Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Before and after all of this, remember that first fall, fat with colors and the swerves in canyon road that your body took for the car, and unafraid as if your mountain-birth meant mountain rights and your body recalled each jig and jag, each rick-rack heartlining the slope with what could only be a steady pulse. Before and after it all, there is just what you lean into or slow down from fear. I could never ski for this reason: body trust and terror, the certainty that speed craved more of itself and the body accelerated is a brittle, blown-glass thing. I did my extreme sports with my soul, catapulting it here, vaulting it there, the long stretches on French heights, the soul pedalling hard and finishing barely and far behind.
When You Return
Ellen Bass
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass
The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.
The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.
When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.
This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.
Ellen Bass
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass
The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.
The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.
When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.
This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.
Wild Strawberries
Relax
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
Ellen Bass
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
Ellen Bass
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Days on Water, Babyskin, Grilled Lobster, Mirth Kitchen
Days on water, on air and two if by landed, at last, albeit gently but arrived. Some holidays remind you why you live. Three sisters dancing with one baby boy in a kitchen full of so much warmth and not because the days touched the near hundred mark or the cooking. This what being alive was meant to be I felt as that little babyboy dancing with us and laughed and each of us, for once, had all this plus good love in our lives. It felt like the pay-off for years of work. Three sisters so happy and the husband/brother-in-law all we could wish for in chosen family and my boy: a perfect, beautiful fit and hit with everyone.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.
Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.
Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.
My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.
Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.
Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.
My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.
Monday, July 12, 2010
What Two Oh Seven A. M. is For
If not looking into the darkness and finding it line-broken, the caesuras and commas most of what life is: waiting rooms. The waiting takes more as the days get shorter and after reading Jackie Osherow's God's Acrostic again, and after considering all she says about how maybe God has hidden things in plain sight, down the vertical margins of our seasons and science and our eyes, dutiful drones, glide left to right while we lose the most pressing part of the message.
It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.
The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.
In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.
For now, sleep.
Demimonde
She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost
in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon
flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward
escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity
of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,
puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope
that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.
He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink
on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.
Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press
It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.
The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.
In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.
For now, sleep.
Demimonde
She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost
in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon
flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward
escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity
of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,
puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope
that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.
He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink
on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.
Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press
Thursday, July 08, 2010
How Swiftly Fly the Days These Days
Teaching all summer and gratefully-so but the days are gone before I know it and the things I meant to do gone with them. A special stolen afternoon with dear Les and the laughter from that and her good brain and heart and the wonderful "buddha bowl" of my old north star made an unexpected treat of the afternoon. Sad began it, her worries and devotion over her dearest friend, but the time itself was good I think, and I was grateful for it. Tomorrow I meant to Yellow Springs, to watch a movie in the art theater there but I may just meander here, make some time for the pool, pack some boxes, get my life into a portable mode.
Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."
I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.
Echoing Canto of Fixedness
The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point
looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising
from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,
aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks
of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,
intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.
Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved
Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."
I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.
Echoing Canto of Fixedness
The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point
looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising
from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,
aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks
of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,
intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.
Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Time to Make the Doughnuts
It's 3:00 a.m. and I am awake only because there was iced coffee today and as much of it as I could down despite knowing tonight would read something like this.
Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.
Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.
Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.
Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Mostly Southern Appendages
Today I was offered a list of payphrases, which I declined, but not before looking them all over. I love language.
Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.
But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.
More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.
Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.
But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.
More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
A zillion poems behind
blame it on Denver, the catch-up of returning, the emotional exhaustion (for life-revolutions don't come cheap) the so-much to do and so-much that matters.
Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.
I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.
For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.
Facebook
He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.
Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.
I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.
For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.
He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
April Prose Posies Days Three and Four
3
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.
I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.
I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)
3
Partly Due
to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life
to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.
yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;
partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.
Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die
you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war
that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human
one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.
partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same
partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl
whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.
to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life
to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.
yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;
partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.
Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die
you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war
that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human
one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.
partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same
partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl
whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Day Two April Poem by Guest Poet G.M. Lear
You're supposed to every day drink a lot of water
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.
Friday, April 02, 2010
April Day Two Brewer
Geese scream the pond’s surface out of smoothness
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.
To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.
To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.
The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.
To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.
To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.
The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.
April ala Brewer Prompts Napowrimo
Not the Same as Being Alone
The wild geese collide with you
outside the window where she sleeps
and does not sleep alone
yet still you’re there, too.
Why here again, why now? If he’s there, again,
then how? So many places need you
more: country music’s lost
without you, love songs, too, a tumbleweed dress
falling hem over neckline and hem again,
an appaloosa tearing wild down a prairie. The cattle low
at twilight, where a woman does not sleep
solo, yet you: wandering as a cloud, a state of being
they believed left behind, come in now,
settle-down, lovers have always shared a bed with you.
The wild geese collide with you
outside the window where she sleeps
and does not sleep alone
yet still you’re there, too.
Why here again, why now? If he’s there, again,
then how? So many places need you
more: country music’s lost
without you, love songs, too, a tumbleweed dress
falling hem over neckline and hem again,
an appaloosa tearing wild down a prairie. The cattle low
at twilight, where a woman does not sleep
solo, yet you: wandering as a cloud, a state of being
they believed left behind, come in now,
settle-down, lovers have always shared a bed with you.
April Flowers
1
If not, winter remains, a stain where whiteness is the stain. If not, starlight intrudes on the dark, spots it, light dribbles down the nightness, bleached. If not, winter to skid Sam out of the living and into the otherwise. If not speed’s black ice or the seasons worn, not on the highway but on the blank stare of the impossibly-old woman who pulled out onto the interstate without imagining that what her peripheral vision missed and what she did not turn to see was my husband bound for groceries like any-husband but transformed now to involuntary stuntman, an Evil Kneivel who never trained for the moment when he’d swerve to save her antique bones and make of his body a kind of figure of resurrection, rising like a circus-Messiah sprung from a cannon but the funny part, the bent knee bounced down to the ground, the perky jump up to show his form and intention, that part got skipped, if not for that, what would remove him from me, I wondered. Not time, for the widowed never imagine that their love would end lamely, a cute bank-teller, a telling bank statement, a night at a hotel so extravagant, no wife imagines her body ever sliding down the luxurious length of such-bedding again.
2
The one with violets in her lap is the other, or child. The one with violets in her lap is never you again, when wooing has made way for the won-over, the once-over that finds you found. The one with violets in her lap in never wife, but widow, I think, while I take the funeral arrangements apart and throw them all over the living room floor. What I remember are the violets, delicate things we kept on a step-ladder that Sammy and I painted over in leftover colors: honeydew green, sockeye salmon, a color called puce and one eerie blue. We called it the Vomit of Key West but with the violets we tended in their various shades of purple, magenta, and plum, there was harmony to it.
1
If not, winter remains, a stain where whiteness is the stain. If not, starlight intrudes on the dark, spots it, light dribbles down the nightness, bleached. If not, winter to skid Sam out of the living and into the otherwise. If not speed’s black ice or the seasons worn, not on the highway but on the blank stare of the impossibly-old woman who pulled out onto the interstate without imagining that what her peripheral vision missed and what she did not turn to see was my husband bound for groceries like any-husband but transformed now to involuntary stuntman, an Evil Kneivel who never trained for the moment when he’d swerve to save her antique bones and make of his body a kind of figure of resurrection, rising like a circus-Messiah sprung from a cannon but the funny part, the bent knee bounced down to the ground, the perky jump up to show his form and intention, that part got skipped, if not for that, what would remove him from me, I wondered. Not time, for the widowed never imagine that their love would end lamely, a cute bank-teller, a telling bank statement, a night at a hotel so extravagant, no wife imagines her body ever sliding down the luxurious length of such-bedding again.
2
The one with violets in her lap is the other, or child. The one with violets in her lap is never you again, when wooing has made way for the won-over, the once-over that finds you found. The one with violets in her lap in never wife, but widow, I think, while I take the funeral arrangements apart and throw them all over the living room floor. What I remember are the violets, delicate things we kept on a step-ladder that Sammy and I painted over in leftover colors: honeydew green, sockeye salmon, a color called puce and one eerie blue. We called it the Vomit of Key West but with the violets we tended in their various shades of purple, magenta, and plum, there was harmony to it.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
O Bless You & Bless You & A-choo
Spoke with Evan on Skype tonight. He sneezed and his mommy and I both blessed him, which made him strangely-happy. He likes when things he does get response. He claps, I clap, I sing the little Greek song about clapping and braided Greek cookies in paper (koulourakia) brought home by the daddy. My own Daddy taught Evan the song, just as he taught Evy's mommy and her sisters which is yours truly, for one.
Yours truly is watching life steamroll in at the speed of well, something. Things she can't say here and things she can't say yet but there are life revolutions afoot, everywhere.
For now there are words and I have had some rattling around and some falling inkily-thud to the page. There will be more. There will be more. But the blog, is the blog a thing I use to keep things like wildflowers trapped between panes of glass? Is it a place I spoke to/from when loneliest? I am some things more than others but the loneliness tree does not grow tall in me. I can point to where it's planted, it will always stand but... I have lost the urge to say what I can't or shouldn't yet say.
But not to share beauty. My favorite phonecalls are the ones where Kat, Liz or Veace; The Bear, the Spoon, or even the old friend SF used to call in a poem to me. We would find something so urgently-beautiful that we rushed to share it, so pressing was the need to carry it to someone else.
How to Say I Love You
On evenings when my dogs and I circle the block,
if I am guilty of anything,
it's being distracted by the streetlamp.
I am visible in it.
If I look directly at the lamp, I can't see the stars.
I don't need the stars anymore?
I used to think
I'd cavern you, and grotto you, waterfall you,
and immense-rock you, solitude you
until rain Bristled the evening, lit
our roof to singing—
And of thinking too hard about what to say
when we're home from our walk:
my wife: welcome home high-wires
and habitual nightmares, lonely woes
and wooden shoes!
Copyright © 2010 Gary L. McDowell All rights reserved
Yours truly is watching life steamroll in at the speed of well, something. Things she can't say here and things she can't say yet but there are life revolutions afoot, everywhere.
For now there are words and I have had some rattling around and some falling inkily-thud to the page. There will be more. There will be more. But the blog, is the blog a thing I use to keep things like wildflowers trapped between panes of glass? Is it a place I spoke to/from when loneliest? I am some things more than others but the loneliness tree does not grow tall in me. I can point to where it's planted, it will always stand but... I have lost the urge to say what I can't or shouldn't yet say.
But not to share beauty. My favorite phonecalls are the ones where Kat, Liz or Veace; The Bear, the Spoon, or even the old friend SF used to call in a poem to me. We would find something so urgently-beautiful that we rushed to share it, so pressing was the need to carry it to someone else.
How to Say I Love You
On evenings when my dogs and I circle the block,
if I am guilty of anything,
it's being distracted by the streetlamp.
I am visible in it.
If I look directly at the lamp, I can't see the stars.
I don't need the stars anymore?
I used to think
I'd cavern you, and grotto you, waterfall you,
and immense-rock you, solitude you
until rain Bristled the evening, lit
our roof to singing—
And of thinking too hard about what to say
when we're home from our walk:
my wife: welcome home high-wires
and habitual nightmares, lonely woes
and wooden shoes!
Copyright © 2010 Gary L. McDowell All rights reserved
Monday, March 22, 2010
Flicks
One of those "Amelie" moments came to me today in the form of an old candy that no one recalled but me.
The scene I am referencing is the one where in a phone booth, our heroine sees to it that the older man finds the tin full of his treasures from forty years previous. My moment was not so large and moving but it was pure nostalgia. As a child I recalled Flicks for their design and the vibrant foil tubes. The chocolate was, in fact, chocolate-flavored and even years ago, it tasted kind of cheap but uniquely itself. But the tubes, like kaleidoscopes in shape, like special, exotic gifts: metallicly-red, gold, green and blue. Stacked together they were a wonderful xylophone or the satisfying cylinders of a pipe organ. In any case, they moved me, reminded me of lives and theatres gone by of Evanston, Wyoming's one Strand Theatre that held all the town's romantic secrets on any given Friday night. Of the young girl always on the outskirts of everything, waiting in line.
The scene I am referencing is the one where in a phone booth, our heroine sees to it that the older man finds the tin full of his treasures from forty years previous. My moment was not so large and moving but it was pure nostalgia. As a child I recalled Flicks for their design and the vibrant foil tubes. The chocolate was, in fact, chocolate-flavored and even years ago, it tasted kind of cheap but uniquely itself. But the tubes, like kaleidoscopes in shape, like special, exotic gifts: metallicly-red, gold, green and blue. Stacked together they were a wonderful xylophone or the satisfying cylinders of a pipe organ. In any case, they moved me, reminded me of lives and theatres gone by of Evanston, Wyoming's one Strand Theatre that held all the town's romantic secrets on any given Friday night. Of the young girl always on the outskirts of everything, waiting in line.
Stray Paragraphs, February, Year of the Rat
After Charles Wright
Why we resist coming after, coming second, coming late
but not last
I cannot say, but we seem to, though we should root to, if we
had the sense of a brush pile, or the squirrels.
There are no gifts that are not dowries; etym- and archaeologies
like the first divorce—the division of day from night,
that coin of solace and
precursor to the watershed, to the neighborhood's
downward contours—define where everything runs
and where runoffs deposit their wrack lines.
What accumulates is not a reason, not debris but tablature,
adagia, apologia, full-stops and half-lives along with twigs and trash,
notations scratched-out in unremarkable fashion.
We have commissioned a longitudinal study, so give it time,
but try to avoid that ur-emphasis poets put on being,
where what is best left unaccented they prod into becoming
something else,
a thing at all, that wants nothing anyway, more or less,
like our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be,
who will miss the seventh moon's scheduled swell
but asks for no condolence.
February, old rite-monger, this is how you will be welcomed,
in the name of those who won't be.
Ignore my firstborn, as I cannot, as he pries up the corner
of the living room rug
to reveal the filthy tape, the wood floor's bright parts,
and nothing else
the naked eye can see, however suggestive.
Even so it ties the room together
in a way you cannot, or will not, willfully bereft
of origins, middle sister who, like us,
awaits recombination, some saving throw, mitochondrial.
Copyright © 2009 John Estes All rights reserved
After Charles Wright
Why we resist coming after, coming second, coming late
but not last
I cannot say, but we seem to, though we should root to, if we
had the sense of a brush pile, or the squirrels.
There are no gifts that are not dowries; etym- and archaeologies
like the first divorce—the division of day from night,
that coin of solace and
precursor to the watershed, to the neighborhood's
downward contours—define where everything runs
and where runoffs deposit their wrack lines.
What accumulates is not a reason, not debris but tablature,
adagia, apologia, full-stops and half-lives along with twigs and trash,
notations scratched-out in unremarkable fashion.
We have commissioned a longitudinal study, so give it time,
but try to avoid that ur-emphasis poets put on being,
where what is best left unaccented they prod into becoming
something else,
a thing at all, that wants nothing anyway, more or less,
like our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be,
who will miss the seventh moon's scheduled swell
but asks for no condolence.
February, old rite-monger, this is how you will be welcomed,
in the name of those who won't be.
Ignore my firstborn, as I cannot, as he pries up the corner
of the living room rug
to reveal the filthy tape, the wood floor's bright parts,
and nothing else
the naked eye can see, however suggestive.
Even so it ties the room together
in a way you cannot, or will not, willfully bereft
of origins, middle sister who, like us,
awaits recombination, some saving throw, mitochondrial.
Copyright © 2009 John Estes All rights reserved
Friday, March 19, 2010
Sans Loneliness
Have I nothing to say? I would like to think not but it's been hard to keep the blog going. April, with its poetry month challenge, that should get me back. Until then, or soon, or the next pretty I find to share.
Today I househunt, enjoy the sunlight that is, the grief almost blown-over for my Bronte, and how last Saturday she lingered still and I had to let her go.
That letting go seems to be the way lately. Something so long considered and then, a phonecall, a bit of news, a ripe May and so much changes in a day.
Not Yet
Give me, if you will, a little time
To understand how meanings come and go,
Resembling ants converging at an anthill
And then dispersing, each with work to do.
Meanwhile, the anthill rises and expands.
The sun comes out. The days grow ever shorter.
Give me time to sense how meanings perish
Like plums left unattended in a bowl.
Because their lives were finite in the first place,
That spreading mold should come as no surprise.
So it is with meanings, I suppose,
Though how and why I've yet to understand.
Copyright © 2009 Ben Howard All rights reserved
from Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Salmon Poetry
Today I househunt, enjoy the sunlight that is, the grief almost blown-over for my Bronte, and how last Saturday she lingered still and I had to let her go.
That letting go seems to be the way lately. Something so long considered and then, a phonecall, a bit of news, a ripe May and so much changes in a day.
Not Yet
Give me, if you will, a little time
To understand how meanings come and go,
Resembling ants converging at an anthill
And then dispersing, each with work to do.
Meanwhile, the anthill rises and expands.
The sun comes out. The days grow ever shorter.
Give me time to sense how meanings perish
Like plums left unattended in a bowl.
Because their lives were finite in the first place,
That spreading mold should come as no surprise.
So it is with meanings, I suppose,
Though how and why I've yet to understand.
Copyright © 2009 Ben Howard All rights reserved
from Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Salmon Poetry
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