Celebration
Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green –
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of buds on spindly bushes –
greener than ever before. And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.
Denise Levertov
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Saturday, December 31, 2011
How better to go out than in gratitude
2011 was hard on my household. My lovely-lovely was diagnosed with renal failure and his father passed away--all in a few months. I had my first set of scary medical test results and then months later, an okay. Still, things took their toll. But the house is warm with life and love and I am here, waiting on the edge of my seat for 2012. No matter what those Mayans think.
Because 2011 has been rough on us all, but as Rilke says: Love the questions. Live the questions.
To 2012! Love and best wishes,
Sophia
Six Kinds of Gratitude
1
I'm someone's small boat,
far out at sea,
sailing from what has so long sustained me
toward what I don't know.
My joy is the sound
of the water purling around me,
but is it my hull
or the great ocean moving?
2
Are those flies I hear, or a trick of the wind,
faintly human voices,
or a whistle of breath
in the nose of my sleeping dog?
3
Without me there is no confusion.
Buddhas see no difference between
themselves and others; Angels,
between the living and the dead.
4
At last I've discovered
the secret of life:
If you don't leave
you can't come back.
5
Deep in the Earth there are pockets of light
that did not come from Heaven,
and yet they are the light of Heaven
deep inside the Earth.
6
This bird is the birdness of a bird.
—Dan Gerber, A Primer on Parallel Lives
And of course, Rainer. Always Rainer.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”
R.M. Rilke is the man!
Because 2011 has been rough on us all, but as Rilke says: Love the questions. Live the questions.
To 2012! Love and best wishes,
Sophia
Six Kinds of Gratitude
1
I'm someone's small boat,
far out at sea,
sailing from what has so long sustained me
toward what I don't know.
My joy is the sound
of the water purling around me,
but is it my hull
or the great ocean moving?
2
Are those flies I hear, or a trick of the wind,
faintly human voices,
or a whistle of breath
in the nose of my sleeping dog?
3
Without me there is no confusion.
Buddhas see no difference between
themselves and others; Angels,
between the living and the dead.
4
At last I've discovered
the secret of life:
If you don't leave
you can't come back.
5
Deep in the Earth there are pockets of light
that did not come from Heaven,
and yet they are the light of Heaven
deep inside the Earth.
6
This bird is the birdness of a bird.
—Dan Gerber, A Primer on Parallel Lives
And of course, Rainer. Always Rainer.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”
R.M. Rilke is the man!
A Tinselly Farewell to December
Holy Ghost
by Brian Brodeur
Next
My mother spreads tinsel snow over the kitchen sills,
sets the cedar manger in its place, arranging
the hollow plastic magi next to a cradle
displaying the baby Jesus missing an arm.
The little enameled figure of Mary kneeling
embraces something only she can see. Pinned to the banister,
our crocheted stockings sag. All afternoon
she listens to laundry click in the pantry dryer,
packing layers of chocolate cake and home-made cream
into Tupperware for the Heath-Bar trifle we love.
Light moves across the counter, almost touching her hand,
shattering over an open drawer of knives.
From "Snapshots 1," Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008).
Used with the author’s permission.
by Brian Brodeur
Next
My mother spreads tinsel snow over the kitchen sills,
sets the cedar manger in its place, arranging
the hollow plastic magi next to a cradle
displaying the baby Jesus missing an arm.
The little enameled figure of Mary kneeling
embraces something only she can see. Pinned to the banister,
our crocheted stockings sag. All afternoon
she listens to laundry click in the pantry dryer,
packing layers of chocolate cake and home-made cream
into Tupperware for the Heath-Bar trifle we love.
Light moves across the counter, almost touching her hand,
shattering over an open drawer of knives.
From "Snapshots 1," Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008).
Used with the author’s permission.
"I should tell them
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard."
from The Refugee Camp by John Drury
Whose work I have long-loved. The latest continues to astound. Rarely have I met someone who has such a sense of the arts and their play and his own play with all of that knowledge in his work. But here's the really rare part: he writes it all as a poet would not as someone wooden who knows a lot. (You know the poems I mean, they sound smart but dead.) Drury is a scholar's poet and a poet's scholar. There is someone real inside all of that wisdom who still manages to say it all with warmth and sometimes, whimsy. I took any course that I could from him at the University of Cincinnati and left the classroom bowled-over by how much we learned and how much fun we had learning it.
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard."
from The Refugee Camp by John Drury
Whose work I have long-loved. The latest continues to astound. Rarely have I met someone who has such a sense of the arts and their play and his own play with all of that knowledge in his work. But here's the really rare part: he writes it all as a poet would not as someone wooden who knows a lot. (You know the poems I mean, they sound smart but dead.) Drury is a scholar's poet and a poet's scholar. There is someone real inside all of that wisdom who still manages to say it all with warmth and sometimes, whimsy. I took any course that I could from him at the University of Cincinnati and left the classroom bowled-over by how much we learned and how much fun we had learning it.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Lady Alice is Her Name
The mac book. I love it. Cindy-Lou taught me how to grab images and so I have. My desktop is sea of colorful minutia. It thrills to me to look at it all: paper lanterns, New Orleans, my lighthouse, a periwinkle crayon on an old piece of fabric of flocked dark red roses, a vintage taffeta and lace heart-shaped candybox, an amphora with a silhouette on it, oil slicks, spider lilies, Sophia Loren, three icicles, a gloved hand holding three tulips, a ship in a lightbulb, sno cones, tiny, tiny sofas and one photograph snatched from a friend's wall, of pomegranates hanging in front of a stone cherub built into an arc of a crumbling red brick wall. The photograph is shot perfectly from a kind of side angle and so fills the viewer with a kind of inexplicable longing. It is just enough and yet it creates a hunger. I am going to use it when I teach the ekphrasis class to talk about that effect--how writing should do that--ache you a little, make you want more and yet, feel strangely satisfying in that unquenched need. Very sensual. Like pomegranates.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tiny Furniture & Au Lait Lotion & a Blow-Out
Watching the first, wearing the latter (I love the way it smells) and counting my blessings that M wasn't hurt during the third. Far left lane and a total blow-out and it was night. Just finished writing a poem that does not love the halogen light but that very light helped save the day.
Not a wholly productive day but not terrible. Favorite lines so far: "I once saw him sitting on a crate of onions reading Osterling." Then, later:
"Poems are basically like dreams, something everyone likes to tell other people about but no one likes to hear if it's not their own. Which is why poetry is a failure of an intellectual community."
"It's not too poemy, which I like."
This film is making me miss my dangly earrings days. Tomorrow I will wear dangly earrings.
Earring
by Ales Steger translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry January 2009
The whole time he tells you what to do.
His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria.
He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.
It is enough that he sees half the world to command the other half.
He gladly inspects himself in the mirror, but goes crazy if you praise him
Before another. He is not your property. He is not your adornment.
Only when you dance and when you make love with him, he coos.
Then cages open. Then he is the white message bearer of the gods.
Gradually you detach him more often, hide him in a box, misplace him.
But his bite at the lobe still whispers to you.
As if Eros holds you with invisible filigree pliers
And solders words of guilt and the silence of betrayal into your ear.
A copy of a stone from Sisyphus’s mountain is set inside it.
You roll hope uphill. And you roll downhill drunk, despondent and alone.
Poem Disguised as What I Should be Reading Right Now
Which is how to plan my courses (two of which are very new and exciting, but lots of new and exciting work and prep. too). And how to paint my wall called Toasted Marshmallow or French Vanilla, I forget which paint swatch I chose and how to prep the wall that will be Malted and do you notice a little bakery lust in my selection of off-whites? For the record, the accent wall is Mourning Dove, so let it not be said that I am focused on the lyrical, the melancholy, the simple carbs. Oh, wait...
I am wishing I were more here, less facebook. Here feels like the right ruminations about writing. There feels like self-billboardizing. I don't like it, and yet, I look. It's a clever way to pretend to friend and unfriend and it lacks the sense of consequence and courage, (like reality television). In fact, like reality t.v., it actually numbs one from feeling the sense of consequence. Thoughtlessness abounds and rarely does one stop to contemplate the actual emotional ramifications of things said and done. Here, I assume it's me alone plus maybe just a few of those wandering googlebot things that move eyeless (I first wrote "love eyeless" hmmm....) and gathering but never really gathering. (The instructional designer boyfriend assures me that such things watch the blog, too.) So here is like a way to type out what I think I am thinking and thus, cleanse the palate or rough draft out the next thing I need to say on the more official pages of my life. About those.
So New Years' resolutions are silly. They don't last. But a habit takes twenty-one days to form, so my reading tells me, so why not these twenty-one. Like starting today. I want to work on things in a more balanced fashion. My schedule allows whole days where I can paint and another day where I can sort clothes, if a deadline is coming up, I write like a fiend to finish something. Good writers, writers with good habits, work a set of hours a day at a writing project, then a set schedule for class planning, housework, etc. I read an interview with Donald Hall once and he said he advanced each of the many, many, many writing and journalism assignments a little bit with time meted out so that he might make his various deadlines. They are various and many and he always does. Plus he's said to be a damn fine teacher, as well. Even after Jane died, Hall continued to write and send his work out (I worked on a literary magazine at the time and we received a strange elegy that was later picked up by, I think, TriQuarterly.) Anyway, proof, that not even grief, much less that flitty, meandering mind of one Intagliosa, could keep a good writer from getting his good writing accomplished. With that, I leave you to a wonderful poem that was sent along to me by a kind woman who found the audio of my "Lucy" poem some years back and had always wanted the text. I was sent her note and when I responded, telling her how happy it made me that my poem stayed with her the way certain other poems had stayed with me, (yes Taije Silverman I am talking to you, also Eliot Khalil Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Richard Siken, Laura Kasischke, Simone Muench, and too many others to list)... she wrote me with this lovely title which I read, envied and shared.
Now to that new day I promised myself.
Matthew Olzmann
MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM
Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
I am wishing I were more here, less facebook. Here feels like the right ruminations about writing. There feels like self-billboardizing. I don't like it, and yet, I look. It's a clever way to pretend to friend and unfriend and it lacks the sense of consequence and courage, (like reality television). In fact, like reality t.v., it actually numbs one from feeling the sense of consequence. Thoughtlessness abounds and rarely does one stop to contemplate the actual emotional ramifications of things said and done. Here, I assume it's me alone plus maybe just a few of those wandering googlebot things that move eyeless (I first wrote "love eyeless" hmmm....) and gathering but never really gathering. (The instructional designer boyfriend assures me that such things watch the blog, too.) So here is like a way to type out what I think I am thinking and thus, cleanse the palate or rough draft out the next thing I need to say on the more official pages of my life. About those.
So New Years' resolutions are silly. They don't last. But a habit takes twenty-one days to form, so my reading tells me, so why not these twenty-one. Like starting today. I want to work on things in a more balanced fashion. My schedule allows whole days where I can paint and another day where I can sort clothes, if a deadline is coming up, I write like a fiend to finish something. Good writers, writers with good habits, work a set of hours a day at a writing project, then a set schedule for class planning, housework, etc. I read an interview with Donald Hall once and he said he advanced each of the many, many, many writing and journalism assignments a little bit with time meted out so that he might make his various deadlines. They are various and many and he always does. Plus he's said to be a damn fine teacher, as well. Even after Jane died, Hall continued to write and send his work out (I worked on a literary magazine at the time and we received a strange elegy that was later picked up by, I think, TriQuarterly.) Anyway, proof, that not even grief, much less that flitty, meandering mind of one Intagliosa, could keep a good writer from getting his good writing accomplished. With that, I leave you to a wonderful poem that was sent along to me by a kind woman who found the audio of my "Lucy" poem some years back and had always wanted the text. I was sent her note and when I responded, telling her how happy it made me that my poem stayed with her the way certain other poems had stayed with me, (yes Taije Silverman I am talking to you, also Eliot Khalil Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Richard Siken, Laura Kasischke, Simone Muench, and too many others to list)... she wrote me with this lovely title which I read, envied and shared.
Now to that new day I promised myself.
Matthew Olzmann
MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM
Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Touche Today
Because I couldn't stop the dead/they ambled up to me.
Or so it's been. A long year. A long, long year. But some of it still scarlet shawls, collected animal bones carved cryptically to read a thing about vintage quilts made into tipis and what it means to teach, to be taught, to have words amass loss into something meaningful.
The other day I pulled up a poem to show a student a certain tone and the lines and within it the line about the people who loved the speaker being sad since the speaker died struck me anew as a mean thing and it reminded me of a coffee meeting a few weeks back with someone who didn't like any of his wives or women or me and how I left reeling from it and thinking that literature should bring about the best of us. So today saunters in, a little stooped as a Thursday can be and with it, an elegy by a student who wrote of the universe's overcoat and another student urging him to search that coat for spare change and change and then this title little sonnet about sugar and our sweetness galloping away with us, consumed by our consumption, done in by our need for the lovely and honeyed and I am saved enough by that. But then the mail and that cranberry crimson shawl made for me by one of my first university students ever. A girl wicked-sharp, a teacher among students even then, and now, all degreed-up, married, a grown-up but still armed with the whimsy and knitting needles both unmetaphored, restored to a world where a thing can be spun into something both necessary and playful and warming a needful day into play.
I could say more about a snapshot of Glen Campbell or a poem called a canzone shared with me by a favorite poet or about lite eggnog and spiced rum or smoke kittens or tadpoles so tiny when they burst into froglets that we call them the preemy and they burst out like a dark star against the turquoise gravel. Or a sister named of all things Antonia, who is indeed My Antonia and my best friend and my light star in a world of dark gravel. Or that I live in a house now with a someone who loves me despite myself, sometimes in spite of myself but makes a night like this pitch-black from the city's distance, a little warmer, a lot brighter.
In light of that, here's a poet whose work I await in book form:
Conversion Blues
by CHRIS PEXA
– for Rachel
tell us about evening and about the bright
star tell us about the huge dark wall
where it is pinned so if no one is looking
the sky is really burning and tell me it is my eyes
that douse it all to soot, black branches
with one root in carbon and budding eternity.
explain that once a month a family of owls covers
the tree, winks at us, refuses to explain their singing.
when snow is thinly falling we see you there,
the slowest star, and I hear you thinking
of a story, that mute wetness spread across the field is you
clearing your throat, all stories being born
from silence. what story: the snowflakes
cut from the sun are large as cars in the darkness
and grow small and doily when licked
by January stars. what story: barefoot,
running in the wake of the plow,
cold black clods and white sun blessing your steps,
no Jesus yet to dream you into majesty, earth
being enough, no steeple secrets, no divine moons
to pin back your hair, no soap for your tongue, no lye,
no alabaster mothers to sew in a new tongue
and holy toast, cracked as headstones, for you to chew.
are you ready to climb to the top of the stairs?
to tell me about the star nation, the unnamed,
what some grandfather of the clean, glowing
cafes and dive bars of the moon
call morning, a newborn's grouchy hunger?
the dew its mouth and tongue sing for?
think of me in the low thorns, hunched like an umbrella,
my small ribs breaking toward the clouds like love.
Or so it's been. A long year. A long, long year. But some of it still scarlet shawls, collected animal bones carved cryptically to read a thing about vintage quilts made into tipis and what it means to teach, to be taught, to have words amass loss into something meaningful.
The other day I pulled up a poem to show a student a certain tone and the lines and within it the line about the people who loved the speaker being sad since the speaker died struck me anew as a mean thing and it reminded me of a coffee meeting a few weeks back with someone who didn't like any of his wives or women or me and how I left reeling from it and thinking that literature should bring about the best of us. So today saunters in, a little stooped as a Thursday can be and with it, an elegy by a student who wrote of the universe's overcoat and another student urging him to search that coat for spare change and change and then this title little sonnet about sugar and our sweetness galloping away with us, consumed by our consumption, done in by our need for the lovely and honeyed and I am saved enough by that. But then the mail and that cranberry crimson shawl made for me by one of my first university students ever. A girl wicked-sharp, a teacher among students even then, and now, all degreed-up, married, a grown-up but still armed with the whimsy and knitting needles both unmetaphored, restored to a world where a thing can be spun into something both necessary and playful and warming a needful day into play.
I could say more about a snapshot of Glen Campbell or a poem called a canzone shared with me by a favorite poet or about lite eggnog and spiced rum or smoke kittens or tadpoles so tiny when they burst into froglets that we call them the preemy and they burst out like a dark star against the turquoise gravel. Or a sister named of all things Antonia, who is indeed My Antonia and my best friend and my light star in a world of dark gravel. Or that I live in a house now with a someone who loves me despite myself, sometimes in spite of myself but makes a night like this pitch-black from the city's distance, a little warmer, a lot brighter.
In light of that, here's a poet whose work I await in book form:
Conversion Blues
by CHRIS PEXA
– for Rachel
tell us about evening and about the bright
star tell us about the huge dark wall
where it is pinned so if no one is looking
the sky is really burning and tell me it is my eyes
that douse it all to soot, black branches
with one root in carbon and budding eternity.
explain that once a month a family of owls covers
the tree, winks at us, refuses to explain their singing.
when snow is thinly falling we see you there,
the slowest star, and I hear you thinking
of a story, that mute wetness spread across the field is you
clearing your throat, all stories being born
from silence. what story: the snowflakes
cut from the sun are large as cars in the darkness
and grow small and doily when licked
by January stars. what story: barefoot,
running in the wake of the plow,
cold black clods and white sun blessing your steps,
no Jesus yet to dream you into majesty, earth
being enough, no steeple secrets, no divine moons
to pin back your hair, no soap for your tongue, no lye,
no alabaster mothers to sew in a new tongue
and holy toast, cracked as headstones, for you to chew.
are you ready to climb to the top of the stairs?
to tell me about the star nation, the unnamed,
what some grandfather of the clean, glowing
cafes and dive bars of the moon
call morning, a newborn's grouchy hunger?
the dew its mouth and tongue sing for?
think of me in the low thorns, hunched like an umbrella,
my small ribs breaking toward the clouds like love.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Long, long time
since I came here and said hello to myself or whatever it is that I am trying to sing into or out of in the specifics of this forum. It's one thirty in the morning, I am not home and I will be on a plane soon to be home. I am feeling that at sea feeling of not being where one lives and not feeling very at home in the transitional homes we make when we travel. So I went into my books, Lisa Olstein lately, and I found what home I always do in her kind of words. Tonight I am struck with how certain seasons effort in quietly and others crash in and no season really leaves us without impact. There will be another new baby in my life in April and what other chairs will be pulled after the music stops, there is no way of knowing. But I try, like another quietly-efforting poet, to dwell in possibility and when I can focus in, I also dwell in prose. Tonight, I think I should dwell in waiting sheets and the too-little slumber that precedes too long a day. But with luck and some portion of a blessing, I will sleep in my own bed tomorrow night, which as darkness sometimes keeps me from recalling, is really tonight.
Dear One Absent This Long WhileBy Lisa Olstein
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.
I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,
you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,
the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.
In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.
June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall
so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.
I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk
with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.
Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.
Dear One Absent This Long WhileBy Lisa Olstein
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.
I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,
you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,
the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.
In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.
June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall
so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.
I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk
with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.
Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Home from home again and it was a gorgeous trip. M and me bushwacked a trail through the trail-less and inching along tree trunk, through pine and juniper, we thorn cross-hatched our flesh and bled our way to the clearing where an ice-cold stream stood between us and a better trail. We took off our shoes and crossed, our feet a screaming declaration of ALIVE, as they thawed and the feeling was sheer elation. We took our empty water bottles and filled them with the purest clarity and drank. It was heaven. Back in our wonderland of a country-house, the fireflies are like a lite-brite board. I have never seen so many and the feeling is like the old opening of Disney movies--all that Tinkerbell wand-debris and firework. It's been hard to get back here, to the blog that kept company at my loneliest. Now there are foxes,chipmunks,squirrels, goldfinches, bluejays, frogs, rabbits, groundhogs, deer, skunks and two cats in the window to keep me company and busy. But I miss writing here and sharing the latest lovelies.
One Heart
Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
One Heart
Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Dear Someone
Deborah Landau
my emptiness has a lake in it deep and watery
with several temperaments milk cola beer
at night the selves are made of water
all the openings flooded streaming with rain
my emptiness has an aqueduct in it
selves rushing through channels
dissolving washing away in streaks
my emptiness has a fish in it
a piece of seaweed liferaft a rocky strait
all night the selves are breaking themselves
again and again on the sandbar
you can’t get out from the drowning
nightwatery the blacksparkling pools
my emptiness has a nowhere reef an island
at night the immersion comes deep-running and sudden
the selves
it washes us under and sudden
Deborah Landau
my emptiness has a lake in it deep and watery
with several temperaments milk cola beer
at night the selves are made of water
all the openings flooded streaming with rain
my emptiness has an aqueduct in it
selves rushing through channels
dissolving washing away in streaks
my emptiness has a fish in it
a piece of seaweed liferaft a rocky strait
all night the selves are breaking themselves
again and again on the sandbar
you can’t get out from the drowning
nightwatery the blacksparkling pools
my emptiness has a nowhere reef an island
at night the immersion comes deep-running and sudden
the selves
it washes us under and sudden
More and more it's deliciousness I want but all the time there's less and less of it.
All Else Fails
*
Days, weeks, months,
why not use them for something?
I'm heading for a head on.
I'm revving up my so-called self.
I know my life is meaning
less. Strutting around
for awhile until poof.
*
Everything gets more and more absurd.
The office and deskchair, the skin on the neck
eye cream, love, the handholding and bungled
attempts, watching the clock all night 2 am, 4,
then daylight, sitting in my dress again
with cup and plate.
To work to work then back again
to bed, another night.
*
I read Pessoa and he confirms
my worst suspicions.
I read the entertaining novels
and they make me happy.
I sleep beside the river.
The river often sleeps when I'm awake.
Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
Better be shoving off again and into the night.
*
More and more it's deliciousness I want
but all the time there's less and less of it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
You should find something definite to subscribe to
so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.
At the party Stanley said for now factor in
gratitude, narrow the zone and see your life
which is what we call it as if it were a real thing.
I wear my street clothes. I accept the parameters.
Don't shout drink some wine at night
work is what is offered and sometimes love.
Another time there was ecstasy,
though many things went laughably wrong.
*
Those who don't feel are happy, says Pessoa.
Those who don't think.
The night has advanced. We figure in it so slightly.
Down the ice chute we go.
Say goodbye to your eyes in real time.
Get ready, get set. Say goodbye
to your synovial fluid. Your knees
will wear out in no time
won't hoist you nowhere.
*
And now our luck has changed.
There are a lot of hells in this room
but I put on my girlface
and we go to a café we have dinner
we creep into the night and hide
such a slight place we find
we can duck into it and not worry
it isn't yesterday or tomorrow
it is only for a time.
We plan to meet again later but.
*
He keeps me waiting
and I start hysteria a little bit.
I start hysteria against everyone's advice.
I go into the street to drink air.
I've never been so thirsty in my life.
Another mouth, some fresh minted lips.
See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.
Sleep then wake then this then that day
and another night back on the bed
lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.
The sound of hustling advances and retreats
as if someone were shuffling money
or unbuttoning a blouse.
Can you put that taffeta away now, please?
Please put it away.
*
As soon as he sits down I can tell I want to.
How long can I sit here not doing the thing
I want to do. All the youngish men all the etceteras
of desire etcetera.
There's a little hole in my boot.
Could you put your finger in it.
There is power in breathing.
There is power in a silent beat
before answering a question, in a leaning in.
But puts down her foot
every time (monogamy) you mustn't be
strident cheri stop that.
Across the table his mind right there
behind his talking face.
*
We are in a dirty place now when we get together.
We made a nasty city and have to walk in it.
Before we were wider wilder avenues but we made it too cramped and ugly.
Nowhere to go to tea. Only gin here, damn it this cramped and narrow
space and no god at any gate and no goodness.
*
Now our bed is not ample not fair. Now
we don't have a bed
only this corner blackred and backlit.
Something of me is a blind point, something of him too.
There's a little edge of pain here and we walk along it.
Don't cry don't kiss me either and also don't stop.
That's the way he looks when he wants to watch.
Why don't you go swoon yourself again into some fantastic
mood music. I am a small cup with a twist and you are liquid. A drink.
Another drink.
*
I'd rather watch you doing it than do it myself,
I'd rather hear about it, I want to be told,
I'd rather read about it, I'd rather just sit here.
Hold the mask over my face
while you do it to me.
I'll put on some music.
Now see how we grow aglow
so young and beautiful
all our capillaries lit up.
Deborah Landau is the author of Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Last Usable Hour (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). Her poems have appeared recently in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Best American Erotic Poems, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at NYU.
*
Days, weeks, months,
why not use them for something?
I'm heading for a head on.
I'm revving up my so-called self.
I know my life is meaning
less. Strutting around
for awhile until poof.
*
Everything gets more and more absurd.
The office and deskchair, the skin on the neck
eye cream, love, the handholding and bungled
attempts, watching the clock all night 2 am, 4,
then daylight, sitting in my dress again
with cup and plate.
To work to work then back again
to bed, another night.
*
I read Pessoa and he confirms
my worst suspicions.
I read the entertaining novels
and they make me happy.
I sleep beside the river.
The river often sleeps when I'm awake.
Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
Better be shoving off again and into the night.
*
More and more it's deliciousness I want
but all the time there's less and less of it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
You should find something definite to subscribe to
so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.
At the party Stanley said for now factor in
gratitude, narrow the zone and see your life
which is what we call it as if it were a real thing.
I wear my street clothes. I accept the parameters.
Don't shout drink some wine at night
work is what is offered and sometimes love.
Another time there was ecstasy,
though many things went laughably wrong.
*
Those who don't feel are happy, says Pessoa.
Those who don't think.
The night has advanced. We figure in it so slightly.
Down the ice chute we go.
Say goodbye to your eyes in real time.
Get ready, get set. Say goodbye
to your synovial fluid. Your knees
will wear out in no time
won't hoist you nowhere.
*
And now our luck has changed.
There are a lot of hells in this room
but I put on my girlface
and we go to a café we have dinner
we creep into the night and hide
such a slight place we find
we can duck into it and not worry
it isn't yesterday or tomorrow
it is only for a time.
We plan to meet again later but.
*
He keeps me waiting
and I start hysteria a little bit.
I start hysteria against everyone's advice.
I go into the street to drink air.
I've never been so thirsty in my life.
Another mouth, some fresh minted lips.
See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.
Sleep then wake then this then that day
and another night back on the bed
lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.
The sound of hustling advances and retreats
as if someone were shuffling money
or unbuttoning a blouse.
Can you put that taffeta away now, please?
Please put it away.
*
As soon as he sits down I can tell I want to.
How long can I sit here not doing the thing
I want to do. All the youngish men all the etceteras
of desire etcetera.
There's a little hole in my boot.
Could you put your finger in it.
There is power in breathing.
There is power in a silent beat
before answering a question, in a leaning in.
But puts down her foot
every time (monogamy) you mustn't be
strident cheri stop that.
Across the table his mind right there
behind his talking face.
*
We are in a dirty place now when we get together.
We made a nasty city and have to walk in it.
Before we were wider wilder avenues but we made it too cramped and ugly.
Nowhere to go to tea. Only gin here, damn it this cramped and narrow
space and no god at any gate and no goodness.
*
Now our bed is not ample not fair. Now
we don't have a bed
only this corner blackred and backlit.
Something of me is a blind point, something of him too.
There's a little edge of pain here and we walk along it.
Don't cry don't kiss me either and also don't stop.
That's the way he looks when he wants to watch.
Why don't you go swoon yourself again into some fantastic
mood music. I am a small cup with a twist and you are liquid. A drink.
Another drink.
*
I'd rather watch you doing it than do it myself,
I'd rather hear about it, I want to be told,
I'd rather read about it, I'd rather just sit here.
Hold the mask over my face
while you do it to me.
I'll put on some music.
Now see how we grow aglow
so young and beautiful
all our capillaries lit up.
Deborah Landau is the author of Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Last Usable Hour (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). Her poems have appeared recently in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Best American Erotic Poems, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at NYU.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Dear diary, I'm afraid I'm gravely ill. It is perhaps times like these that one reflects on things past. An article of clothing from when I was young. A green jacket. I walk with my father. A game we once played. Pretend we're faeries. I'm a girl faerie. My name is Laura Lee. And you're a boy faerie. Your name is Tita Lee. Pretend, when we're faeries we fight each other, and I say "Stop hitting me I'll die!" And you hit me again and I say, "Now I have to die." And then you say, "But I'll miss you." And I say, "But I have to. And you'll have to wait a million years to see me again. And I'll be put in a box, and all I'll need is a tiny glass of water and lots of tiny pieces of pizza and the box will have wings like an airplane." And you'll ask, "Where will it take you?" "Home." I say.
Olive from Synechdoche, NY
Olive from Synechdoche, NY
"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen." Minister from Synechdoche, NY
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth
When at last we whisper, so long, so lonesome,
and watch our house on the horizon
go down like a gasping zeppelin of bricks,
we’ll turn, holding hands,
and walk the train tracks to the sea . . .
So sing me that song where a mountain falls
in love with an octopus, and one thousand fireflies
ricochet around their heads,
and I’ll dream we’re dancing in the kitchen one last time,
swaying, the window a waystation
of flaming leaves, the dogs shimmying
about our legs,
dragging their golden capes of rain . . .
O my critter, my thistle, gal-o-my-dreams,
lift your voice like an oar into the darkness,
for all the sad birds are falling down—
Nothing in this night is ours.
Brian Barker
When at last we whisper, so long, so lonesome,
and watch our house on the horizon
go down like a gasping zeppelin of bricks,
we’ll turn, holding hands,
and walk the train tracks to the sea . . .
So sing me that song where a mountain falls
in love with an octopus, and one thousand fireflies
ricochet around their heads,
and I’ll dream we’re dancing in the kitchen one last time,
swaying, the window a waystation
of flaming leaves, the dogs shimmying
about our legs,
dragging their golden capes of rain . . .
O my critter, my thistle, gal-o-my-dreams,
lift your voice like an oar into the darkness,
for all the sad birds are falling down—
Nothing in this night is ours.
Brian Barker
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The First of Friday
Fifteen minutes into Friday and I felt the need to update. In truth, I can't sleep for worrying a little over two someones dear to me, with some serious medical challenges.
I don't know really what to say here, but I rose from bed, needing the company of some imaginary company, the screen, these words anting across the white mock paper before me. I have thought today about centipedes or millipedes and called them the false eyelashes of evil, but perhaps they're not. The fluffy ones are said to keep other insects at bay. I have thought today about three ghost airports, cream of tartar, and mostly about a woman made of fire flung from a convertible and her next words all shattered and scattered on April's cruel highway. I've been thinking that there isn't enough poetry in this month of poetry for me.
An Old Man Performs Alchemy
on His Doorstep at Christmastime
Cream of Tartar, commonly used to lift meringue and
angel food cake, is actually made from crystallized fine wine.
After they stopped singing for him,
the carolers became transparent in the dark,
and he stepped into their emptiness to say
he lost his wife last week, please
sing again. Their voices filled with gold.
Last week, his fedora nodded hello to me
on the sidewalk, and the fragile breath
of kindness that passed between us
made something sweet of a morning
that had frightened me for no earthly reason.
Surely, you know this by another name:
the mysteries we intake, exhale, could be
sitting on our shelves, left on the bus seat
beside us. Don't wash your hands.
You fingered them at the supermarket,
gave them to the cashier; intoxicated tonight,
she'll sing in the streets. Think of the old man.
Who knew he kept the secret of levitation,
transference, and lightness filling a winter night?
—an effortless, crystalline powder
that could almost seem transfigured from loss.
I don't know really what to say here, but I rose from bed, needing the company of some imaginary company, the screen, these words anting across the white mock paper before me. I have thought today about centipedes or millipedes and called them the false eyelashes of evil, but perhaps they're not. The fluffy ones are said to keep other insects at bay. I have thought today about three ghost airports, cream of tartar, and mostly about a woman made of fire flung from a convertible and her next words all shattered and scattered on April's cruel highway. I've been thinking that there isn't enough poetry in this month of poetry for me.
An Old Man Performs Alchemy
on His Doorstep at Christmastime
Cream of Tartar, commonly used to lift meringue and
angel food cake, is actually made from crystallized fine wine.
After they stopped singing for him,
the carolers became transparent in the dark,
and he stepped into their emptiness to say
he lost his wife last week, please
sing again. Their voices filled with gold.
Last week, his fedora nodded hello to me
on the sidewalk, and the fragile breath
of kindness that passed between us
made something sweet of a morning
that had frightened me for no earthly reason.
Surely, you know this by another name:
the mysteries we intake, exhale, could be
sitting on our shelves, left on the bus seat
beside us. Don't wash your hands.
You fingered them at the supermarket,
gave them to the cashier; intoxicated tonight,
she'll sing in the streets. Think of the old man.
Who knew he kept the secret of levitation,
transference, and lightness filling a winter night?
—an effortless, crystalline powder
that could almost seem transfigured from loss.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Another boring post about my happiness
But forgive me, this kind of boredom suits me. A Pandora station built around Hallelujah, that played yes, Regina Spektor, whom I love like I love Anne Sexton and I love that I am that which can love that. (Have had to fight the merit of both, believe it or not.)
Spent the day getting the sunroom ready for long summer evenings with the fireplace, the swimming pool and the hot tub M is getting all set up for lots of steamy nights under stars. It's sheer bliss. Everything is asparkle and I waited so long for it that I am silly with gratitude. I am lighting one candle for the good eyes of my dear friend and one for the ability to remember how lucky I am when stupid things like sleeplessness or my dumb terrors make me forget. Sunset is to my right and Wonderful World just passed through my radio station and I am thinking of New York and the trip back home and how much there is to fly to and how much to return to. To anyone reading, I wish us all the softest blanket of summer skies.
Spent the day getting the sunroom ready for long summer evenings with the fireplace, the swimming pool and the hot tub M is getting all set up for lots of steamy nights under stars. It's sheer bliss. Everything is asparkle and I waited so long for it that I am silly with gratitude. I am lighting one candle for the good eyes of my dear friend and one for the ability to remember how lucky I am when stupid things like sleeplessness or my dumb terrors make me forget. Sunset is to my right and Wonderful World just passed through my radio station and I am thinking of New York and the trip back home and how much there is to fly to and how much to return to. To anyone reading, I wish us all the softest blanket of summer skies.
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