Tomorrow Marks the First Day of National Poetry Month

And L-Bo and I are writing a poem a day, in honor. No matter how failed, how broken, how stinky, how sad, I will post here. I warn you now so that you can look away, look away or like miner's canaries fly through and see how toxic the fumes get. On the best days, we might all emerge singing. Or, you'll get good-jealous and join us?
To yellow feathers and flights of verse.

Dance Me to the End of Love, MD

Slow Dance
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained

Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like

children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

Matthew Dickman (From All American Poem)

I was in tears after reading it. Thank you Lovely Beary-Boy for drawing my attention to it.

The Girl from Ipanema

's got nothing on the boy from Medina. (on "favoriting" onehundredtwentynine days ago and being unable to find the unfavorite button)

Standing on the corner of Sixth & How to Forget

Italy, October

To be here is to be where fruit you have never seen before grows on equally strange trees. The fruit is not, as you first thought, oranges, though it is orange in color. Nor is it a tangerine or some strangely colored apple. Then you see it in the market, each soft fruit cradled in its own nest of woven plastic. Cachi, the sign reads, 200 lire. You hold out a palm of silver, and let the cashier pick warm coins from your waiting hand. Then she wraps your cachi in white paper like a present, which you carry to your hotel, hoping cachi can be safely eaten raw.

In your room, you slice it open, lift the cachi to your lips and find it sweeter than any fruit you've ever tasted, half watermelon, half pressed roses. Only when you've finished, do you think to look up cachi in your pocket Italian dictionary which says it means persimmon. And you remember as a child picking a persimmon at a friend's house, then leaving it all afternoon in your mother's stand-up freezer. Still, when you bit the unripe fruit, your mouth drew up in a pucker from which you—silent person that you are—never did recover. Until today in Sacile when you took a bite of strange fruit.


Now, who knows? You may speak in tongues.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Depleted Evening

I am almost counting hours until morning and until I can make something of Saturday since Friday I have so-failed. I tried. I did. I went through some clothes. I went thrifting--not great finds save for one fabulous bathrobe from China--that red (L-Bo!) and embroidered on the back. A phonecall that sort of saddened me and then a coffee meeting where I didn't even try to make it fun. I had won tickets to a concert in Nelsonville and should have gone. But I had plans and didn't want to go solo (though I really like that most of the time) but for some reason today, didn't. And this Ashleigh Flynn sounded so great on the radio. And I was Caller Number Four.

Someone posted something about vicissitudes and I thought of them in Annie-light. Every month taking in the scenery and spinning it like the wheel in the middle of the boardgame. What comes up is vicissitude month after month and how many vicissitudes do you count away, before like the twelve beastly increments of the zodiac, you're back at Pisces with its fish swimming both towards and away from themselves, one another, their bodies the hissing s of snakes, their destination always you, always me, always the same, never arriving. Therein lies the difficulty in perpetual vicissituding: how to measure, where you've come from, where you've been and degrees of change in Bettermentberg. I could go for a butter mint, just know. A belief system both creamy-rich and fresh on the tongue. A love affair thrown just in time and landing in sea of ruffles and petticoat-excess. A pinafore of old-time valentines. I'm not even sure what I'm asking for.

:-(

Found this out first thing this morning while researching Sylvia for a poem.
And then there was one. Saddest news for Frieda. It must feel as if it never stops happening somehow.

I am going out into the cold sunshine and bringing back a sweet coffee for my spring cleaning extravaganza. Today's basil to be planted in Nicholas' honor.

The Beauty in Walking Away

Thursday night, L-Bo, Filo and I went to see our beloved Koogle perform some of his own songs. It was a lovely night and the strange reverberations of seeing someone you once kind of really, really like-liked do something that makes you feel so proud of him and also so protective when now you are a standard audience member with no rights to invest was kind of sad for a minute but then kind of cool. My good fortune at finding the most wonderful, special, rare and talented people always amazes me. I was just telling my favorite bear that today--regarding Veace and her way with words. L-Bo, Filo, Locksmith: all wonders to me and such friends. And my good, pretty, kind bird, I couldn't hope that a big brother would be better to me.
So Koogle hurts a little to see, and sends the air to electric-storm-settings and disturbs, disrupts, (bewitches, bothers, bewilders) but too, through battle after battle and much awkwardness, I can call him friend and he wrote those bright, beautiful songs and he was so all-grown-up up there and it was pretty great and makes me pretty proud of him, of me.

My Sweet Old ee.c

Looking through all my exams notes and the little notebook of quotes I kept just for me and came across all of these. So much of that time was hard to digest, a million books to read, my memory a selective, random, associative thing. Exams, (as dear Abraham once described certain aesthetics)require coming at the wind with hammer and nails. Still, finding this quartered bit of paper and the quotes reminded me how much I still love these words I've married.

why-colored worlds of because


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you.

tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us
(if they do, we'll move
away still further: into now)

you shall above all things
be glad and young
for if you're young whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become

how much more than enough for both of us
darling, and if I sing you are my voice

beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss
or sold the reason, they undream a dream)

(formybff) I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
then teach 10,000 stars how not to dance

nobody, not even the rain,
has such small hands

Today's Creed

I spend my time and try not to just kill minutes off with a big rock and the dead-eyed, broth-eating, "beige hallways," if I can help it.
They find their way in and they, (for no other life-force to them, and flimsy-souled as they otherwise are) can be persistant and tenacious when they want to apprehend the crayon-box toting, world-reading, soulful souls who are just trying to make a day of each day. We must be as vigilant as we are vibrant. They outnumber us by millions.

For this reason I have twice-Coralined. For this reason, I am going to Jacksonville to run near the water, to the Great Gatsby ballet, to Ireland, to Florida to see that first photo of a little someone for whom I must post the following advice: Eye your time, measure it out in coffee spoons but brew it strong and hearty and serve it to the few-few who deserve it. Make it hot, fair-trade and from good beans, the finest roast. Spend here if you must, they're your days, after all, Little Daisy. And most of all, be vigilant as you are vibrant.

“The female seer will burn upon this pyre”

Sylvia Plath is setting my hair
on rollers made from orange-juice cans.
The hairdo is shaped like a pyre.


My locks are improbably long.
A pyramid of lemons somehow
balances on the rickety table


where we sit, in the rented kitchen
which smells of singed naps and bergamot.
Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept


at rolling my unruly hair.
She knows to pull it tight.Few words.
Her flat, American belly,


her breasts in a twin sweater set,
stack of typed poems on her desk,
envelopes stamped to go by the door,


a freshly baked poppyseed cake,
kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans
in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word,


“immolate,” then a single sentence
of prophecy. The hairdo done,
the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean


of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.


“The female seer will burn upon this pyre” Copyright �© 2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted from Antebellum Dream Book, with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

I have forgiven Ms. Alexander for the inauguration. It isn't her fault that my Barack likes her best. Besides, after E. Arnold's the poem on Poetry and all the Elizabeth-poetry-chicks' general sensibilities, I feel like my admiration must outweigh my envy. It wouldn't be the first time that my digressive, associative way of connecting disparate entities damned or absolved the whole lot.

All the streetlights in the city of Me

This morning your mother told me a secret over decaf and too many miles. From 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning, Eastern time, you are conceived anew--like a character in a long, long novel--in my story. There is word of you, Little One, all over the country.
I told her how I tried giving up caffeine for few weeks and then I returned and all of the lamps on the avenue of Me re-lit and the little citizens: fedoraed, sundressed, strolling by with stylish dogs and carriages began to move again.
--from Season of White Flies & Diary of a New Sparkle in the Night Sky of Us


The streets were so bodied last night. So sculpted and dense. The very air was shaking with hormones and be in the first weekend of something like spring, the heat of the muscular flesh moving with an awareness of the body, the human form as art and appetite, it's hard to say, but the streets were fairly shivering with desire. It was yummy. The lines to Jeni's out to the street and wrapping the sidewalk as the tongue imagined the strange songs of cherry lambic or olive oil sea salt pepita ice cream rolling tart, bitter, salty meeting sweet and finally butterfat creamy against it.

Loss Dog

My favorite typo of the week and already part of a story where such a hound was needed to wander the streets of sorrow, the aging neighborhoods where the pies baked are the pies of nostalgia and the berries are never the right vintage, too modern in their flavor, geometric on the tongue with the hum and buzz of excess where should be the sound of the screen door, the dazed days of boys on bicycles and the warm palms of his mother falling paradoxically cool on his febrile brow.

Such a neighborhood needs the loss dogs wandering its evening sidewalk, while the boys that ran with them, call for them at dusk and one night, they'll return to them, tags ringing on their collars and the thunk of their tails against the night air clearing a space for summer.

Or this student explaining her missed alarm clock and how the sound finds its way into the dream

I dream about a boat and the alarm is the bell.

I am really, strangely tired today but happy. A good phonecall as I was about to walk out the door to tell me "open the door, have you been out in it yet? it's amazing!" And it is and tonight I will not be able to get that pop song line out of my head with the warm wind blowing the stars around and I do, I really do, want to see you tonight.

Lest I Forget

Here is just the kind of poem I'd share with you were you here.

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
by Kevin C. Powers

I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.
---
Game Night
by Conor O'Callaghan


Love not
being in the loop.


Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.


Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.


And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?
---

I began two new of my own. One for Audrey, maybe Cynthia. One for a girl named Emily. And soon, the one about Song of the Lark. With a face of rapt listening...

I am fighting the wooly-horribles today. Sleep. More motion. More poetry, Poetry, prose.

Let the moment be where Annie finds herself, not because she's lost but because she's been looking and when Aram calls because she was meeting with her boss and he remembers not one but both meetings and worries that she's weary and she is, Annie tells herself that it isn't only love that looks like this but some days when there's not a cupcake on the horizon, no good song, no time to read the body of books that she sleeps beside each night, she thinks it really is. Let the moment be Liza on the line talking about lost boys as dead horses, the kind heavy when they live, heavier when they die, their bodies the stuff of breaking the barn down around them, just to hire the back-hoe and dig a grave, larger than most of the places where she has lived. There is no quiet way for a lost boy to leave you, Liza says as she laments her own, the one who forgets to brush his teeth and won't floss for anything, the one who drinks himself to sleep most nights and dreams through the alarm because he didn't protect his ears against the years of truck-tinkerings so loud they blew out whole octaves and now it's hard to call him indoors when night is falling and dinner is still warm. They are tired, Liza and Anastasia, though Liza has made a home with her man and Annie some nights feels like a single dandelion seed pirouetting ever-away from the pod, and so portable it's as if the flight was what she was made for.

Advance Requiem for a Lovely Couple

So Beauty's gone under the knife again,
For a chin lift and an alabaster brow;
And Truth, who can't stop confessing
Everything to everyone, has taken another
Name in the witness protection program.

Who would recognize them now, Anonymous
And his soulmate? Maybe, with her new look,
She'd like a new name, too, something tan enough
For a swimsuit, like Melanie, or as pale as
Blanche, all parasols and moonlit lace.

Cramped in their dim suburban home, afraid
To stroll around the neighborhood, Alias goes only
Deeper into himself, where his thoughts line up
Like retired folk at a buffet diner, as if it's
All You Need to Know Night in the brain.

It's a cold and lonely life, quiet to the end,
When the organ pipes will play low hymns
No one but churchmice and poets can hear,
As soft as two palmfuls of ash poured inside
A small urn, old and Greek and overwrought.

Elton Glaser

May the Moment Be

better than the memory" my wise new friend tells me. I like it and like that I am just now, precisely where I need to be.

The new schedule of less phone time more discipline is working well so far. Today is a lovely color and I'm about to dive into it. More soon

BRAT
I am all about heavenly cavorting
Here on silly earth.
And I misbehave around death.
And I tug on trouble's braids.
But tonight I am going to pretend
I know the people who love me.
Jeni Olen

Tonight I am going to pretend to know that the new love is respect and that what isn't mine won't be and that there is a bunch of gift wrap around things like that.
I had good Vietnamese food tonight. I walked on old streets in the new cold which is less-so than the old. I went for a drive last night and someone's presence was so present in the car with me I thought he must be thinking me too. But I'm rarely right about who pines and how much and I am again, okay with that.

A friend said yesterday that I was without strategy and that made me glad. I have made a list of goals that have little to do with anyone but me. They are good things and I need more energy. There have been many funerals in the lives of people I love lately and what they all seem to spit back from their bed-shaped holes in the dirt is something about knowing what matters, random beauty and the open eyes to get it, the infinite, unrepeating sky, spices, black cats, good music and the kind of hands that hold on and well.

Starry Starry Night

Tonight we study more Van Gogh letters and the work that he inspires. I recall seeing his paintings live and being unable to believe that they were what they were ie: real Van Goghs and not dorm posters or boxer shorts of starry night.

His colors, the shagginess of the paint, sigh... I am so tired still. I can't wait to go home and make some great veggies, eat spring mix salad and sleep. I am reading a borrowed book and oddly-distracted by far-away persons and the way they cast long shadows that are not unwelcome, unrefreshing.

Today's offering is from my new find:

Patrick Lawler

Freud with a Picture of Teiresias Finds Dora with a Picture of Cassandra

When I wake, glass is all around me.
Millefiori glass. Venetian glass. Glass
with thin vein-like cracks. Glass like
the breath of an anorexic.
Glass like the brains
of deep-sea fish. Glass like language.
Glass like belief. Glass filling the room.


Glass like echoes. Glass like the language
of aboriginal people. Glass from the mothering
caves of memory. Glass like swollen objects
that have been misplaced in dreams:
Birthmarks and terrariums.

Glass like the uterus of a saint. Glass


like the sewn language of memory. Glass ready
to break into a mosaic. Glass like a body of someone
touched. Glass like an indelible language.


Glass like the memory the body has
of places that have been touched.


Glass filled with twisted light. Glass so fragile
it breaks when I think. Glass that cuts into flesh.
Glass that grows more dangerous
with every step. Glass that sees everything
with its shattered eyes. Glass like a fantastic
plant with fruit that will make us transparent.

I was always one of those women that hung out too long at the counter with the other women in vintage clothing shops like the one in Baltimore where we gathered around Lucinda Williams as if she were a patron saint. And then Sam happened. Sam, who fit into that world and made larger it and brought his own globe over and we made a life of it all. A messy, tangle of life with plastic beads in his thirties, my late-fifties greens. His restrained deco decor and silk ties in colors that claimed the spice rack. Everything richer after Sam and that sense, that Peter Pan girl-feeling I had of being ever-single and moving in some circle of people that were, too, it evaporated so organically, so gently with Sam that I find myself stunned that there was a time I lived with...cufflinks and his big floppy clown-foot gym shoes and that there was a time after that, when I boxed his things reverently, breathed in his scent as if my lungs could keep him that way, and put our life away in storage. I didn't explicitly tell myself that he would be back and we would go to the desolate always-same rows of storage units and we would turn the key and our objects and his things wedded together behind some door with numbers on it would be waiting and we might then, right here, pull up a chair and resume. But I didn't and I know this, really tell myself that it would be impossible to store him and therefore us, for a better, later time. I lived with cufflinks, I thought, the way someone else might mutter the winning numbers of the lottery ticket that took them from destitute to beachfront property. Once upon a time, there were cufflinks on my dressing table.

Periwinkle Blue & Silver Shoes

A clean bedroom with my beautiful comforter (thank you, The Good Bird,) and my lovely duvet. A bit of blue sky and Florida up ahead, beyond that, Chicago and a big dose of people that I love. I have this real hold on things right now and I am loving that feeling.

I read a poem today that reminded me what it is about marriage that I will someday want in my life again.

Cleaning Out Zaide's Apartment
by Yehoshua November
— for my grandparents

His scent still lingered in the black heat
of his darkroom, where he spent decades
developing his meticulous world
of insects and flowers.
Boxes of slides
lay piled on top of one another.
Holding one to the lamplight,
I entered a different universe,
where moths silently cling to the stems
of roses.

In the bedroom
we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes
and then the slender, fragile model planes
he had built from scratch and hand-painted
bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings.

And in every drawer,
countless notes she had written to him.
He must have saved them all,
each one wedding the mundane to a private world
only the lovers themselves could know:
Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.

Enough of the Parade Already

It's snowing floats and marching bands here. Sorry Streisand, but there it is.

The weather wore on me a little. If I were a sweater, I'd have pilled some. Then I was walking back from Metro and I heard a voice call out my name. I looked up to see one of my adorable new students who is connected to one of my adorable previous students running across the street, coatless, black hair flying, to ask me to go up to the second floor and see the mural they were painting. How could I not? I went up and it was a tangle of color, styles, and yet, harmonious. A kind of wacky symphony of figures and these delicate trees and the turquoise and au lait restraint of the keen eye that drew me in my other student's writing (you recall the one, Locksmith?) I wandered over almost hypnotized, having no idea whose work it was just that it was beautiful and the student who first brought me in to see the piece said "that is J's" and I thought, "of course."

Another new and bright student was working on it, too and I felt that old continuity and good fortune that I did when I worked with generations of students in Alabama and Cincinnati. What I couldn't find in myself in either motivation or endorphins or even just plain old energy my students like strange angels flew down and injected into my day.

The ride home was absolutely terrifying. I am curled up under my comforter with a good new novel and tummy full of kale, broccoli, go-lean "ground beef" garlic and cheese pizza. I am reading an amazing novel written by a poet (big shock that it's amazing!) I am dreaming of spring in northern Ohio and all of my fun little holidays.