
of prints swirling off that rock thrown
on the puddle of us that first time we spoke.
Disinfected, we're no longer
a crime scene, dust anything and find
that no skin cell, no hair or spit
contaminates our caesura of no longer here
nor there, so sanitized, antiseptic, it’s nearly disgusting.
But I’m meditating on cleanliness
and we’re in the midst of Passover,
the metaphor inherent too easy,
too done, and there is nothing
more immaculate than the perfect
blonde haystack of coconut macaroons,
the scent of them too, like summer
and beaches. Someone from Israel
sings in a pitch that defines the clean
but nothing so much as a very old man resting
his head against the Torah’s scroll,
eyes closed, looking like a small boy
again fallen asleep during the service,
muffled as the first day of heavy snow,
rests safe against the certain purity of the word.
Dingy as the Black Tulip Hour Dims in
How little we’ve considered
pirates these last few years
until now. Then we radio
them in and they are both
contemporary and the pirates
we imagine, eye-patched, with parrots,
and so on. We’re packing up
around the aquarium, the fish
slide back and forth in the peripheral,
where their small treasure chest
breathes in and out, the plastic gold
of doubloons, spilled strand of pearls,
the tiny skeleton lounging as if bubble-bathing,
his plastic bones cleansed on the rubies, emeralds,
and rhinestones and I consider the pillage
and remember you, Sister, your shampooed hair, unrinsed
and-crackling-dry as we talked and talked ourselves
away from that bad night, each word a brick between us
and the sandpaperdoll we’d ground ourselves against
the bitter truth, against the planetary-grime
shaped like a man (who was no man) and whose dark garden
bloomed cruel blossoms but we picked them, dried
them and from those seeds found that what is buried
breathing dirt, scooting the ground out of the way
in search of a window of sky, and far from subway rats
and city mice, a year of hard-rain grew
this good harvest, this hard-won crop.
for V, again
Monday, April 06, 2009
Black Tulips Grown in Missing Gardens
Places lost to us or places we go to do our losing,
mourn our lost. Statues there, and on good days
they’re not us. I say it but I don’t mean it—not today.
I’ve hurt myself at least three different ways
and I’m missing nine-hundred things or more.
I lost my rent check, my willpower, my way.
I’m missing the sycamore, the ill-love
at the root of it, the someone who told
me if you rub the bark, it releases
the scent of vanilla. Then a someone to magicize trees,
to see features: each crease on that old man’s face
risen true from the oak. The someone to see the dice
of expressions on faces framed in windows
from a faraway train. (His voice the only voice
that makes me cry.) I’ve hurt myself three times
today and counting, but nothing like memory:
the bamboo fence, our saint-rabbit’s grave
robbed, the dainty-bones gone and what gave
anyone the right to take them away? The painted stone
we placed there to mark the place--gone
too--and who knew how cruel any one
season might be? I miss it. Most of all on days
like today, where the snow follows sun follows snow
again and I don’t know if what I’m missing
is what I miss or the other way or if I’ve just braced myself
as the tulips have closed their mouths before they can say:
You invited us. Why treat us this way?
Places lost to us or places we go to do our losing,
mourn our lost. Statues there, and on good days
they’re not us. I say it but I don’t mean it—not today.
I’ve hurt myself at least three different ways
and I’m missing nine-hundred things or more.
I lost my rent check, my willpower, my way.
I’m missing the sycamore, the ill-love
at the root of it, the someone who told
me if you rub the bark, it releases
the scent of vanilla. Then a someone to magicize trees,
to see features: each crease on that old man’s face
risen true from the oak. The someone to see the dice
of expressions on faces framed in windows
from a faraway train. (His voice the only voice
that makes me cry.) I’ve hurt myself three times
today and counting, but nothing like memory:
the bamboo fence, our saint-rabbit’s grave
robbed, the dainty-bones gone and what gave
anyone the right to take them away? The painted stone
we placed there to mark the place--gone
too--and who knew how cruel any one
season might be? I miss it. Most of all on days
like today, where the snow follows sun follows snow
again and I don’t know if what I’m missing
is what I miss or the other way or if I’ve just braced myself
as the tulips have closed their mouths before they can say:
You invited us. Why treat us this way?
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Black Tulip Hour at Our Cottage
If a time were a place then this
would be utopia. We might be
married, our cottage with its grass
roof keeps the weathers audible
but in their place. Our place
is daily and each other,
where flowers can be soot-dark
as the throw-pillows of charcoal
briquet on which we Sunday-grill
our garden’s skewered harvest:
the sexy tomatoes in their sheaths
of olive oil, their oregano trinkets,
the cavernous peppers, hollow
and hopeful, and the yellow squash
like suns within suns and blooming.
would be utopia. We might be
married, our cottage with its grass
roof keeps the weathers audible
but in their place. Our place
is daily and each other,
where flowers can be soot-dark
as the throw-pillows of charcoal
briquet on which we Sunday-grill
our garden’s skewered harvest:
the sexy tomatoes in their sheaths
of olive oil, their oregano trinkets,
the cavernous peppers, hollow
and hopeful, and the yellow squash
like suns within suns and blooming.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Kenny the Cat, I Mean,
Explained Over the Cheap
Bottle of Gato Negri
As Poured for Us Repeatedly
At the Black Tulip Hour
He cries like he cried
when I was reading Henry James.
Professional weepers
by now, and the library
fears us like southerners
fear a powder-sugar-French-toast
-dusting-of-snow.
I am not saying the librarians
buy up all the milk and eggs
and leave the grocery
looking robbed. I am saying
that they bring in sand bags
and move the rarest books
to higher ground. That first
edition Dumas signed, for example.
We’re allowed nowhere near that section,
and yet, shouldn’t the entire library
be ashrug with sobs? The tragedy,
the gorgeousness, all gathering in a folding wave
of the unbearable ache of the glorious
uses of language to bring us: flowers, countries, back
to life. A thank you for being
this species to sing this string
of words taught to us so young
we could barely guess what we meant
by promises that contained four witches upright,
or prayers that suggested death before waking
and someone told me just yesterday
that what Sylvia Plath was missing was God
and dear fellow follower of the words
I thought of us: full of Christmas cookies
and writing about a year lousy with meteors.
How we escape however we can in the black tulip
hour, his needles, her pills, our sugar highs and lows,
the dresses we put in our virtual shopping carts
only to have them pillaged in the night.
Cindy, I almost knew your father:
years-gone before I even met you,
and on his birthday, when we dined
at our favorite Chinese cafe in his honor,
I felt he saw you somehow, sees you:
wonder, toy-hearted, a mind sharp
as his warnings about a world
he could barely trust with his girl.
We had helped each other farewell
so much, by then: your father goodbye,
your love goodbye, and me, newly-wrenched
from what I thought was certain love.
The story was the same when we left
for new distant towns months ago, only the lovers
were swapped out for new ones to leave or leave us
and we wrote back and forth, to remind us
how to move, how to do anything
not to hurt him, anything not to hurt.
Incidentally, I don’t know where the rest
of my life went, but this morning,
it’s Sunday, early spring, and outside
my window, I spy a man
teaching his daughter
how to ride a sky-blue bicycle
with a basket, plastic-flowered,
with streamers, and there is only
that first bike, father’s hand: solid-lightly
on the small of the back, believing
us into feeling it there still
when, holding his breath,
and her balance with just
the muscular-wish of his gaze,
a ghost-hand lingers, steadying
and she rides away still with him
with every push on the pedal,
every sparkling-spit of silver
off the spokes, the planet,
the daylight-saved clock
everything that spins,
spin-certain, spin.
for Chicky
Explained Over the Cheap
Bottle of Gato Negri
As Poured for Us Repeatedly
At the Black Tulip Hour
He cries like he cried
when I was reading Henry James.
Professional weepers
by now, and the library
fears us like southerners
fear a powder-sugar-French-toast
-dusting-of-snow.
I am not saying the librarians
buy up all the milk and eggs
and leave the grocery
looking robbed. I am saying
that they bring in sand bags
and move the rarest books
to higher ground. That first
edition Dumas signed, for example.
We’re allowed nowhere near that section,
and yet, shouldn’t the entire library
be ashrug with sobs? The tragedy,
the gorgeousness, all gathering in a folding wave
of the unbearable ache of the glorious
uses of language to bring us: flowers, countries, back
to life. A thank you for being
this species to sing this string
of words taught to us so young
we could barely guess what we meant
by promises that contained four witches upright,
or prayers that suggested death before waking
and someone told me just yesterday
that what Sylvia Plath was missing was God
and dear fellow follower of the words
I thought of us: full of Christmas cookies
and writing about a year lousy with meteors.
How we escape however we can in the black tulip
hour, his needles, her pills, our sugar highs and lows,
the dresses we put in our virtual shopping carts
only to have them pillaged in the night.
Cindy, I almost knew your father:
years-gone before I even met you,
and on his birthday, when we dined
at our favorite Chinese cafe in his honor,
I felt he saw you somehow, sees you:
wonder, toy-hearted, a mind sharp
as his warnings about a world
he could barely trust with his girl.
We had helped each other farewell
so much, by then: your father goodbye,
your love goodbye, and me, newly-wrenched
from what I thought was certain love.
The story was the same when we left
for new distant towns months ago, only the lovers
were swapped out for new ones to leave or leave us
and we wrote back and forth, to remind us
how to move, how to do anything
not to hurt him, anything not to hurt.
Incidentally, I don’t know where the rest
of my life went, but this morning,
it’s Sunday, early spring, and outside
my window, I spy a man
teaching his daughter
how to ride a sky-blue bicycle
with a basket, plastic-flowered,
with streamers, and there is only
that first bike, father’s hand: solid-lightly
on the small of the back, believing
us into feeling it there still
when, holding his breath,
and her balance with just
the muscular-wish of his gaze,
a ghost-hand lingers, steadying
and she rides away still with him
with every push on the pedal,
every sparkling-spit of silver
off the spokes, the planet,
the daylight-saved clock
everything that spins,
spin-certain, spin.
for Chicky
Friday, April 03, 2009
Happy Hour at The Black Tulip
The problem with drinking
revolves around honesty.
Around a devoted lush
we hear our faults itemized
later, incanted, the repetition
pared-down to a word
(usually compound) forehead,
bad-kiss, monobrow, mushmouth,
disbeliever, deadboylover, pigeon
but not always. But then
the booze/truth runs out
and there’s no way of knowing
what’s wrong with us.
The liquor inside us lies
Tells us we’re profound
When really we’re just drunk,
Not deep, but deepening
To the shade of dark
Indecisive as that flower.
At the black tulip hour
the minds dribbles the ball
Up and down the court
of possibility and there’s
no fairer place to play
save for yesterday
which is an etch-a-sketch
we shake out at whim
and re-begin. The clouds
not portabella, not straw,
not wood, nor shitake,
not wild. Just clouds
stuck bulbous against
a one-dimensional sky.
At the black tulip hour
We’ve said enough
about the sky. The problem
with dreamers is evident.
revolves around honesty.
Around a devoted lush
we hear our faults itemized
later, incanted, the repetition
pared-down to a word
(usually compound) forehead,
bad-kiss, monobrow, mushmouth,
disbeliever, deadboylover, pigeon
but not always. But then
the booze/truth runs out
and there’s no way of knowing
what’s wrong with us.
The liquor inside us lies
Tells us we’re profound
When really we’re just drunk,
Not deep, but deepening
To the shade of dark
Indecisive as that flower.
At the black tulip hour
the minds dribbles the ball
Up and down the court
of possibility and there’s
no fairer place to play
save for yesterday
which is an etch-a-sketch
we shake out at whim
and re-begin. The clouds
not portabella, not straw,
not wood, nor shitake,
not wild. Just clouds
stuck bulbous against
a one-dimensional sky.
At the black tulip hour
We’ve said enough
about the sky. The problem
with dreamers is evident.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Outside The Black Tulip
Three a.m. and you’re smoking, Dear,
(and so am I). One shared-cigar
and music--something extravagant
romantic, pours from a bag lady's
mouth as her handcart jumps fish-silver
at the sidewalk's buckled vertebrae
where the Chinese New Year tunneling
underground marches the dragon's collaborative
concrete spine to the end of the block.
Outside The Black Tulip we collect
our affections like rainwater
and then hold the canteen
of each other for the certain thirst.
We treat our love like our houseplants,
making them wait so long,
they slouch toward the sink
before we finally give in
and hand them a drink.
Inside the black tulip:
night-lit, visceral, every color of hurt,
of scabs, the dried injury’s memory
of what it meant to tear open,
a space like that within praying hands.
Inside the black tulip, a small room
where a tiny family might gather
around the dollhouse television
as if it were a fire. The president
might present the queen with an i-pod
and we’d think it surreal only here,
where the black tulip chimes
the hour of Plato’s worst fears,
to name a thing is to make it possible,
to make it possible invites the lie.
Outside The Black Tulip, our breath
braids tequila and rum, and someone
tells someone of how today the queen
was given an i-pod by the president
and for a minute, in another realm, Plato
and Einstein raise their glass across
the mushroom clouds of paradise
as an imaginary family inside an imaginary
flower, grown in an imaginary (impossible)
shade of night, points their imaginary
remote control at their tiny screen
and shuts our whole world down.
(and so am I). One shared-cigar
and music--something extravagant
romantic, pours from a bag lady's
mouth as her handcart jumps fish-silver
at the sidewalk's buckled vertebrae
where the Chinese New Year tunneling
underground marches the dragon's collaborative
concrete spine to the end of the block.
Outside The Black Tulip we collect
our affections like rainwater
and then hold the canteen
of each other for the certain thirst.
We treat our love like our houseplants,
making them wait so long,
they slouch toward the sink
before we finally give in
and hand them a drink.
Inside the black tulip:
night-lit, visceral, every color of hurt,
of scabs, the dried injury’s memory
of what it meant to tear open,
a space like that within praying hands.
Inside the black tulip, a small room
where a tiny family might gather
around the dollhouse television
as if it were a fire. The president
might present the queen with an i-pod
and we’d think it surreal only here,
where the black tulip chimes
the hour of Plato’s worst fears,
to name a thing is to make it possible,
to make it possible invites the lie.
Outside The Black Tulip, our breath
braids tequila and rum, and someone
tells someone of how today the queen
was given an i-pod by the president
and for a minute, in another realm, Plato
and Einstein raise their glass across
the mushroom clouds of paradise
as an imaginary family inside an imaginary
flower, grown in an imaginary (impossible)
shade of night, points their imaginary
remote control at their tiny screen
and shuts our whole world down.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Black Tulip Hour
When time and thyme--equally concrete
or abstract might flavor or exact
the same rhyme from life to recipe
The nun’s warning :the sin thought
the deed wrought and you,
you were such a beautiful poem
before I wrote you,such a gorgeous dress
hanging in the closet where some nights
I dream fantastic fabric, bicycling birds,
seahorse florals even that tulip: midnight
satin, not the maroon lanterning
off the queen of the night varietal
but Dumas-dark and holding
or abstract might flavor or exact
the same rhyme from life to recipe
The nun’s warning :the sin thought
the deed wrought and you,
you were such a beautiful poem
before I wrote you,such a gorgeous dress
hanging in the closet where some nights
I dream fantastic fabric, bicycling birds,
seahorse florals even that tulip: midnight
satin, not the maroon lanterning
off the queen of the night varietal
but Dumas-dark and holding
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Tomorrow Marks the First Day of National Poetry Month
And L-Bo and I are writing a poem a day, in honor. No matter how failed, how broken, how stinky, how sad, I will post here. I warn you now so that you can look away, look away or like miner's canaries fly through and see how toxic the fumes get. On the best days, we might all emerge singing. Or, you'll get good-jealous and join us?
To yellow feathers and flights of verse.
To yellow feathers and flights of verse.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Dance Me to the End of Love, MD
Slow Dance
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained
Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like
children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.
Matthew Dickman (From All American Poem)
I was in tears after reading it. Thank you Lovely Beary-Boy for drawing my attention to it.
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained
Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like
children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.
Matthew Dickman (From All American Poem)
I was in tears after reading it. Thank you Lovely Beary-Boy for drawing my attention to it.
Friday, March 27, 2009
The Girl from Ipanema
's got nothing on the boy from Medina. (on "favoriting" onehundredtwentynine days ago and being unable to find the unfavorite button)
Standing on the corner of Sixth & How to Forget
Italy, October
To be here is to be where fruit you have never seen before grows on equally strange trees. The fruit is not, as you first thought, oranges, though it is orange in color. Nor is it a tangerine or some strangely colored apple. Then you see it in the market, each soft fruit cradled in its own nest of woven plastic. Cachi, the sign reads, 200 lire. You hold out a palm of silver, and let the cashier pick warm coins from your waiting hand. Then she wraps your cachi in white paper like a present, which you carry to your hotel, hoping cachi can be safely eaten raw.
In your room, you slice it open, lift the cachi to your lips and find it sweeter than any fruit you've ever tasted, half watermelon, half pressed roses. Only when you've finished, do you think to look up cachi in your pocket Italian dictionary which says it means persimmon. And you remember as a child picking a persimmon at a friend's house, then leaving it all afternoon in your mother's stand-up freezer. Still, when you bit the unripe fruit, your mouth drew up in a pucker from which you—silent person that you are—never did recover. Until today in Sacile when you took a bite of strange fruit.
Now, who knows? You may speak in tongues.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Standing on the corner of Sixth & How to Forget
Italy, October
To be here is to be where fruit you have never seen before grows on equally strange trees. The fruit is not, as you first thought, oranges, though it is orange in color. Nor is it a tangerine or some strangely colored apple. Then you see it in the market, each soft fruit cradled in its own nest of woven plastic. Cachi, the sign reads, 200 lire. You hold out a palm of silver, and let the cashier pick warm coins from your waiting hand. Then she wraps your cachi in white paper like a present, which you carry to your hotel, hoping cachi can be safely eaten raw.
In your room, you slice it open, lift the cachi to your lips and find it sweeter than any fruit you've ever tasted, half watermelon, half pressed roses. Only when you've finished, do you think to look up cachi in your pocket Italian dictionary which says it means persimmon. And you remember as a child picking a persimmon at a friend's house, then leaving it all afternoon in your mother's stand-up freezer. Still, when you bit the unripe fruit, your mouth drew up in a pucker from which you—silent person that you are—never did recover. Until today in Sacile when you took a bite of strange fruit.
Now, who knows? You may speak in tongues.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Depleted Evening
I am almost counting hours until morning and until I can make something of Saturday since Friday I have so-failed. I tried. I did. I went through some clothes. I went thrifting--not great finds save for one fabulous bathrobe from China--that red (L-Bo!) and embroidered on the back. A phonecall that sort of saddened me and then a coffee meeting where I didn't even try to make it fun. I had won tickets to a concert in Nelsonville and should have gone. But I had plans and didn't want to go solo (though I really like that most of the time) but for some reason today, didn't. And this Ashleigh Flynn sounded so great on the radio. And I was Caller Number Four.
Someone posted something about vicissitudes and I thought of them in Annie-light. Every month taking in the scenery and spinning it like the wheel in the middle of the boardgame. What comes up is vicissitude month after month and how many vicissitudes do you count away, before like the twelve beastly increments of the zodiac, you're back at Pisces with its fish swimming both towards and away from themselves, one another, their bodies the hissing s of snakes, their destination always you, always me, always the same, never arriving. Therein lies the difficulty in perpetual vicissituding: how to measure, where you've come from, where you've been and degrees of change in Bettermentberg. I could go for a butter mint, just know. A belief system both creamy-rich and fresh on the tongue. A love affair thrown just in time and landing in sea of ruffles and petticoat-excess. A pinafore of old-time valentines. I'm not even sure what I'm asking for.
Someone posted something about vicissitudes and I thought of them in Annie-light. Every month taking in the scenery and spinning it like the wheel in the middle of the boardgame. What comes up is vicissitude month after month and how many vicissitudes do you count away, before like the twelve beastly increments of the zodiac, you're back at Pisces with its fish swimming both towards and away from themselves, one another, their bodies the hissing s of snakes, their destination always you, always me, always the same, never arriving. Therein lies the difficulty in perpetual vicissituding: how to measure, where you've come from, where you've been and degrees of change in Bettermentberg. I could go for a butter mint, just know. A belief system both creamy-rich and fresh on the tongue. A love affair thrown just in time and landing in sea of ruffles and petticoat-excess. A pinafore of old-time valentines. I'm not even sure what I'm asking for.
Monday, March 23, 2009
:-(
Found this out first thing this morning while researching Sylvia for a poem.
And then there was one. Saddest news for Frieda. It must feel as if it never stops happening somehow.
I am going out into the cold sunshine and bringing back a sweet coffee for my spring cleaning extravaganza. Today's basil to be planted in Nicholas' honor.
And then there was one. Saddest news for Frieda. It must feel as if it never stops happening somehow.
I am going out into the cold sunshine and bringing back a sweet coffee for my spring cleaning extravaganza. Today's basil to be planted in Nicholas' honor.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The Beauty in Walking Away
Thursday night, L-Bo, Filo and I went to see our beloved Koogle perform some of his own songs. It was a lovely night and the strange reverberations of seeing someone you once kind of really, really like-liked do something that makes you feel so proud of him and also so protective when now you are a standard audience member with no rights to invest was kind of sad for a minute but then kind of cool. My good fortune at finding the most wonderful, special, rare and talented people always amazes me. I was just telling my favorite bear that today--regarding Veace and her way with words. L-Bo, Filo, Locksmith: all wonders to me and such friends. And my good, pretty, kind bird, I couldn't hope that a big brother would be better to me.
So Koogle hurts a little to see, and sends the air to electric-storm-settings and disturbs, disrupts, (bewitches, bothers, bewilders) but too, through battle after battle and much awkwardness, I can call him friend and he wrote those bright, beautiful songs and he was so all-grown-up up there and it was pretty great and makes me pretty proud of him, of me.
So Koogle hurts a little to see, and sends the air to electric-storm-settings and disturbs, disrupts, (bewitches, bothers, bewilders) but too, through battle after battle and much awkwardness, I can call him friend and he wrote those bright, beautiful songs and he was so all-grown-up up there and it was pretty great and makes me pretty proud of him, of me.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
My Sweet Old ee.c
Looking through all my exams notes and the little notebook of quotes I kept just for me and came across all of these. So much of that time was hard to digest, a million books to read, my memory a selective, random, associative thing. Exams, (as dear Abraham once described certain aesthetics)require coming at the wind with hammer and nails. Still, finding this quartered bit of paper and the quotes reminded me how much I still love these words I've married.
why-colored worlds of because
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you.
tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us
(if they do, we'll move
away still further: into now)
you shall above all things
be glad and young
for if you're young whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become
how much more than enough for both of us
darling, and if I sing you are my voice
beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss
or sold the reason, they undream a dream)
(formybff) I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
then teach 10,000 stars how not to dance
nobody, not even the rain,
has such small hands
why-colored worlds of because
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you.
tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us
(if they do, we'll move
away still further: into now)
you shall above all things
be glad and young
for if you're young whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become
how much more than enough for both of us
darling, and if I sing you are my voice
beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss
or sold the reason, they undream a dream)
(formybff) I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
then teach 10,000 stars how not to dance
nobody, not even the rain,
has such small hands
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Today's Creed
I spend my time and try not to just kill minutes off with a big rock and the dead-eyed, broth-eating, "beige hallways," if I can help it.
They find their way in and they, (for no other life-force to them, and flimsy-souled as they otherwise are) can be persistant and tenacious when they want to apprehend the crayon-box toting, world-reading, soulful souls who are just trying to make a day of each day. We must be as vigilant as we are vibrant. They outnumber us by millions.
For this reason I have twice-Coralined. For this reason, I am going to Jacksonville to run near the water, to the Great Gatsby ballet, to Ireland, to Florida to see that first photo of a little someone for whom I must post the following advice: Eye your time, measure it out in coffee spoons but brew it strong and hearty and serve it to the few-few who deserve it. Make it hot, fair-trade and from good beans, the finest roast. Spend here if you must, they're your days, after all, Little Daisy. And most of all, be vigilant as you are vibrant.
They find their way in and they, (for no other life-force to them, and flimsy-souled as they otherwise are) can be persistant and tenacious when they want to apprehend the crayon-box toting, world-reading, soulful souls who are just trying to make a day of each day. We must be as vigilant as we are vibrant. They outnumber us by millions.
For this reason I have twice-Coralined. For this reason, I am going to Jacksonville to run near the water, to the Great Gatsby ballet, to Ireland, to Florida to see that first photo of a little someone for whom I must post the following advice: Eye your time, measure it out in coffee spoons but brew it strong and hearty and serve it to the few-few who deserve it. Make it hot, fair-trade and from good beans, the finest roast. Spend here if you must, they're your days, after all, Little Daisy. And most of all, be vigilant as you are vibrant.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
“The female seer will burn upon this pyre”
Sylvia Plath is setting my hair
on rollers made from orange-juice cans.
The hairdo is shaped like a pyre.
My locks are improbably long.
A pyramid of lemons somehow
balances on the rickety table
where we sit, in the rented kitchen
which smells of singed naps and bergamot.
Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept
at rolling my unruly hair.
She knows to pull it tight.Few words.
Her flat, American belly,
her breasts in a twin sweater set,
stack of typed poems on her desk,
envelopes stamped to go by the door,
a freshly baked poppyseed cake,
kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans
in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word,
“immolate,” then a single sentence
of prophecy. The hairdo done,
the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean
of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.
“The female seer will burn upon this pyre” Copyright �© 2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted from Antebellum Dream Book, with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
I have forgiven Ms. Alexander for the inauguration. It isn't her fault that my Barack likes her best. Besides, after E. Arnold's the poem on Poetry and all the Elizabeth-poetry-chicks' general sensibilities, I feel like my admiration must outweigh my envy. It wouldn't be the first time that my digressive, associative way of connecting disparate entities damned or absolved the whole lot.
Sylvia Plath is setting my hair
on rollers made from orange-juice cans.
The hairdo is shaped like a pyre.
My locks are improbably long.
A pyramid of lemons somehow
balances on the rickety table
where we sit, in the rented kitchen
which smells of singed naps and bergamot.
Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept
at rolling my unruly hair.
She knows to pull it tight.Few words.
Her flat, American belly,
her breasts in a twin sweater set,
stack of typed poems on her desk,
envelopes stamped to go by the door,
a freshly baked poppyseed cake,
kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans
in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word,
“immolate,” then a single sentence
of prophecy. The hairdo done,
the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean
of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.
“The female seer will burn upon this pyre” Copyright �© 2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted from Antebellum Dream Book, with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
I have forgiven Ms. Alexander for the inauguration. It isn't her fault that my Barack likes her best. Besides, after E. Arnold's the poem on Poetry and all the Elizabeth-poetry-chicks' general sensibilities, I feel like my admiration must outweigh my envy. It wouldn't be the first time that my digressive, associative way of connecting disparate entities damned or absolved the whole lot.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
All the streetlights in the city of Me
This morning your mother told me a secret over decaf and too many miles. From 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning, Eastern time, you are conceived anew--like a character in a long, long novel--in my story. There is word of you, Little One, all over the country.
I told her how I tried giving up caffeine for few weeks and then I returned and all of the lamps on the avenue of Me re-lit and the little citizens: fedoraed, sundressed, strolling by with stylish dogs and carriages began to move again.
--from Season of White Flies & Diary of a New Sparkle in the Night Sky of Us
The streets were so bodied last night. So sculpted and dense. The very air was shaking with hormones and be in the first weekend of something like spring, the heat of the muscular flesh moving with an awareness of the body, the human form as art and appetite, it's hard to say, but the streets were fairly shivering with desire. It was yummy. The lines to Jeni's out to the street and wrapping the sidewalk as the tongue imagined the strange songs of cherry lambic or olive oil sea salt pepita ice cream rolling tart, bitter, salty meeting sweet and finally butterfat creamy against it.
I told her how I tried giving up caffeine for few weeks and then I returned and all of the lamps on the avenue of Me re-lit and the little citizens: fedoraed, sundressed, strolling by with stylish dogs and carriages began to move again.
--from Season of White Flies & Diary of a New Sparkle in the Night Sky of Us
The streets were so bodied last night. So sculpted and dense. The very air was shaking with hormones and be in the first weekend of something like spring, the heat of the muscular flesh moving with an awareness of the body, the human form as art and appetite, it's hard to say, but the streets were fairly shivering with desire. It was yummy. The lines to Jeni's out to the street and wrapping the sidewalk as the tongue imagined the strange songs of cherry lambic or olive oil sea salt pepita ice cream rolling tart, bitter, salty meeting sweet and finally butterfat creamy against it.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Loss Dog
My favorite typo of the week and already part of a story where such a hound was needed to wander the streets of sorrow, the aging neighborhoods where the pies baked are the pies of nostalgia and the berries are never the right vintage, too modern in their flavor, geometric on the tongue with the hum and buzz of excess where should be the sound of the screen door, the dazed days of boys on bicycles and the warm palms of his mother falling paradoxically cool on his febrile brow.
Such a neighborhood needs the loss dogs wandering its evening sidewalk, while the boys that ran with them, call for them at dusk and one night, they'll return to them, tags ringing on their collars and the thunk of their tails against the night air clearing a space for summer.
Or this student explaining her missed alarm clock and how the sound finds its way into the dream
I dream about a boat and the alarm is the bell.
I am really, strangely tired today but happy. A good phonecall as I was about to walk out the door to tell me "open the door, have you been out in it yet? it's amazing!" And it is and tonight I will not be able to get that pop song line out of my head with the warm wind blowing the stars around and I do, I really do, want to see you tonight.
Such a neighborhood needs the loss dogs wandering its evening sidewalk, while the boys that ran with them, call for them at dusk and one night, they'll return to them, tags ringing on their collars and the thunk of their tails against the night air clearing a space for summer.
Or this student explaining her missed alarm clock and how the sound finds its way into the dream
I dream about a boat and the alarm is the bell.
I am really, strangely tired today but happy. A good phonecall as I was about to walk out the door to tell me "open the door, have you been out in it yet? it's amazing!" And it is and tonight I will not be able to get that pop song line out of my head with the warm wind blowing the stars around and I do, I really do, want to see you tonight.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Lest I Forget
Here is just the kind of poem I'd share with you were you here.
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
by Kevin C. Powers
I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.
I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.
I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.
---
Game Night
by Conor O'Callaghan
Love not
being in the loop.
Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.
Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.
And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?
---
I began two new of my own. One for Audrey, maybe Cynthia. One for a girl named Emily. And soon, the one about Song of the Lark. With a face of rapt listening...
I am fighting the wooly-horribles today. Sleep. More motion. More poetry, Poetry, prose.
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
by Kevin C. Powers
I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.
I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.
I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.
---
Game Night
by Conor O'Callaghan
Love not
being in the loop.
Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.
Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.
And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?
---
I began two new of my own. One for Audrey, maybe Cynthia. One for a girl named Emily. And soon, the one about Song of the Lark. With a face of rapt listening...
I am fighting the wooly-horribles today. Sleep. More motion. More poetry, Poetry, prose.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Let the moment be where Annie finds herself, not because she's lost but because she's been looking and when Aram calls because she was meeting with her boss and he remembers not one but both meetings and worries that she's weary and she is, Annie tells herself that it isn't only love that looks like this but some days when there's not a cupcake on the horizon, no good song, no time to read the body of books that she sleeps beside each night, she thinks it really is. Let the moment be Liza on the line talking about lost boys as dead horses, the kind heavy when they live, heavier when they die, their bodies the stuff of breaking the barn down around them, just to hire the back-hoe and dig a grave, larger than most of the places where she has lived. There is no quiet way for a lost boy to leave you, Liza says as she laments her own, the one who forgets to brush his teeth and won't floss for anything, the one who drinks himself to sleep most nights and dreams through the alarm because he didn't protect his ears against the years of truck-tinkerings so loud they blew out whole octaves and now it's hard to call him indoors when night is falling and dinner is still warm. They are tired, Liza and Anastasia, though Liza has made a home with her man and Annie some nights feels like a single dandelion seed pirouetting ever-away from the pod, and so portable it's as if the flight was what she was made for.
Advance Requiem for a Lovely Couple
So Beauty's gone under the knife again,
For a chin lift and an alabaster brow;
And Truth, who can't stop confessing
Everything to everyone, has taken another
Name in the witness protection program.
Who would recognize them now, Anonymous
And his soulmate? Maybe, with her new look,
She'd like a new name, too, something tan enough
For a swimsuit, like Melanie, or as pale as
Blanche, all parasols and moonlit lace.
Cramped in their dim suburban home, afraid
To stroll around the neighborhood, Alias goes only
Deeper into himself, where his thoughts line up
Like retired folk at a buffet diner, as if it's
All You Need to Know Night in the brain.
It's a cold and lonely life, quiet to the end,
When the organ pipes will play low hymns
No one but churchmice and poets can hear,
As soft as two palmfuls of ash poured inside
A small urn, old and Greek and overwrought.
Elton Glaser
So Beauty's gone under the knife again,
For a chin lift and an alabaster brow;
And Truth, who can't stop confessing
Everything to everyone, has taken another
Name in the witness protection program.
Who would recognize them now, Anonymous
And his soulmate? Maybe, with her new look,
She'd like a new name, too, something tan enough
For a swimsuit, like Melanie, or as pale as
Blanche, all parasols and moonlit lace.
Cramped in their dim suburban home, afraid
To stroll around the neighborhood, Alias goes only
Deeper into himself, where his thoughts line up
Like retired folk at a buffet diner, as if it's
All You Need to Know Night in the brain.
It's a cold and lonely life, quiet to the end,
When the organ pipes will play low hymns
No one but churchmice and poets can hear,
As soft as two palmfuls of ash poured inside
A small urn, old and Greek and overwrought.
Elton Glaser
May the Moment Be
better than the memory" my wise new friend tells me. I like it and like that I am just now, precisely where I need to be.
The new schedule of less phone time more discipline is working well so far. Today is a lovely color and I'm about to dive into it. More soon
The new schedule of less phone time more discipline is working well so far. Today is a lovely color and I'm about to dive into it. More soon
Saturday, February 21, 2009
BRAT
I am all about heavenly cavorting
Here on silly earth.
And I misbehave around death.
And I tug on trouble's braids.
But tonight I am going to pretend
I know the people who love me.
Jeni Olen
Tonight I am going to pretend to know that the new love is respect and that what isn't mine won't be and that there is a bunch of gift wrap around things like that.
I had good Vietnamese food tonight. I walked on old streets in the new cold which is less-so than the old. I went for a drive last night and someone's presence was so present in the car with me I thought he must be thinking me too. But I'm rarely right about who pines and how much and I am again, okay with that.
A friend said yesterday that I was without strategy and that made me glad. I have made a list of goals that have little to do with anyone but me. They are good things and I need more energy. There have been many funerals in the lives of people I love lately and what they all seem to spit back from their bed-shaped holes in the dirt is something about knowing what matters, random beauty and the open eyes to get it, the infinite, unrepeating sky, spices, black cats, good music and the kind of hands that hold on and well.
I am all about heavenly cavorting
Here on silly earth.
And I misbehave around death.
And I tug on trouble's braids.
But tonight I am going to pretend
I know the people who love me.
Jeni Olen
Tonight I am going to pretend to know that the new love is respect and that what isn't mine won't be and that there is a bunch of gift wrap around things like that.
I had good Vietnamese food tonight. I walked on old streets in the new cold which is less-so than the old. I went for a drive last night and someone's presence was so present in the car with me I thought he must be thinking me too. But I'm rarely right about who pines and how much and I am again, okay with that.
A friend said yesterday that I was without strategy and that made me glad. I have made a list of goals that have little to do with anyone but me. They are good things and I need more energy. There have been many funerals in the lives of people I love lately and what they all seem to spit back from their bed-shaped holes in the dirt is something about knowing what matters, random beauty and the open eyes to get it, the infinite, unrepeating sky, spices, black cats, good music and the kind of hands that hold on and well.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Starry Starry Night
Tonight we study more Van Gogh letters and the work that he inspires. I recall seeing his paintings live and being unable to believe that they were what they were ie: real Van Goghs and not dorm posters or boxer shorts of starry night.
His colors, the shagginess of the paint, sigh... I am so tired still. I can't wait to go home and make some great veggies, eat spring mix salad and sleep. I am reading a borrowed book and oddly-distracted by far-away persons and the way they cast long shadows that are not unwelcome, unrefreshing.
Today's offering is from my new find:
Patrick Lawler
Freud with a Picture of Teiresias Finds Dora with a Picture of Cassandra
When I wake, glass is all around me.
Millefiori glass. Venetian glass. Glass
with thin vein-like cracks. Glass like
the breath of an anorexic.
Glass like the brains
of deep-sea fish. Glass like language.
Glass like belief. Glass filling the room.
Glass like echoes. Glass like the language
of aboriginal people. Glass from the mothering
caves of memory. Glass like swollen objects
that have been misplaced in dreams:
Birthmarks and terrariums.
Glass like the uterus of a saint. Glass
like the sewn language of memory. Glass ready
to break into a mosaic. Glass like a body of someone
touched. Glass like an indelible language.
Glass like the memory the body has
of places that have been touched.
Glass filled with twisted light. Glass so fragile
it breaks when I think. Glass that cuts into flesh.
Glass that grows more dangerous
with every step. Glass that sees everything
with its shattered eyes. Glass like a fantastic
plant with fruit that will make us transparent.
His colors, the shagginess of the paint, sigh... I am so tired still. I can't wait to go home and make some great veggies, eat spring mix salad and sleep. I am reading a borrowed book and oddly-distracted by far-away persons and the way they cast long shadows that are not unwelcome, unrefreshing.
Today's offering is from my new find:
Patrick Lawler
Freud with a Picture of Teiresias Finds Dora with a Picture of Cassandra
When I wake, glass is all around me.
Millefiori glass. Venetian glass. Glass
with thin vein-like cracks. Glass like
the breath of an anorexic.
Glass like the brains
of deep-sea fish. Glass like language.
Glass like belief. Glass filling the room.
Glass like echoes. Glass like the language
of aboriginal people. Glass from the mothering
caves of memory. Glass like swollen objects
that have been misplaced in dreams:
Birthmarks and terrariums.
Glass like the uterus of a saint. Glass
like the sewn language of memory. Glass ready
to break into a mosaic. Glass like a body of someone
touched. Glass like an indelible language.
Glass like the memory the body has
of places that have been touched.
Glass filled with twisted light. Glass so fragile
it breaks when I think. Glass that cuts into flesh.
Glass that grows more dangerous
with every step. Glass that sees everything
with its shattered eyes. Glass like a fantastic
plant with fruit that will make us transparent.
Monday, February 02, 2009
I was always one of those women that hung out too long at the counter with the other women in vintage clothing shops like the one in Baltimore where we gathered around Lucinda Williams as if she were a patron saint. And then Sam happened. Sam, who fit into that world and made larger it and brought his own globe over and we made a life of it all. A messy, tangle of life with plastic beads in his thirties, my late-fifties greens. His restrained deco decor and silk ties in colors that claimed the spice rack. Everything richer after Sam and that sense, that Peter Pan girl-feeling I had of being ever-single and moving in some circle of people that were, too, it evaporated so organically, so gently with Sam that I find myself stunned that there was a time I lived with...cufflinks and his big floppy clown-foot gym shoes and that there was a time after that, when I boxed his things reverently, breathed in his scent as if my lungs could keep him that way, and put our life away in storage. I didn't explicitly tell myself that he would be back and we would go to the desolate always-same rows of storage units and we would turn the key and our objects and his things wedded together behind some door with numbers on it would be waiting and we might then, right here, pull up a chair and resume. But I didn't and I know this, really tell myself that it would be impossible to store him and therefore us, for a better, later time. I lived with cufflinks, I thought, the way someone else might mutter the winning numbers of the lottery ticket that took them from destitute to beachfront property. Once upon a time, there were cufflinks on my dressing table.
Periwinkle Blue & Silver Shoes
A clean bedroom with my beautiful comforter (thank you, The Good Bird,) and my lovely duvet. A bit of blue sky and Florida up ahead, beyond that, Chicago and a big dose of people that I love. I have this real hold on things right now and I am loving that feeling.
I read a poem today that reminded me what it is about marriage that I will someday want in my life again.
Cleaning Out Zaide's Apartment
by Yehoshua November
— for my grandparents
His scent still lingered in the black heat
of his darkroom, where he spent decades
developing his meticulous world
of insects and flowers.
Boxes of slides
lay piled on top of one another.
Holding one to the lamplight,
I entered a different universe,
where moths silently cling to the stems
of roses.
In the bedroom
we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes
and then the slender, fragile model planes
he had built from scratch and hand-painted
bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings.
And in every drawer,
countless notes she had written to him.
He must have saved them all,
each one wedding the mundane to a private world
only the lovers themselves could know:
Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.
I read a poem today that reminded me what it is about marriage that I will someday want in my life again.
Cleaning Out Zaide's Apartment
by Yehoshua November
— for my grandparents
His scent still lingered in the black heat
of his darkroom, where he spent decades
developing his meticulous world
of insects and flowers.
Boxes of slides
lay piled on top of one another.
Holding one to the lamplight,
I entered a different universe,
where moths silently cling to the stems
of roses.
In the bedroom
we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes
and then the slender, fragile model planes
he had built from scratch and hand-painted
bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings.
And in every drawer,
countless notes she had written to him.
He must have saved them all,
each one wedding the mundane to a private world
only the lovers themselves could know:
Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.
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