January 2012
3 posts
1 tag
from Colophon
More than the beetles turned russet,
sunset, dragging their shield, more than
the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon,
it’s the bees I love this time of year.
Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips
of too many flowers for one summer but
still must go on hunting, one secret
closing, another ensuing, picking
lock after lock, rapping the glass,
getting stuck in a...
1 tag
In Kansas
The moon coming back,
your breath returning,
love replenishing itself.
Allison Funk
I Datura
It’s warm enough
to sit out on the porch
till late:
the windows
all along this street
burning out
one by one
till only the moon
and the saw-toothed pumpkins
set out in the yards
are visible
as if the town
had finally...
1 tag
In Autumn
The extinct animals are still looking for home
Their eyes full of cotton
Now they will
Never arrive
The stars are like that
Moving on without memory
Without having been near turning elsewhere climbing
Nothing the wall
The hours their shadows
The lights are going on in the leaves nothing to do with evening
Those are cities
Where I had hoped to live.
Mark Irwin
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
October (section I)
Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted
didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters
wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe
didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury
terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t...
1 tag
Fetch
Go, bring back the worthless stick.
“Of memory,” I almost added.
But she wouldn’t understand, naturally.
There is the word and the thing
adhering. So far so good.
Metaphor, drawer of drafting tools—
spill it on the study floor, animal says,
that we might at least see
how an expensive ruler tastes.
Yesterday I pissed and barked and ate
because that’s what waking means.
Thus has...
1 tag
Masters of the Cante Jondo
1.
They were beside me,
they sat in black taffeta, in veils, leather chaps,
felt hats, lace. “Closer,” they call, “closer.”
“And my body I give to you,” “my body
I would betray for you.” The sun akimbo
to the plated horizon sinks, a goblet moon
above sea slowly rises
If we could talk:...
1 tag
Mother's Day
I passed through the small hills
of my mother’s hips one cold morning
and never looked back, until now, cutting
her hard toenails the yellow of blanched corn,
sitting her with her on the bed’s edge,
combing out the tuft of hair at the crown
of her head where it ratted up as she slept,
her thumbs locked into her fists, a gesture
as old as she is, her bald knees fallen together
beneath a...
1 tag
Heraclitus on Rivers
Nobody steps into the same river twice.
The same river is never the same
Because that is the nature of water.
Similarly your changing metabolism
Means that you are no longer you.
The cells die, and the precise
Configuration of the heavenly bodies
When she told you she loved you
Will not come again in this lifetime.
You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than...
November 2011
1 post
1 tag
from By Kautokeino
Nothing explains the pull and lurch of the sky,
how, sooner or later, each of us goes to answer;
no logic stills the heartbeat in the earth:
it never stops, it knits within the bone,
a world around the world we understand
waiting to be recovered and given names:
this gravity, this lifeblood in the thaw,
this salt of love, this mercury in absence.
John Burnside
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
A Mathematics of Breathing
I.
Think of any of several arched
colonnades to a cathedral,
how the arches
like fountains, say,
or certain limits in calculus,
when put to the graph paper’s crosstrees,
never quite meet any promised heaven,
instead at their vaulted heights
falling down to the abruptly ending
base of the next column,
smaller, the one smaller
past that, at last
dying, what is
called...
1 tag
Cartoon Physics, Part 1
Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock....
September 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Prayer
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1...
1 tag
The New Math
There are these notions of how the world would be better. Shoot all the anti-Semites. Wear only
red socks. Hunt truth like the wolf hunts elk, in packs, with relentless teeth. Make language stand
up and be something like a house, give it the force of wind, the courage of a storm to destroy
itself. What we think of as wild I think of as honest. Doing, not what you think, but what you are.
The...
1 tag
Anniversary
What I believe in, now,
is woodwork and sea-grass
the blond light on country roads and occasional
glimpses of the smaller birds of prey;
or lying awake at night, with a lamp still lit
in one of the lower rooms, to feel the darkness
gather like a fleece
above the stairs,
as if the house would happily reveal
its ghosts: umbrellas dripping in the hall
and rain tracked in from forty years...
1 tag
from Daphne and Laura and So Forth
Why talk when you can whisper?
Rustle, like dried leaves.
Under the bed.
It’s ugly here, but safer.
I have eight fingers
And a shell, and live in corners.
I’m free to stay up all night.
I’m working on
these ideas of my own:
venom, a web, a hat,
some last resort.
He was running,
he was asking something,
he wanted something or other.
Margaret Atwood
August 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Washing My Husband's Kilt Hose: A 32-Bar Reel
You wash wool with shampoo. If you learn nothing
else today, learn that, to use shampoo
and water the temperature of a baby’s bath.
What I have in the sink here aren’t argyles,
but proper kilt hose I knit stitch by stitch, gray
for daytime, formal whites, choosing among
dozens of possible cuffs, customized gussets
to accommodate the bulging calves
of Scottish country dancers,...
1 tag
from Textbook Statistics
If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,
think of the mole digging a tunnel underground
ninety-eight miles long to China
in one single night. If you think beauty escapes you
or your entire genealogical tree, consider the slug
with its four uneven noses, or the chameleon shifting colors
under an arbitrary light. Think of the deepest point
in the deepest ocean, the Marianas Trench in...
1 tag
America [Try saying wren]
Try saying wren.
It’s midnight
in my body, 4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and
cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten. How am I ever. Oh notebook.
A clown explains the war. What start or color or kind of
grace. I have to teach. I have to run, eat less junk. Oh CNN.
What start or color. There’s a fist of meat in my solar plexus
and green light in my...
1 tag
By Herodsfoot
Out in the dark, the tawny owls are hunting,
moving away from this house at the edge of the woods
where what we know of life is mostly owls
and night rain in the trees, a steady fuzz
we think of as accomplished,
given in marriage and taking it in turn
to go down in the dark to where the kitchen
harbours the lingering quiet we sometimes hear
as rats’ feet in the larder, seeping pipes,
the...
July 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Mastery
(for Basho, Zooey & Vico)
The dogs do not think
but instead are the flush joinery of drive and muscle,
heart and intent, now, and now again
aloft between the greening crusts of fields
and June’s high-ceilinged
heaven.
For all their flight they’re stillpoint,
flashing lure and paradigm
of how to live and how to love on earth,
completely, now, and as if their sensuous...
1 tag
Listen
Listen,
I never dreamed
I would learn to love you so.
You are as flawed
as my vision
As short tempered
as my breath.
Every time you say
you love me
I look for shelter.
But these matters are small.
Lying entranced
by your troubled life
within as without your arms
I am once again
Scholarly.
Studying a way
that is not mine.
Proof of evolution’s
variegation.
You would...
1 tag
Ends of the Earth
I write about you
as if I own you
which I do not.
As you can say of nothing
this is mine.
When we rise
the last hug
no longer belongs,
is your fiction
or my story.
Mulch for the future.
Whether we pass
through each other
like pure arrows
or fade into rumour
I write down now
a fiction of your arm
or of that afternoon
in Union Station
when we both were lost
pain falling free...
1 tag
A Secret Life
Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know...
June 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Hurt Hawks
I
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the...
1 tag
To A Terrorist
For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem
without hope, knowing there’s nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one
might offer his father’s ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there’s nothing else to do.
Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good...
1 tag
The Wife of Jesus Speaks
Ours was the first inch of time.
The word passion hadn’t yet been coined,
and I’d not yet watched my beloved
laid out to butchery and worshipped as a virgin, son
of a virgin even. This was before the Roman
bastards hammered his arms wide
as for some permanent embrace,
before the apostles paid me to lie,
he never shuddered to death in my arms, I never
feasted on his flesh...
1 tag
Camber
That rising curve, the fine line
between craft and magic where we
travel uphill without effort, where anticipation,
slipping into eros,
summons the skin. When you
say “you” with that inflection something stirs
inside the word, echo
infected with laugh. One night O., gazing at the moon
as usual, encountered K. as he was trying to outwalk
bureaucracy....
May 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Not light’s version
A child from the past:
We always knew the world
would crack open like this, in our lifetime.
The walls, the fences, the resembling
governments looking past faces into the fire
of maps on the long table. Forest sounds.
A gun. A chemical. A bomb.
Something leaking light. Then, not light.
Then, not light’s version of everything.
Then, that, after it touches something.
Michael...
1 tag
Catch a Body
Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell
anybody anything” is a string of words
I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink
to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract
by laser from the ribcage of all of us
who ever believed it, who felt afraid
to miss someone, to be the last one
standing. “Tell everyone everything” is
not exactly right, but I do believe that if
your mother looks radiant in...
1 tag
For the City that Nearly Broke Me
Listen for echoes.
Now bury what you lost
in the wind’s silence.
I want to name names but
what kind of remembrance is
syllables? Who wants more
obituaries? Just fold their
memories into the gust
of the hawk terrorizing
these January mornings.
Let me be without James,
without Black, without the boy
whose name I don’t know, but
whose face is the armor that cracks
as a bullet questions...
1 tag
from Berryman
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have...
April 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Things Unso
If the wind takes the house
it will be someone else’s
soon enough, and they too
will find it cold. What breaks
breaks open. After a house
one finds oneself in a wood,
and after too long in a wood
one finds oneself sullen
in heaven. Someone else lies
in my bed now so I can’t
sleep any better than they do.
To be lost is to be connected
interminably.
When they turn in my bed
the whole...
1 tag
Ferry Boat Wreck
I have spent all day with the silver disc of the barn owl’s face
embedded in my thoughts & my beloved under general
anesthetic, his whole form etherized, calcite laddering
his spine, strange thorns in the distinct cave of him. I wring
my hands, silly spinster-ish fret motion, I say shoo but still
the owl’s trembly face luminescent or opalescent & by all reckoning
grave. I...
1 tag
Days I Enjoy
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,
When I have no engagements written on my block,
When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,
When no one comes to take me away from myself
And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,
A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,
Being so contrived that it takes too long a time
To get myself back to myself when they have gone.
The years...
1 tag
from The Aerodrome
If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
Seamus Heaney
1 tag
i.e.
The window, say the window shattering on a arm Say any given home/ river/ one town over/ loose stone Let loose [of course, towns grow like shattering Say prove the towns or answer with Stacy Kidd
1 tag
Adulterated
Bella fica! (beautiful fig, fine sex) the whore said
in the back streets of Livorno, proudly slapping
her groin when the man tried to get the price down.
Braddock, the heavyweight champion of the world,
when Joe Louis was destroying him, blood spraying
and his manager between the rounds wanting to stop
the fight, said, I won the title in the ring,
I’m going to lose it in the ring....
1 tag
Uncle John
That was the year
Granddaddy Thomas died
Left the family worse than broke
Uncle John stole a ham
from Mr. Ennis’s Meat Market
He was seventeen
Lost his taste for it
locked up
fourteen years
Ham salt cured and earth-red
sliced with the fat hanging on
yellow sunshine on a white plate
The hambone cut crosswise
rings marrow
a dark eye
All in the skillet
making gravy for grits
Lost...
March 2011
3 posts
1 tag
from Concerning the Atoms of the Soul
Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the centre
of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.
John Glenday
1 tag
The Lives of the Heart
Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step...
1 tag
since feeling is first
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning...
February 2011
2 posts
1 tag
I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night
Janet Frame
1 tag
Aubade
Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,
Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue,
What have we after that to look forward to?
Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.
Louis MacNeice
January 2011
8 posts
1 tag
From the Devotions
1.
As if somewhere, away, a door had slammed shut.
—But not metal; not wood.
Or as when something is later remembered only
as something dark in the dream:
torn, bruised, dream-slow
descending, it could be anything—
tiling, clouds,
you again, beautifully consistent, in no
usual or masterable way leaves, a woman’s
shaken-loose throat, shattered
eyes...
1 tag
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me...
1 tag
from Originally
All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,
leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue
where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.
Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,
leading to unimagined, pebble-dashed estates, big boys
eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.
My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth
in my head. I want our own country,...
1 tag
Geometry
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
And above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true...
1 tag
User's Guide to Physical Debilitation
Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days
but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
stirring dark witch’s brews of resentment
inside what had been her happy...
1 tag
The Threat
I am not looking for your jugular.
Only for your eyes.
This isn’t exactly accurate.
I want both. And if you ask, as you should
if you like yourself, why do I go for such
ferocious treats, I must
admit
that there is something unexploded in my gut.
And it wants you because there is
an unexploded something in yours too.
A music box we swallowed when we were children?
The...
1 tag
Habitation
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
The edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
Margaret Atwood