Andrew Grace

Andrew Grace [Shenandoah]

from Andrew Grace's Shadeland:

Grant Wood, oil on hardboard, 1934

1.

Noon. A thresher waits
to wash the debris from his face into
a stone bowl. His hair is stiff
with lice. A rooster
missed its hour, tries
to scream the sun back down; it is Iowa,
1892. A draft horse the color
of zinc tongues it own shadow.
The thresher is about to join a table
of men — fourteen of them, as in the Last Supper —
in the house
for lunch. The string of Xs
formed by the backs of the men’s overalls marks a negation.
They lift the offering to their
mouths: blood, flesh;
coffee, rabbit.

2.

Their minds are on process:
thrash, shake, winnow. Two thousand
bushels bagged in a pigeon-crusted loft.
Two thousand to go.
Man in the hopper,
man on the stack of moth-gutted
wheat. Two horses lashed to the ends
of a rafter, the drugged circumference
of their labor turns the machine.
The man in the hopper
pushes wheat into a chute, which separates
grain from chaff. A boy clears the waste.
A shroud of white moths rises
from his arms.

3.

The thresher’s forehead is the color of torn roots, his face
and neck empurpled by sun, spelled only by quick
reshufflings of cirrus.
He is not
unhappy, only
afflicted by variables. Hail, rust,
blight, eyespot,
black chaff,
pink seed, flood, endless depth of sky, endless dark of his bedroom
in which the eye drowns.

4.

Ornate wallpaper, the smell of cooked meat
like the flush of warmth back
to a cold extremity:
women bring bowls
to the table, men in
fellowship with men as a reward for labor.
But for every spotless rack
of cerulean china
there is a night
when the rooster
conjures a false dawn;
in its intervals
silence rages in the English garden;
candle flames like commas
prolong the dark. This is why
aprons are bleached daily,
why the barn is scrubbed as reclamation from
scat and sun, why
each man asks for more meat, more labor
as if bodies
are made to be consumed.

5.

To chew the roots of cowbane is a way out. Laudanum under
the sink is
a way out. Also, the concept
of being a metaphor
for wheat:
when torn open: raw, prone material
that broken across
a machine or a winter
is malleable to
any use; touch me and blue shale beneath
us is tamped an inch
towards the underworld.
What if they did not want
a way out? Night’s oaks swallow wrens, so dark
the barn is imperceptible. To sit at that
table emptied of its men is to
learn to take solace in what pours
from the window’s open mouth.

6.

The last man raises
his face from the bowl. The prairie
is both hurtling and
standing still. It will
not rearrange itself no
matter how deeply he scrawls his attention
over it. He takes in the thick
concussions of light.
He is drawn back to the barn
and past it, where pheasants explode
from the ditches. He is not hungry
anymore. Someone will take his seat
at the table. Someone will lower their head
and ask the Lord to be made
more bare to the sun.
A clot of moths unravels
across the man’s eyes. He asks for no other
veil over the stillness.
And the Lord
provides.

Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen [M/ELT]

from Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary:

Fancy Cortex

Reading Jayne Cortez

I’m using my plain brain to imagine her fancy cortex. As if my Lowly mollusk could wear so exalted a mantle as her pontifex Pallium. As if the knots and tangles of my twisted psyche could mesh with her intricate synaptic network of condensed neural convolutions. As if my simple chalk could fossilize the memory of her monumental reefs of caulifloral coral. As if my shallow unschooled shoals could reckon the calculus of her kink’s brainwave tsunami. As if the pedestrian software of my mundane explorer could map as rounded colonies the terra incognita of her undiscovered hemispheres. As if the speculative diagnosis of my imaging technology could chart the direction of her intuitive intellect. As if the inquisitive iris of my galaxy-orbiting telescope could see as far as her vision. As if the trained nostrils of my nacro-bloodhound could sniff out what she senses in the wind. As if my duty-free bottle of jerk sauce could simulate the fire ant picante that inflames her tongue of rage. As if the gray matter of my dim bulb could be enlightened by the brilliance of her burning watts. As if her divergent universification might fancy the microcosm of my prosaic mind.

Music for Homemade Instruments

I dug you artless, I dug you out. Did you re-do? You dug me less, art. You dug, let’s do art. You dug me, less art. Did you re-do? If I left art out, you dug. My artless dug-out. You dug, let art out. Did you re-do, dug-out canoe? Easy as a porkpie piper-led cinch. Easy as a baby bounce. Hop on pot, tin pan man. Original abstract, did you re-do it? Betting on shy cargo, strutting dimpled low-cal strumpets employ a hipster to blow up the native formica. Then divided efficiency on hairnets, flukes, faux saxons. You dug, did you re-do? Ever curtained to experiment with strumpet strutting. Now curtains to milk laboratory. Desecrated flukes & panics displayed by mute politicians all over this whirly-gig. A well known mocker of lurching unused brains, tribal & lustrous diddlysquats, Latin dimension crepe paper & muscular stacks. Curtains for perky strumpets strutting with mites in the twilight of their origami funkier papoose. Thanks for patting wood at flatland. Thanks for bamboozle flukes at Bama, my seedy medication. Thanks for my name in the yoohoo. Continental camp-out, percolating throughout this whirly-gig on faux saxon flukes. Artless, you dug. Did you re-do?

But we are a house

But we are a house

foundered on a hillside

bottomed in a creek & crowned

by century redwoods. We are walled

w/ eyes recording weather,

dawn, Anna's hummingbirds & silver

fungi, fox & coyote, tomato-

gobbling fawn w/ parent

(parent another kind of house).

We don’t recall the hares &

Germán’s dogs in fruitless chase,

a hundred parrots grazing

out the north window of that red-roof

pale green house, vacant now

& likely wind burned, dust bunnied,

the dying willow once hung

w/ parrots a ghost beside

a second-story stained-glass eye

incandescent w/ desire to gain

someone new’s affection.

                                          But here

in what you call present time we are

a blue-roof pale brown, say it — beige

call it bone house. Is it so unlikely

you can learn to love us?

two coyotes

coyote @ UCSC [Santa Cruz Pumas]

two coyotes cross

the driveway, eyeball the cat

disappear downslope

Sixteen Sections

falling stars reckon

a rabbit moon kin or foe

clouds may discover

according to the 11th century Ehr-Ya Encyclopedia, tyvm Philip Whalen, the world divides into sixteen sections, i.e.:

kin,

houses, utensils,

music,

heaven, earth,

mounds, hills,

waters,

plants, trees,

insects,

fishes,

birds,

wild

& domestic animals

a cat down a well

is not a drink but a dream

of drink, a bad spill

No Bone

No Bone

My thumb joint's becoming a natural

marshmallow, seamed at the wrist

above a neighborhood weave,

natives jockeying for best place,

muscling into a new interior

left by a bone drilled & joysticked

out of mosaic, its grout extruded

by decades of tool use or traces

of faulty DNA. Reconstruction’s a race

not to mimic the joint but conjecture

by tissues willed to regenerate,

to stuff life in the empty space.

the prisoned weight

the prisoned weight of
my thumb, wound & bound, boarded
stay at home Gitmo

hive

a bee, a buzz

inside a bulge, a nettle

of sting, a hum hive

Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves [Julio Jimenez]

from Roger Reeves's King Me:

Self-Portrait as Vincent van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles

The moths in the orchard squeal
with each pass of the mistral wind.
Yet the reapers and their scythes,
out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat
in sure columns. Christ
must have been made of shocks
of wheat. When they lashed him,
four bundles of fine yellow burst forth
from each welt. And the women,
tarrying as they do now behind the swing
and chuff of the reapers' blades,
gathered and plaited the stray pieces
of wheat falling from his hips into braids,
long braids that would bind a tattered sail-
cloth over his yellow mouth, yellow feet.
Oh to be bound by one's own blood
like a burlap sack cinched around the neck
with a leather belt. Father, forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard
of my mouth. Forgive the rattle and clatter
of wings inside the blur of my brain.
Even if these iron bars queer a field,
queer a woman standing too close to a reaper's blade,
a half-moon hung and wholly harsh,
even if this woman, burdened like a spine
carrying a head and a basket of rocks,
forgets the flaw of a well-sharpened tool,
let her not mistake my whimper and warning
for the honk of a goose in heat. Father,
she is not made like our savior,
of straw, of a coarse tender. Nothing will stop
when her blood runs along a furrow.
The sun will not sag with a red scowl.
The field will not refuse water, Father,
I am unsure of what I am —
a fragrant mistral wind or a pile of moth's heads
at the foot of a pear tree. Father,
give me a scythe. Father, let me decide.


Every Casket, a Pause

Leaking white into the plum-crushed tunic of night,
the geese drop their tiny anvils onto the lake,
our heads, as if your brother floating below our boat
weren't forcing enough silence into our throats.
Should I gather and burn what falls? What beast
should I press to your back and breast, let suck
at the fine ribbon of grief knotted at your neck?
I have an animal for every occasion. And another
for the occasion after. Our boat tangled in the crown
of a pine. Your hand, hacking at the needles. Too much
blood in the water. Dead Love, Dear Pine Piercing
The Top of This Flooded Lake, who will cut us down,
burn what remains, leave feathers to clot our throat?

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag [Architectural Digest]

from Susan Sontag's Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings:

Artaud wandered in the labyrinth of a specific type of religious sensibility, the Gnostic one. (Central to Mithraism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Tantric Buddhism, but pushed to the heretical margins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the perennial Gnostic thematics appear in the different religions in different terminologies but with certain common lines.) The leading energies of Gnosticism come from metaphysical anxiety and acute psychological distress — the sense of being abandoned, of being an alien, of being possessed by demonic powers which prey on the human spirit in a cosmos vacated by the divine. The cosmos is itself a battlefield, and each human life exhibits the conflict between the repressive, persecuting forces from without and the feverish, afflicted individual spirit seeking redemption. The demonic forces of the cosmos exist as physical matter. They also exist as “law,” taboos, prohibitions. Thus, in the Gnostic metaphors the spirit is abandoned, fallen, trapped in a body, and the individual is repressed, trapped, by being in “the world” — what we would call “society.” (It is a mark of all Gnostic thinking to polarize inner space, the psyche, and a vague outer space, “the world” or “society,” which is identified with repression — making little or no acknowledgment of the importance of the mediating levels of the various social spheres and institutions.) The self, or spirit, discovers itself in the break with “the world.” The only freedom possible is an inhuman desperate freedom. To be saved, the spirit must be taken out of its body, out of its personality, out of “the world.” And freedom requires an arduous preparation. Whoever seeks it must both accept extreme humiliation and exhibit the greatest spiritual pride. In one version, freedom entails total asceticism. In another version, it entails libertinism — practicing the art of transgression. To be free of “the world,” one must break the moral (or social) law. To transcend the body, one must pass through a period of physical debauchery and verbal blasphemy, on the principle that only when morality has been deliberately flouted is the individual capable of a radical transformation: entering into a state of grace that leaves all moral categories behind. In both versions of the exemplary Gnostic drama, someone who is saved is beyond good and evil. Founded on an exacerbation of dualisms (body-mind, matter-spirit, evil-good, dark-light), Gnosticism promises the abolition of all dualisms.

Artaud’s thought reproduces most of the Gnostic themes.

Saskia Hamilton

Saskia Hamilton [Star Black]

from Saskia Hamilton's Divide These:

Year One

If the eyes move to the right: no.
If they stay in the center: yes.

The left is for listening because they sit
on the left side of the bed.

Only the eyes move. Someone
swabs her lips.

◊

The first nurse is too cheerful.

The second does not know

how to speak to the speechless.

The third strokes her arm:

something settles down:

one lying, one sitting,

one in the doorway.

Remembering Dreams

A flash of green,

the face of someone mouthing words

you can’t hear or remember —

sometimes all that returns is the curve

of the plank bridge you cross, the wonder of

outstretched wings, your body

riding the air between.

Nights, you lie impatient

for sleep, for noises to jolt you awake

mid-dream — the sound of the child

rising from her bed at the foot of your bed,

staring out the window, then peering at you,

your closed eyes, making sure you’re

still here, the child not knowing

you are awake & listening.

You wait for reruns —

the dream of the lion, the snakes

surrounding the bed, the long corridors,

pitched ramps, stair steps

hollowed by boot soles

leading you higher & higher to room after room,

family & roommates, always

the old house.

You wait for the rare dreams

where your mother is alive

& going her patient way —

“being a mother is learning how to wait”

she would say at the doctor’s office,

at piano lessons, & afterward waiting alone

the rest of her life for letters & calls, waiting

through the long dream of her death.

Before first light

you wait & listen, dreams gone by

except in bursts — one actor

center stage, spots blazing, grease-paint

running, her mouth round & open

she speaks into the memory

of your other world.

Jan Bolesław Ożóg

Jan_Bolesław_Ożóg [Wikipedia]

Jan Boleslaw Ozóg translated by Leonard Kress from Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Emory George:

Village for a Wedding

Sky like pigeon’s little belly.

Sky like goldfinch egg,

sky like starling’s tune

greenishblue.

But fields like sundrenched sea

where roe-deer bound through oats

like fish through sea of rye.

And the village distant from a hummock

like a chain on a bicycle.

Iris in golden glimmer like pilot-flame.

But trees deeprooted like ponds

of green broth.

But grass like prayers

from lips of decaying willows.

And the village distant from a hummock

harrows gouged by nails

instead of stakes.

Lady bugs slide off lindens,

cockroaches to pick in a kerchief.

In barns peasant gears groan

cranking round the chaffcutter,

and frightened wasps play

like a heathen church at high mass.

Red beaks of carrots

circle higher than storks.

And the power station beyond the village

limping on crutches

like bent herdsman on crook.

Here the morning scented with hemp

saltily with bundle of clover.

Here my beloved hides for the night

safe from the boys in the kneading trough.

But up the ladder to the attic

carrying a measure of rye on his back

like a good husband

Here you are invited to the wedding.

Lisa Jarnot

Lisa Jarnot [John Sarsgard]

from Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire:

Valley of the Shadow of the Dogs

He could be so far outside himself, generating body heat, far from the telephone, in a room, heated, with the outside of his thoughts, turning, with precision, for the reasons he would know, nearer to god and the mountains and the outside of the room, with the chairs, perceived as objects, always slightly passed, looming, on the forefront, like cake, looming, on the forefront, ambitious, like a sumac leaf, lovely, a wing, with wings and made of cake, having counted let me count, one, the ways that there are, unused, potentially useful, held at a distance like a flower filled with tiny bugs, loved and lovely, without raccoons, beside the spiders, smashed on the sides of the forks, lovely the form in the meadow of the shadows of the dogs, howling, reckless, unusual, unfulfilled, with the christmas lights, steady, and how close I am to myself, and how close they are to the sumac leaves, lovely, against the rain, falling out, fully heated, from the inside of his head, with spiders, in a meeting, against the rain, given to this disposition, equally talented, talkative, talking in tongues, beyond the heads of cows, friendly, on the staircase, friendly, where I waited and the city moved, drenched beneath the sumac leaves, having fallen, into the field, where the dogs are looming, in the forefront, in the shadow of the gods, dreaming of being alone, relieved, heated, steady on the trees beside their wings, riding on the backs of all the bears, and the bears, relieved to be the sumac leaves, and the sumac leaves, relieved to be the bears, and the spider, on the plate, relieved to be just so, wanting to be loved, where the city moved, and then I moved, and the pins all moved, out of place, tetanus-like, having syllables, wishing to love, wishing to love the ocean and the ski runs and the sand, wishing to love the sheep, converging, on the frontispiece, having thrown the ball, equally having thrown the ball and having thrown it, into the leaves, near the trees and all the dogs, meditating, on the coffee cups, meditating, on the backs of all the bears.

Sea Lyrics [excerpt]

I am this Santa Ana wind and we are bowlers, we are at the haircut man, I have divulged so little of the avocado dawn, I am waiting to buy coffee near the docks upon the square, I am all the hot dogs and the roof of city hall, I am hardly standing in the kamikaze rain, I am of the new year sober now, I am inside of all the horoscopes at once, I am the rainy part of early fall expecting to go back across the bridges, I am near the greenish plantains down the street, I am the subtler angles of the sunlight from the surface of the moon, I am here to yet predict the dawn, I am getting better like the oceans on the sidestreet, I am surrounded by water, I am walking sideways near the church in Watsonville upon the orange line at Lammas Tide.

Right Speech

Love, which is meaning

compels speech, speech

which is human, compels

mammals, from the trees

of the language of the

mammals, from the mailbox

where they rise, speakers,

hugged close to the

forest fires late at night,

tigers, cicadas, and trees,

name of the one who is love

compels speech which is

meaning from trees to be

mammals, mammalian,

made of music, made of

tigers with the flames,

rising up from the gardens

of the naming of the night,

giant, speaking to me,

content with this, the trees

with tigers and with corn,

the hot spell of speaking

speech, the language laced

with tigers laced with night.

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine [LA Times]

Claudia Rankine from The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture:

I know, because I have been told, some people find The End of the Alphabet to be something other than accessible. This, of course, was never my intention. I wanted only to distress the reading experience so that words were no longer markings to be skimmed over towards the close of an expected narrative. The idea was that a word, any word, would cast its layers of meaning toward an emotional field that was triggered by certain unexpected juxtapositions on the page. The reading experience then would be a journey into a process outside of the narrative plot-driven arc. In this sense I wanted an end to thought as I encountered it in narrative poetry. An end to clarity, however, was never my intent. Always we were meant to come up, to arrive at another mode of expression, for it seemed to me that language could be turned toward rendering an atmosphere, a feeling of flux and desperation, which seems the point of autobiographical, confessional poetry anyway. You know what I mean, people talk a lot and what are they saying beyond, we are not as we “are living” ourselves to be.

Claudia Rankine from The End of the Alphabet:

Overview is a place

Difficult to pinpoint

fear of self, uncoiled.

specter unstrung. staggering stampede. Which

sung? left the body open for the moon to break into,

unspooling disadvantage.

Give a thought, Jane: Did filth

begin in conversation? drag

the mood through before escaping the ugliness. Not to

dwell on but overhear footsteps again

approaching: immured,

not immune, then dumdum

bullet templed, rip the mind out. go ahead.

*

Dawn will clear though the night rains so hard. Rain

and Jane mix and mixing up, thinking shore but hugging floor.

What Jane must substitute for this year’s substitute

for a mind intact? fire?

its greediness egged on, flame after flame

uninvolved

but still fueling the shifting onslaught.

Gray Jane

emphasize otherwise, not the eyes

but the cheek to the pillow. Bundle up and sweep

bare the mind. Land its ooze

at some other gate, soften

dead wood. Sea smoke, drizzle, distance. The moment

of elucidation snipped its tongue, its mouth water

dried out —

thought-damaged throat.

*

Remember a future

from another dream

and hold on. open your mouth

close to your ear: fear

in sanity lives. anatomy

as dissonance,

vertebral breaking. In spite

of yourself.

rising, the mercury

reaching out

to fever. fire. all your civilized

sense, Jane, disabled.

*

Assurance collapses naturally

as if each word were a dozen rare birds

flown away. And gone

elsewhere is their guaranteed landing

though the orphaned wish

to be happy was never withdrawn.

Do not face assault uncoiled as loss,

as something turned down: request or sheet. Pray

to the dear earth, Jane, always freshly turned,

pull the covers overhead and give

and take the easier piece.

to piece the mind.

to gather on tiptoe. Having lost

somewhere, without a name to call, help

yourself. all I want.

Victor Hernández Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz [Butler MFA]

from Victor Hernández Cruz's Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000:

Mesa Blanca

If I were writing on rock,
It would be the wind of the year
That caressing me will make
Me aware of the shadows on
A distant stone —
That signifies an eclipse
On some unseen distant roof,
From where in the form of
A kite a diamond leaves for heaven.

It would be that sound that I would
Make into a face,
Present it at the banquet of those
Who came lost on the boats
Punctuate on key
A coco-net of cybernetic eyes
Transmitting from the beach.

The sea a rush or mists,
Christ carrying the cross of Castile
Soldiers laundering heads of crushed guava
Have popped out of there
Salty like bacalao which here has been
Fricasseed with calabaza,
So we have to church the word
Mestizo
Half and Half —
So that textbooks claiming total
Taino vanishment
Should four pages later erase
The word Mestizo,
With the same mouth they say we are,
Was Webster wasting his time:
"mes-tiz-o [Sp. fr. mestizo, mixed, fr. L.L. mixticius]
a person of mixed blood; specif: a person of mixed
European and American Indian ancestry."

The sensational things coming together,
Of the Arawak-Taino
The only thing that remains is
What is not gone:
The looks,
The gestures,
The thoughts,
The dreams,
The intuitions,
The memories,
The names of fruits,
Rivers,
The names of towns,
Vegetables,
Certain fish,
The gourd making music
In the mountain,
The maraca making feet
Areyto dance,
And this cigar between my fingers.
More than half is the ground itself
The rock in my hands was in Arecibo's palm.
This is not to disagree with the
Anthropologists of text
But merely to reaffirm what they mean
When they don't say.

This paper which was a tree
is crying for its leaves
That's the route of your mind
To dance its branches,
For that canopy red flower
Of the Antilles,
So high up in air spirit,
Flowing right through that bark,
A water shaft,
A city of bamboos
Liquefied fructus,
Humid swamp for that
Night frog.
To sing without rest
Till the roosters brush their
Beaks with the first
Arriving morning light.

The joyful noise of the night
What might be coming from lips,
Or the rubbing of legs
The full harmonic tropical berserk
Begging for love
In abundance
Not one thousand
But one thousand and one
Lights of cucubanos,
Morse-coding lovers,
That come down,
meow not now
Of the cats —

For that's the flavor,
Within the opening of the
Two mountains,
A glance following the
River
That goes to fish its memories,
Scratched one next to the other
Like the grooves of shells,

To think that no one believes
We are here.
The past in the smoke of the cigar,
Bringing the future in-formation.

. . .

The caciques were descendants of hydrogen
The sun hung upon their chest
Candles near the Indian Head
Simaron rockets
They passed singing through
Mavi trees and rock —
They migrate with the blood
And filter through the bricks
Going toward feathers —
In the frozen ice a gold head
Ring upon a finger calls
And the water boils as if
For tea star anise —
When the prayer takes cadence
Someone's hands circle in the
Rising heat
Elevating from the intestines
A stream
Canoes in fierce paddle
Passing the throat
Broadcasting splinters of words
Like a prairie fire
En route to ignite the Crown.

*

A brush of airs full of words —
Ink on limestone marble —
The house itself is a poem,
Enter through the word: See
Shadows and rhythmic stone.
Sara churns 2,000 pieces of silk,
Passports for sailors,
Shepherd streams in the desert,
A caravana of gold tooth wagons,
Long skirts and sharp eyes.
A-string vibes in the air
The ear that heard the doors
of the Cathedral of Burgos open:
Arco de Santa Maria —
El Cid and his sword
Pointed on the parchment —
Riding the sweet eyes of a little girl
Into the stare of macabre machos
Thirsty for blood.
Peace and rage
The picture brings memory to its knees.
The stroll of a scroll pulled
From the pocket of a Cataluña Street.
In the presence of the past — 
Coming back to wonder
How a fresh of air
Can come and bow amongst us —
In the humid Antillean
From dream to terror:
From Bohíos to apartments
From cathedral to mosque
Words ironed into stone.

The Castilians were coming
Out of the mouth of a volcano
Falling as ash unto red dirt.
Orocovis navel earthenware —
Artisans of finger palms
Had designs for each fruit taste
It is that subtle of a music
What silence for cadence split
Coffee people to enter you
Tobacco people to enter you
Sugar cane to enter you.
Corozo palms supply the material
For the black asabache
The space between stars
To enroll your finger
Vegetable craft
Working bones
Placing mother-of-pearl
Like light into the seeds
Three years before Columbus
The future spoke
The mouth of Volcanos:
Ashes.

. . .

What is the melody in the mountains,
Tubers imagining deep in dirt,
Used to be chanted rosaries
A cadence emerging out of wood,
Down ravine circling region
Eating the wide silence —
In trance with the rosary beads
A medieval gloss,
They lived in Maria's womb.

The coast what it got —
Rhythm and waves —
Palms clapping awake the perfume
Humid women in plaza dance
Tongues out of mouth
At the men who jump in the shadows
Panama hats transmitting
Toward the radar 
Of the waits.

Cucarachas in the chicken dance
The roosters bebop.

Heat that is sweat is the ink
A calor in Spanish that
The Church starts to run
Down Avenida Piel de Canela.

Hot waters rising through the
Songs of minerals
As mountain and coast
Morel Campos danza —
Antique contraband bones,
Flesh of bamboo walking
Senegal the Force Feet
of mountain trovador
Rhythm golden bird
Inventing itself on the
Spot.

A disjoint of bone
Like yoga
The Rig Veda becomes
Foot and step —
From Guayama the priest
Ferment of herbs
Frog breath
Lizard Tail
Opticals of owls
And all the fires there are.

What choice do you have:
Might as well jump toward
land like seed
Tongue in moisture
With green mountain light
And coastal curves —
To lick the invisible
Generations.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright [symphonyspace]

from Richard Wright's Haiku: This Other World, "scarecrow" haiku:

“Oh, Mr. Scarecrow,

Stop waving your arms about

Like a foreigner!”

From the scarecrow’s sleeve

A tiny green leaf unfolds

On an oaken arm.

Late one winter night

I saw a skinny scarecrow

Gobbling slabs of meat.

The scarecrow’s old hat

Was flung by the winter wind

Into a graveyard.

Little boys tossing

Stones at a guilty scarecrow

In a snowy field.

Even the sparrows

Are attempting to thaw out

The frozen scarecrow.

When I turn about,

My shadow lies alongside

That of a scarecrow.

“Let’s make a scarecrow!”

But after we had made it,

Our field grew smaller.

Bedraggled scarecrow,

What a time you must have had

In last night’s rainstorm!

Scarecrow, who starved you,

Set you in that icy wind,

And then forgot you?

Don’t they make you sad,

Those wild geese winging southward,

O lonely scarecrow?

It is so hot that

The scarecrow has taken off

All his underwear!

Accidentally

Cut by the tip of the hoe,

The scarecrow shudders.

When the horse whinnies,

The scarecrow waves both his arms,

Asking for silence.

A skinny scarecrow

And its skinnier shadow

Fleeing a cold moon.

As my delegate,

The scarecrow looks pensively

Into spring moonlight.

A darting sparrow

Startles a skinny scarecrow

Back to watchfulness.

His task completed,

The scarecrow watches the truck

Leave loaded with corn.

The scarecrow’s big sleeves

Advertising in the sun:

Huge, red tomatoes!

On a scarecrow’s head

A sparrow braces itself

Against the spring wind.

He hesitated

Before hanging up his coat

On the scarecrow’s arm.