1 enero 2013

we fell asleep last night to thunder & lightning & the sound of rain, up

at midnight to fireworks, now cloudy morning, we hope for rain

Joseph Fasano [pic courtesy of Cider Press Review]

Mahler in New York

by Joseph Fasano [Rattle #30, Winter 2008]

Now when I go out, the wind pulls me

into the grave. I go out
to part the hair of a child I left behind,

and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind.
If I carry my father with me, it is the way
a horse carries autumn in its mane.

If I remember my brother,
it is as if a buck had knelt down
in a room I was in.

I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me.
What is it to have a history, a flock
buried in the blindness of winter?

Try crawling with two violins
into the hallway of your father’s hearse.
It is filled with sparrows.

Sometimes I go to the field
and the field is bare. There is the wind,
which entrusts me;

there is a woman walking with a pail of milk,
a man who tilts his bread in the sun;
there is the black heart of a mare

in the milk — or is it the wind, the way it goes?
I don’t know about the wind, about the way
it goes. All I know is that sometimes

someone will pick up the black violin of his childhood
and start playing — that it sits there on his shoulder
like a thin gray falcon asleep in its blinders,

and that we carry each other this way
because it is the way we would like to be carried:
sometimes with mercy, sometimes without.

Jenny Boully [pic courtesy of coldfront]

footnotes from Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay (2007)

3. One thing the great poet confessed before biting into her doughnut: a good poem writes itself as if it doesn’t care — never let on that within this finite space, your whole being is heavy with a need to emote infinitely.

10. See also De Sica’s Bicycle Thief; thus the leitmotif of this body: What will I have found in the end if I am seeking one thing in particular?

15. Although the text implies a great flood here, know this is seen through a child’s eyes, and here she actually played in sprinklers while loving Heraclitus

24. The death would indeed involve lunamoths and lilacs.

25. But in those days, I thought that by believing in magic and miracles, by believing hard enough, harder than anyone on earth, I would be made witness to the sublime. And so, what I was doing on the rooftop was praying. I was praying for the gift of flight, for the black umbrella and the hidden angels to aid me.

29. After my sister and I stared at the magazine, we were, the both of us, afraid to part our legs or even to pee. For months, we were inseparable in the bathroom, but then, we became brave and decided to look for our holes, and if the spider did come out we would kill it.

from Roland Barthes [tr. Richard Howard (2010)], A Lover’s Discourse:Fragments (1978):

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not — that is the beginning of writing.

At this point in our life, we avoid medical tests, which doesn't mean we never submit, but almost never. When I suffered from a severe digestive ailment for six months of last year, the medical tests revealed nothing. I recovered when a good friend suggested I stop drinking the local water, which, last time I heard, tests clean.

Here's a good article why not to have an MRI.

off & on rain & clouds remain: I plant new seeds — Japanese cucumbers
collards & bok choi, eggplant & tatsoi, mustard & Asian salad greens

Yet Mommy’s Little Monkey — a T-shirt decal — is noise

compared to a body to hold

This is Baby This is Jaguar This is Goose

Mother settles her tweed hat for an easy walk to town

steam rising from boiling jars of fresh sauerkraut

The ducks have a house This is a gopher hole