20 may 2013

Miss Vee

I know it’s unreasonable

especially for someone like me

who doesn’t cry easily or often

to tell you how often I cry now

how I might show up at your house

unable to say a word without crying

but if I try to explain

it comes out sounding

like something Elizabeth Bishop said better

in a poem that’s in a book I’ve lost

along with the rest of my books

all my journals & my mother’s journal

half my clothes plus everything else

Mike didn’t bring back in his luggage

when he returned from Argentina

things I don’t even ask about

like the chenille throw Susan gave me

the fossil rock Ben gave me

material things I cared for

yet those are the least of it

so far behind 

horses cropping alfalfa out windows

that leaked in every rain

onto the windowsills & down 

along the badly set & poorly caulked frames

wet that streaked the paint

of many colors — kiwi & mauve

jalapeño, sunset, goldfinch

erasure

so swift & violent

I scrubbed every trace from my computer & the web

every picture, every glimpse exists

only in my head now

how foxes walked

softly on small feet

how parrots tipped forward & back

on wires holding grapevines

how doves paraded beside the pond

balanced on rocks, dipped their beaks to drink

how toads floated on loose limbs

at the pond rim

how as a kitten

my cat fell in the pond

how she must have clawed her way

up from the water

how I saw her — legs bent, belly dragging

back to the house

where I lifted her, wrapped her in towels

a shivering frightened small cat

the same one who arched her back, fur high 

swagger-hopped out to take the fox

before I grabbed her

rushed her into the house where she would be safe

I miss her more than the mountains

burning red at dawn
more than the llama-wool rugs

beneath my bare feet

more than my red plush chair

19 may 2013

Bob Hicok [Narrative Magazine]

from Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed:

Born again

One day I was introduced to a bed

in which a woman was born, gave birth, and died.

The woman who introduced me to the bed

was the granddaughter of the woman

who was born in the bed and never lived

in another house.

Being a child of wind, I whispered

in the company of so much permanence.

The woman found my reverence ridiculous.

I knew this because she took off her clothes

and got on the bed as a way of asking me

to join her in making the bed a living bed.

It was in that bed that the woman told me

she tried to kill herself at seventeen.

Lots of Valium under a tree with horses nearby

ignoring her to eat.

This is my second life, she said, the one I got

for not knowing more about drugs, for being shy

when it came to my father’s shotgun

in my mouth.

By then, she’d lived a hundred years

in dog years beyond when she’d wanted to die.

When I told her this, she said, Woof.

The bed squeaked each time we turned

or breathed our bodies into each other.

I keep asking myself if this story is true.

I seem to believe it is, seem to admire time

and making love on top of musical springs

and the world every day for not killing itself,

not exploding or burning down

as it might reasonably want to.

And the woman?

I seem to know her or contain her or think

the valley in which I live

would resemble her if someone had the language

to convince it to rise and be a woman

wearing a flowered dress.

Women are more likely to wear gardens

than men, to be valleys, to hold time

in their bodies and take us

inside what is passing

as it passes, what is arriving

as we leave.

And the man?

I seem to be him or want him

to be the feeling that stars

would look down on us and ask

What are you going through

if only they had mouths.

17 may 2013

Joseph Massey [Manor House Quarterly]

from Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog:

Property Line [excerpts]

Honeysuckle

scent like

an open vowel

wrung out

in the rain’s

gloss-

olalia.

*

Wing-slur —

half a humming-

bird’s body

swallowed by

one of the few

fuchsias left.

Arcata Marsh

            Mudscape — tide’s out —

out as far as fog gives sight.

            Periphery-flecked,

orange-white

lichen latched to limbs

            I thought were your

fingers —

            your face turned

back by wind.

17 may 2013

[James Bowe]

The snail’s

lucent

cracked shell

operculum-

pinioned

exsiccating

body mass.

Scratched

the crow

awaits

our passing.

16 may 2013

I Still Have the Floorplan

We look off

as newborns look

into other space

where a door opens

onto a room

& farther doors

to further rooms

of the infinite house

where others live

whether we know

them or not —

known space

we’re hoping to

resurrect from

first memory

every time we

reconnect to

our commonplace.

Cornel West [Evan Agostini]

Cornel West on W. E. B. Du Bois:

the Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and in many ways antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes far beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge versus mass ignorance, individual autonomy versus dogmatic authority and self-mastery versus intolerant tradition. Our tragicomic times require more democratic concepts of knowledge and leadership that highlight human fallibility and mutual accountability, notions of individuality and contested authority that stress dynamic traditions and ideals of self-realization within participatory communities.

The second fundamental pillar of Du Bois’s intellectual project is his Victorian strategies — namely, the ways in which his Enlightenment worldview can be translated into action. They rest upon three basic assumptions. First, that the self-appointed agents of Enlightenment constitute a sacrificial cultural elite engaged in service on behalf of the impulsive and irrational masses. Second, that this service consists of shaping and molding the values and viewpoints of the masses by managing educational and political bureaucracies (e.g., schools and political parties). Third, that the effective management of these bureaucracies by the educated few for the benefit of the pathetic many promotes material and spiritual progress. . . .

In fact, Du Bois’s notion . . . is a descendant of those cultural and political elites conceived by the major Victorian critics during the heyday of the British empire in its industrial phase. S. T. Coleridge’s secular clerisy, Thomas Carlyle’s strong heroes and Matthew Arnold’s disinterested aliens all shun the superficial vulgarity of materialism and the cheap thrills of hedonism in order to preserve and promote highbrow culture and to civilize and contain the lowbrow masses. . . .”The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” . . . The patriarchal sensibilities speak for themselves. They are unargued for, hence unacceptable.

W. E. B. Du Bois [Library of Congress]

14 may 2013

Rosmarie Waldrop [electronic poetry center]

from Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles:

4 I tried to understand the mystery of names by staring into the mirror and repeating mine over and over. Or the word “me.” As if one could come into language as into a room. Lost in the blank, my obsessive detachment spiraled out into the unusable space of infinity, indifferent nakedness. I sat down in it. No balcony for clearer view, but I could focus on the silvered lack of substance or the syllables that correspond to it because all resonance grows from consent to emptiness. But maybe, in my craving for hinges, I confused identity with someone else.

5 Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence which might go on forever, knotting phrase onto phrase with fire hydrants and parking meters, and still not take me to my language waiting, surely, around some corner. Though I am not certain what to expect. This time it might be Narragansett. Or black. A sidewalk is a narrow location in history, and no bright remarks can hold back the dark. In the same way, when a child throws her ball there is no winning or losing unless she can’t remember her name because, although the street lamp has blushed on pink the dark sits on top of it like a tower and allows no more than a narrow cone of family resemblance.

6 I learned about communication by twisting my legs around yours as, in spinning a thought, we twist fiber on fiber. The strength of language does not reside in the fact that some one desire runs its whole length, but in the overlapping of many generations. Relationships form before they are written down just as grass bends before the wind, and now it is impossible to know which of us went toward the other, naked, unsteady, but, once lit, the unprepared fused with its afterimage like twenty stories of glass and steel on fire. Our lord of the mirror. I closed my eyes, afraid to resemble. . . .

10 It is best to stop as soon as you hear a word in a language you don’t know. Its opaqueness stands, not as a signpost to the adventures of misunderstanding, but a wall where touch goes deaf, and without explanations hanging in the air, waiting to be supported by the clotheslines of childhood.

14 may 2013

Stacey Waite [from her website]

from Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint:

when the chalk of androgyny

there was always something about the public bathroom doors, always the chalk of androgyny sticking in my throat as i’d walk towards the women’s room with my mother. somehow i knew she wasn’t bothered by the stick figure triangle skirt that indicated the path we were to take, the ways we were to interpret our bodies, but my mother and i do not have the same body. my mother does not read the doors at all; she is automatic in her automatic body. she tugs me in by my small arms and leads me to the stall. . . .

when in a cabin in maine

no room where the fish

were sometimes cut

no claw foot tub

in which to wring

out the sorrow

from her body

we swim the length

of the lake apart

last night her hand

drafts my body

in halves

we do not keep

the records

of what has been lost

she says she would

again if not for

wanting to see underwater

and my body is underwater

the bed is underwater

her hand heavy

in the wet shell

of another summer

in maine no the fish

were not cut in this room

in this room the fish

were not cut or taken

from underwater

the room itself is

underwater

the bed is underwater

the body the cut trees

the wreckage of towns

all taken under

the lake

has no saint

after which

to take its name

when after you have exhausted the possibilities

blank the sun does not matter the jeweled edges of your body do not matter not in the spring which arrives late in the evening i will not paint the new house blue i will not paint the new house blue somewhere she is walking in fields and when i do not paint the new house blue she will not weep for her mother for what she has lost and calls to report lost the news of dying you do not understand but will not paint the new house blue no wall no roof no blue in the ceilings or gutters blue is not the color you will paint the new house though your body blue though your hands blue as what comes before a bruise she says what wood will not lie beneath the haunted bed

12 may 2013

Hilary Mantel [theguardian]

from Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies:

When [Thomas] Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays. Though in Rome he knew a man, a turnspit in the papal kitchens, who had come face to face with an angel in a passage dripping with chill, in a sunken store room of the Vatican where cardinals never tread; and people brought him drinks to make him talk about it. He said the angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass.

11 may 2013

hawk on cypress @ Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, Naples, FL

lizard

alligator young

lizard

cypress & fern

seaweed @ Naples beach

congeries

Carol Peters

10 may 2013

Sarah Hall [theguardian]

from Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo:

Grace turned to the man behind her. She smiled.

— You’ll see. You’ll also be trying to get away from the pain. Look at you, so fresh in your uniform, you think you understand what it is to fight.

— Well, I have an idea, but why don’t you inform me, colonel.

— Let me tell you then. They tie the tubes off in your stomach with small metal clamps before you die, so that your shit can’t come out of the bullet holes while the priest reads last rites. It’s not possible to have a priest vomiting over a dying man because of the smell of guts and food turning into shit, you see. Have they told you what the most common injury is in the war? It’s your brain. The war punches an asshole in it and whenever it feels like it, it fucks the asshole. Always it feels too small, like it’s tearing open. You’re never going to get used to it — like a virgin will make herself stronger and stop bleeding. It always hurts when the war fucks you, but you know it’s rubbing on a place in your brain that you can’t control so you’re going to respond like you want to be fucked by it — maybe you’ll beat your wife when you get home or put your fingers in your little daughter, put her up on the table and make her dance for you in her mother’s shoes and pearls. And when the war is done fucking it comes, this stinking mess, this juice just like your own, and then the children of the war will live in your brain too. Even when you’re an old man with your polished medals, all bent over and can’t get hard and smelling of piss, sometimes the war will want to come back and fuck your brain in its asshole. All your life. Or until you put your gun up to here and pull the trigger. Yes. Yes.

Only the noise of the bobsled chicaning on its runners and the screams of the jubilant riders and the creak of shutters and signs leaning into the breeze on Oceanic Walk could be heard in the ensuing quiet. Grace was still smiling, broadly now, with her finger pointing to her temple like a gun barrel. And it was a terrible smile, terrible for the lack of psychotic characteristics, for the peaceful crescent moon it made of her mouth while the words escaping it had been rank. Cy could smell the tide coming in four hundred yards away, though he was holding his breath. She removed her hand and nodded again.

— Yes.

— Jesus Christ! Alrighty then, missy, no need to get crazy. Why the hell did you have to go and say all that for, anyway?

The young man turned to face Cy, to find out where his allegiances lay.

— This your girl? ‘Cause she sure is a swell lady. A real charmer.

Laura Kasischke

Laura Kasischke [Michigan State University Libraries]

Speeding Ticket

by Laura Kasischke

The officer asks if I know
why it is I’ve been pulled over. Oh,
No, I say, not

that armed robbery back in ’88. It is a joke

only a woman with two
children in the car, a woman
of a certain age could make. There’s a small

pleasant birthmark shaped
like an island I’ve been to on his face.
I show him the proper papers. Yes,

I’ve been to that place,
and I know about narrow escapes —

many sputtering coals
tossed into the mossy shadows among
the forget-me-nots, the violets, the wild oregano.

In a hurry, ma’am, today?

Hell no.
We could have been early
or late. Who cared? They never unlock that gate. What
difference would it make?
What I was after was just
a graceful passage to another place,
and now I know there’s no such thing.

A flock of swans
risen from the lake.

No swans. No way.
The self, contrary
to popular opinion, is not

the thing that remains. We are
infinite, and it isn’t
a question, is it,
of whether or not we could be replaced. Who

among the millions of us
would be worth the trouble it would take?

Truly, I wanted only
to appear to obtain such grace, and then

through the years somehow I became
a high brick wall fully expecting
the little blue flowers to thrive in my shade.

Once, I let a crescent wrench
rust for years in snow and rain. I knew

exactly where I’d dropped it, could
have taken you to the high
grass into which I’d let it slip, but there it stayed

until I saw the paperboy pick it up
and put it in his pocket one day.
Strange, only
the other morning
my son said he wanted
to be a policeman, or a demon, when he grew up.
To get bad people, he said.

And I said, yes, and poured more
coffee into my cup, and I

remembered the signs, that the signs
were posted all over that place:

Thin Ice, No Skating.

We skated anyway.

The yellow tape.
The psychology majors.
The structuralists, the policy-makers. And how,
when the time finally came
to stand before them and try to explain,

I had nothing at all to say.

Only to find myself suddenly unable
any longer not to say it, finally,
having you
here like this, all
ears and leaning
into my window with an island on your face.

True enough, I was not yet naked.
Comprehensive collision, the neighborhood was safe.

I had an address in it, and a name.  Only
to find you this patient beside
my motor vehicle in your final disguise, all
merciless kindness, laughing a little, with a boy’s
turquoise eyes.

A voice says Hurry, I’m burning.
A voice says Where are you hurt?

All those years, I thought
if only there were a fine, I could pay it
wholly, and this slow torture would be over!

A voice says This
isn’t the end
you know, no
monologue can save you.
A voice says, Yes, Officer, I know
why it is I’ve been pulled over,

while you write it down,
as I always knew you would.
This gentle reckoning,
all my life,

I was driving toward it as fast as I could.

5 may 2013

Peter Gizzi [voca]

Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil

by Peter Gizzi

            There is no better time than the present when we have lost everything. It doesn’t mean rain falling

            at a certain declension, at a variable speed is without purpose or design.

            The present everything is lost in time, according to laws of physics things shift

            when we lose sight of a present,

            when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved.

            In the expanding model things slowly drift and everything better than the present is lost in no time.

            A day mulches according to gravity

            and the sow bug marches. Gone, the hinge cracks, the gate swings a breeze,

            breeze contingent upon a grace opening to air,

            velocity tied to winging clay. Every anything in its peculiar station.

            The sun brightens as it bleaches, fades the spectral value in everything seen. And chaos is no better model

            when we come adrift.

            When we have lost a presence when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved,

            losing anything to the present. I heard a fly buzz. I heard revealed nature,

            cars in the street and the garbage, footprints of a world, every fly a perpetual window,

            unalloyed life, gling, pinnacles of tar.

            There is no better everything than loss when we have time. No lack in the present better than everything.

            In this expanding model rain falls

            according to laws of physics, things drift. And everything better than the present is gone

            in no time. A certain declension, a variable speed.

            Is there no better presence than loss?

            A grace opening to air.

            No better time than the present.

For Anne Loecher's homage to Lorine Niedecker, click here.

4 may 2013

Whistling Heron, Chiflón, Syringa Sibilatrix

Wild

quirquincho

the screaming hairy armadillo

digs the hole I fill daily

next to the garden wall

wild, the young hare

beds among zucchini

shiny black eye

wild fountains of sand

los ocultos architect

underground mazes

wild, the giant snail oozes

across asphalt

pink-rimmed pallium

wild, the parrot flocks

patrol fruiting vineyards

the sky screams

wild foxes, bald with mange

one by one, dead

for the black vultures feeding

wild, the turquoise-spotted toad

buried overnight

in the sprinkler box

wild, the whistling heron

yellow plumes fan

along the riverbed

wild slaty-breasted wood rail

the plumbeous rail

deep in the pond lilies

wild, the vines

bearing cayote squash

scraped & boiled for jam

wild cactus, the prickly pear

long spines spear

my hat’s crown

wild, the verdolaga

common purslane

succulent scourge for the weeder

wild, the dung-feeding beetles

noon mists of grasshopper

palm-sized bats at dusk

wild pink-spotted hawkmoth

wings battering bathroom tile

under the cat’s paws

wild, the tyrant flycatcher

morning’s choral voice

benteveo

benteveo

Great Kiskadee, Benteveo, Pitangus sulphuratus