So late it's early

and I've an urge to type with dirt-clotted fingernails.  The day was a big snake sighting. Something dark with yellowish zig-zagging, a water snake, maybe. I couldn't be sure. I was all about getting the rusted-out wheelbarrow from the woods, all about the planting of the vegetable garden and so flip-flopped out to the little forest beyond our yard. I had the wheelbarrow in hand when the coiled thing, tongue flicking, body poised for trouble, came into my vision. A foot away and with many feet of self to spring out to me. I screamed like a girl and ran straight down the road. I called the mister over as he was eager to see the snake and alas, and of course, it was gone. But I got my wheelbarrow and tomorrow I plant the tomatoes and peppers--patient things they've been, waiting for a long-time home.

We planted the Kim-gifted yuccas. They were put through a lot of waiting too, and by the time they got into the ground there was no telling if they were bound for thriving. I hope they make it. The blossoms are amazing: big white bells like lilies of the valley on super-steroids.

The froglets this year were early and adorable. The tadpoles are seeming to do well and the mystery tadpoles are still significantly larger and have yet to give me a way to tell just who they will be.

The delphinium is blooming a color of purple that seems impossible to believe in, but there it is: all spriggy and deep, deep. I warned you that the content me was likely boring, but she is happy, Gang and tomorrow morning will be here soon. Tomorrow afternoon means setting up my roof garden plant, floral sculpture thing. I can't wait. Now, I guess, as it is pushing two a.m., I should sleep.

Here's a poem by a favorite poet and one that I fortunate to hear read recently:

Poem for Jenny

Larkspur and delphinium, wild and tame
transcriptions of the same essential idiom
(as lullaby, corralled, is requiem,
a sigh, bound and gagged, a lyric poem).
Earth's trying to remake herself with stars,
her own inky domain of skyey colors.
She wants everything. It won't be hers.
Her starry flowers, heedless of safeguards,
will launch their blue and purple rockets heavenwards
and leave her to her dusty browns and reds,
her brief sky shattered, just as words —
the good ones, anyway — will quit this page
before I ever pay this garden homage
or name the pain I'm trying to assuage.
Nonetheless, these clusters are in flower
if only for an instant, as they were
a year ago, when Jenny (this poem's for her),
knowing how I love them, put them here
to make the way around my house less bitter.
My next-door neighbor, she'd watched things shatter
and so came by to plant and tend and water
and whatever else it is that gardeners do.
And I remember catching a dim glimpse, as if through
an impossible tunnel — what's all that blue? —
and thinking, as one thinks of something wholly out of view,
how lovely it would be to lay my eyes on them,
though they were there, waiting, each time I came home:
larkspur out the back, out front delphinium
(the cultivated version for the public eye,
its wild incarnation just for me . . . )
and once or twice I did suspect that beauty
and kindliness had aimed themselves my way
but each was such a difficult abstraction,
at best unverifiable, uncertain,
a meteor I wasn't sure I'd seen.
I, who'd been so lucky up to then,
was utterly astonished by what pain —
in its purest form — can make out of a person.
It was (such things exist) a brutal season
and one that's not entirely departed
though time has passed; flowers, twice, have sprouted.
The earth will be, twice over, broken-hearted,
which means, at least, according to King David,
in his most unnerving psalm, closer to God.
Me? I'd leave some distance if I could
though it would be untrue to say no good
has come from any of this. See? out my window
the earth again has sheathed herself in indigo;
this may be the time she makes it through:
her sapphire daggers, bursting their scabbards,
carve frantic constellations: elfin songbirds
vehement with blue and purple chords;
earth's reaching for her heavens, I for words
or any chink of rapture I can claim.
Delphinium. Larkspur. Larkspur. Delphinium.
Let me claim you as you climb and climb.


Jacqueline Osherow
The Yale Review
Volume 93, Number 2
April 2005 

A.R.

(and for Steph Rogers, too)

1.
Planted the columbines
in an Aprilful afternoon
It's been a hard year
for dying. Last week
my friend said: My my my.
She set a standard
for how we think
of ourselves, didn't she.
Women poets, that is.

2.
Didn't intend to April
planted instead the annuals.
Then she willed me out
to the perennial squaredance,
and I spun the poems around
to return.

3.
Not sorry but would,
with a gift for burning,
recall last fall, when someone
said: we've finished our various
augusts and started in
with the embers.

4.
They can't leave completely,
one hundred percent
of what some ever spoke
aloud, recorded somehow.
One hundred percent
of what she ever spoke
allowed more, megaphoned:
like a begonia flashing
scarlet so many stories up.

5.
Taking-April warmed early,
the May Pond shimmered
elsewhere, and the first vixen
of the season remains in her red
shadow, but from here on, I share
the notion of fox with her,
looking up always from the silvery
bend in the road of 1965,
and her with the photograph taken
in Alabama that echoed
a road ahead, neither then-wife
nor she, nor she-fox nor I
could have known what was mirrored here
central Ohio, where the woods hold
too, a tree hoop-skirted with deadly vine
where women meet and together pull the heavy
ivory needle through. A tree considers time
only barely--but when she died,
somewhere inside itself,
a trunk gained another ring.
A ligneous Saturn, an earthy myth.

6.
Hidden. A glossary absent our classification
we wander then, undefined nameless,
spelling ourselves out to the palms
of our own hands. Might she marvel
to find us, written in our own hand,
hidden in our own hides, thriving.
The other world muffled now, harmless
and the body of us, a sea beginning
nowhere, everywhere.
7.
An ocean's origins confound us,
the sybaritics of each day
undress our wounds, say
what we must about passing
us by, or on and among these years, imagine,
a woman's meaning to another woman,
magnifies: sisters in the distance,
the braided language spoken
in long walks, into bathroom mirrors
where we speak to the eyes
reflected off the glass, or browsing
where we speak as we file through
clothing racks and we know to pause
when the hangers pause, to stop mid
philosophical musing and suggest
how well that color harmonizes with our flesh.

8.
Sometimes she rejects sunlight,
opens to the flourishing fields
the refusal of umbrellas, caped
in rain, the frosted windows
embroidered with cold thread.
A least once the sun rejects
her and together we're unforgetful,
the train tracks of our bones
parallel, the destinations varied.

9.
Inside us, the marshaling yards
grow shady, connections we
might have made fall into night's
long fall and we tarry, separate
malingerers. We spill ahead
into a steely nowhere.
Certain words occur:
enemy, oven, sorrow, enough
to let me know
she's a woman of my time.

10.
To be a forest escaping, a tree
broken-out of the greenhouse,
a fractured satellite hooked
by a fork of branch, unrooted
we travel, half-dead and dragging
our arteries against
the blood-soaked earth aswirl. Hush,
the moon is a head full of whispers,
listen: the voices are hers.

11.
Dear season of loss,
deer season antler-stabbed
and velvety. A ghostly appetite
eats at us, the assertions
of the tentative haunters
wash through the woods
but to the untrained eye,
it looks like moss.
The fawn-colored earth,
buries us in doe-silence.

12.
Something told, something true,
something sorrowed, something
grew in the telling, like a fish
or a mountain. At such elevation
first the air is blue then it is bluer,
first we are something then we
are the sum of things.

13.
A summary, luckless we meander
visitors to our own states, our bodies
under siege, our mouths weary
from explanation. What seemed
like a shared-wisdom about us,
some days falling
between the suspicious
and the superstitious.

14.
Doom-e-rang.
Each doomed day passes
and makes way for another.
I drink Mayan cocoa
and watch for seams
in the calendar: a centennial,
a millenium is best, a belief
that if this doomsday doesn't end us,
the next one will. It's worse than that:
our doom is singular, a chorus
singing all day, all days unharmonious
and out of tune. Ask her, she's out there now:
all ether, all song.

15.
She thought the dress would mend
itself, slash and strap, buttonholes,
so much frayed and faded,
even the balloon print,
vaguely deflated.

16.
To brook no passage,
the mixed-up dialogue
when we crossed
the Mad River. Never
without comment,
jest, sorrow, lent
things, borrowed.

17.
The foxes live in the sky
blue house, abandoned
now for years.
The windows filled with seashells,
porcelain horses, the souvenirs
of where the living travel.
Mementos of the mortal
outdated fragments, keys
to unlock no-memory
only clutter for the kids
to take away, But year after
year, they fail.
In the sci-fi version: the vixen
shades us. the magic of an enchanted
forest ghosty, the mysterious ripples
on the reservoir only her soles
bridging the banks, arriving with mercury-silvery
footprints, staining the shores with rolling light.

18.
And what of the longer-dead?
Homes we place our ears against
and listen for the sound of the sea.
The detritus of the late
creatures, the waves they weathered.
All that they left behind, patient and wild:
even their chalky coffins are fans
and coiled-infinities.
Some hours: the delicate balance
of preparing blowfish. Each recipe,
a warning, each bite, a dare.

19.
Holiday


20.
Let's dredge the pond of your muteness
where drowned things live again.

21.
No one has imagined us, we want to live like trees
Instead, we're under the microscope, flying under
the radar, above the treeline, below the water table,
prepositions of an ailing grammar, but breathing,
breathing greeting the moon and more than stone.


22.
The judicious sky suggested both:
measure and betrayal but the severed saplings
the girdled trunks emboldened her to call the ranger.
What can't cry out, cries in any case, a whole
crop of trillium flattened under the wheels,
the whimsical hackings at small, living trees,
made her alone inside.

23
The morning was a tree fallen
on a red car driven by tourists
from Lao. Or wrapped around
a light pole, or warped against
a building. The morning moved
from one state to the next, your
head on some ever-pillow

Kate Rhoades is the Best

Where I go, you go, Sister. And I'll be back here. I am just loving my homing-blog and writing again with my friend, Kathrine.

My mother, Kathrine and you: The Kath/arines/ryns/thrines are good to me.

Blogging-Away

Lately, my blogging seems to question the act of blogging, much as my facebook-time wonders at itself: what do I get out of this? Is this a narcissist's passtime? Facebook connects me to people whom I would, in no other way, be able to access or yes, follow. It offers lots of professional and academic updates that I could never otherwise find. And it's fun, in a mindless way. Of myself I require only moderation or the eventual cutting-off from my facebook presence.

Blogging is different. One must generate content, have, as they say, a thing to say. I write. It's what I do, what I really am on the radio dial of stations, it is my favorite self. This blog has been besides sounding board, rough draft, place of conversation and imagined listener, also, a comfort, a friend when I went to new places and had not yet made any friends. A place to mark my days when they were sliding by without witness. I don't presume any sort of importance to my thoughts, but as with the bloggers I read, I hope to strike a resonant chord.

Resonance: there it is, as in what resonates now, for me and this self, a little down-dial or up-dial from the intagliod-me. My life feels more set. Nothing is set, no artist can believe otherwise, but there are levels of chaos, levels of disorder and there moments, say last, late summer, when one actually feels able to plant bulbs, those versions of next season that say more owner and less renter, those kind of promised crops that suggest not permanence but the hope of a little lingering.

I can linger a little now. One big beloved's illness, one beloved near-father-in-law's death, one dear left-behind wife's grief and relocation later, one long, long season of taking, I know better than to suggest anything stays put for long, but that anxiety, that brand of carpe diem and restlessness varies much from the way I talked here in this lovely keeping-place blog, so often and so (six whole years!) long.

This isn't a goodbye, it's a bifurcation, not from this road to another, not instead but rather, also. I won't be updating as frequently as I once was, but the house-me, the baking-me, the longtime writing and near-sister friendship of me to the great writer: Kathrine Wright, has a couple of new digs if you're interested in stopping by sometimes:

One is the cool baking blog which is blending into the great new wonderblog called Sweetly Disturbed.

For the lovely Dr. Adler, Whose Birthday I Neglected to Blog About

He of the Slouching Toward Cincinnati poem cycle,
of the black cat, zaftig in her plush pelt, beloved
beyond even the bouquet of radishes offered me
one long roadtrip to Kent, Ohio where we vowed
not to eat them until we called one another and so
we did, crunching the rubyness of them into the cell
towers of one a.m. or thereabouts. Where a big black
horse and a cherry tree were all that we'd need in Philadelphia
in the libraries of his discontent, as familiarity might breed
as much, in his hometown where everyone knows my name!
He of the jumping-on-hotel-beds, riding in Costco
shopping carts, the convertable top down to most
weathers, even in January, especially New Year's Eve
where half-frozen but exhilerated-we drove
a crisp path into the winter stars where later
we'll meet in the fruitstand of our dreams where yes,
we dare to eat a peach, and indeed they are always in season.
To which I say Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

I love my BFF! So happy the world could dream up this little prince
and he could be findable. (Though we really should
make arrangements in the event of time travel.)

Happy Birthday Keith Rehm!

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

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!

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

"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