Ben Lerner

wen:  a harmless cyst, especially on the scalp or face, containing the fatty secretion of a sebaceous gland

After the Wen’s Out

spots of white

antibiotic ointment in my hair

look like insect dribble

my attempt to comb them out

snags on a suture

minutes later blood

fingerprints my new-turned page

spills down my forehead

bring ice!

to the downtown poetry reading

I wear a baseball cap

spotted with Hakalau mud

bleached by Hawaii sun

better artist

than head wound

Daniel had hoped the wen might contain insect larva
specifically Dermatobia hominis
but it didn't
we chose pix & bio-disposal over path lab

Ben Lerner [pic courtesy of NPR]

from Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw:

The first gaming system was the domesticated flame. Contemporary video games allow you to select the angle from which you view the action, inspiring a rash of high school massacres. Newer games, with their use of small strokes to simulate reflected light, are all but unintelligible to older players. We have abstracted airplanes from our simulators in the hope of manipulating flight as such. Game cheats, special codes that make your character invincible or rich, alter weather conditions or allow you to bypass a narrative stage, stand in relation to video games as prayer to reality. Children, if pushed, will attempt to inflict game cheats on the phenomenal world. Enter up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, a, to tear open the sky. Left, left, b, b, to keep warm.

The artist proposes a series of lights attached to tall poles, spaced at intervals along our public roads, and illuminated from dusk to dawn. The public is outraged. The law’s long arm cannot support its heavy hand. The public is outrage. Kingergarteners simulate bayonet fighting with the common domestic fowl. Does this blood look good on me? Does this blood make me look fat? If you replace a cow’s stomach with glass, don’t complain when you cut your mouth.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

23 enero 2013

we’re not yet ready to leave

I did a bout of weeding

Mike finished his outdoor tasks

I cooked everything

we ate roasted squash, jook, & ribs

I introduced Glen to sewing circle

gave away lots of veg

ate three delicious kinds of cookies

now to wash the dishes

then coffee

before I pack

Elizabeth Robinson [pic courtesy of Poetry Society of America]

from Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart (Ahsahta 2012)

The sense of becoming disturbingly real to yourself, that point where the interior conversations begin, like daylight picking its way over a bridge, over there to the further shore to shine its brightest. The difficult shell halved and the sparse interior looked into, a voice appearing and disappearing with the light that fell on one’s single self. Difficult to arrange this monodony. A necessity, the act of discovering where the self starts, hears, itself, and repeats the instructions. [BarbaraGuest]

Once More (Sleep)

Sleep in its rounded mound,

soft and ashy.

Sleep — feathers of the unformed —

and ample to fill a pillowcase, then

blow from its seams

the indentation of the head that never was.

Again.

A summons

reneged. That drowsing

finger, charcoaled,

smears off the first letter

of any word’s repose,

of the soft powder

fills in the impression.

“I”

One site in the alphabet

needs mending.

What might be provender

releases its dissimilar

twin: empty hourglass

upended.

Corybantic silence,

unravel the echoes stitch

by stitch to make such cloak

then wear it. As in the gait,

uneven, “of a man forever in fear of falling”

so as to see to

the restoration of that letter.

Death’s doppelgänger

is truth.

But do not believe that madness has ever left us. Like pain, it lies in wait for us at each stage, I mean each time we run up against the word hidden in the word, the being buried in the being. [Edmond Jabés] . . .

now we're ready

expect my next post from Chile

Elena Fanailova

I finished the eggplant mouse’s body, unraveled it 
am midway through a green mouse’s body with a smaller needle 

my blog statistics indicate that 
Apple owns 60% of the operating system market 
Google owns 60% of the browser market 
Facebook links generate 5-10 times more traffic than Google+ links

I should read more Russian poetry:

Elena Fanailova [pic by Stanislav Lvovsky courtesy of Jacket2]

Lena and Lena

by Elena Fanailova

1

Lena is going to Belgrade

To see her lover,

The one she met in Sarajevo

Right in the airport.

They walk around in Kalemegdan

Look at a photo exhibit

Eat in a fish restaurant

On the banks of the Danube

They don’t get as far as Zemun

And end up a little irritated, waiting:

The taxi doesn’t come right away . . .

He’s very diplomatic
And very tender
That shape of personality and behavior
That she longed for in the dark

But his face wrenches out of shape
When he hears people speaking Hebrew
And hears their self-confident laughter
At the next table
Also he has pretty terrible taste . . .

Fucking, pure fucking until you see stars
As an instrument of cognition

read the rest of Fanailova's poem here

Emily Dickinson [pic courtesy of Wikipedia]

A tour de force read of the word thumb from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

An original Disobedience: A girl in bed alone sucking her thumb.Thumb: short thick first or most preaxial digit of the human hand differing from the four fingers in having greater freedom of movement and being opposable to the other fingers. Thumb and Gnome have silent letters and rhyme wrongly with Gun and whom. For Freudians, thumb and gun are phallic and the same. Without a thumb, it would be hard to grip a gun. The thumb helps my fingers grip, helps to turn the pages of a book. All thumbs — Awkward. Under the thumb: under control of. Thumb: To feel point press attack . . . to play. To thumb one’s nose at the collective wisdom of the ages. Wives and slaves were thumbs. In the nineteenth century a mark made with the inked thumb was used for identification of an illiterate person. Thumb rhymes with dumb.Thumb a nursery word rhymes crookedly with ‘time’ riddled back to Jack Horner who sat in his corner, eating a Christmas Pie. He put in his thumb pulled out a plum and said “What a good boy am I!” Good Uncle Tom. Was Jack put in the corner because he was wrong or dumb? What had he done? Back around to foe and Master and Jack the Giant Killer climbing his beanstalk to hear the “Fie, foh, and fum,” of Edgar/Tom’s mad song, “I smell the blood of a British man./ Be he alive or be he dead,/ I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” Jack, and Jacob the Bible’s poet, were both ladder-watchers. Tom Thumb (“Your Gnome”) was little but as powerful as David the other biblical poet, who slew Goliath with a sling-shot. Cover the touch-hole of a cannon with your thumb. She, GUN-THUMB-YELLOW EYE-BULLET-POET-GNOME is emphatic. Dauntless predator and protector.

coot eggs in large, reed-mounted nest

This afternoon Collin, Molly, Sarah, Beth, & I took a bird walk around the community lake. We identified chestnut-capped blackbird, red-gartered coot, pied-billed grebe, whistling heron, bare-faced ibis, jacana, South American stilt, & Coscoroba swan. We also saw algae, reeds, nests with & without eggs, fish ranging from tiny minnows to oversized koi, & small curled snails.

Phimosus infuscatus, Bare-faced ibis

Fulica armillata, Red-gartered Coot feeding cootlets

Coscoroba coscoroba, Coscoroba Swan

16 enero 2013

Parkinsonia praecox, Sonoran palo verde, brea, [pic courtesy of the Glendale Public Library]

Today we transplanted four breas into our garden, one big, one middle, two small.

the big brea, north border, east of house

Today

on the bristlemallow

a splotch of pink

though bristlemallow flowers salmon-mellow

petal-scattering rose

for the lake Veronica favors a balanced biome

beyond tadpole hatches

lapwings & kiskadees eating them

start out with iris throws

drum of hammers on the half-tiled roof

whine of electric saw

drone of diesel-powered moto

cadence of men speaking castellano

Sewing circle happens on Wednesday afternoons here. Ten stitchers & felters today. Buoyed by confidence gained earlier this month by crocheting a cotton dishcloth, I've begun crocheting a mouse from eggplant-color wool yarn.

2 enero 2013

Marjorie Perloff [pic from jacket2 courtesy of Marjorie Perloff]

Al Filreis urges us to read Marjorie Perloff's essay [again] about poetry [not] on the brink.

AM Babble

I wake before the cat, eager to roll the day

yet wait until five, I walk the cat to her bowl

return to bed for Mike's full-body hug

dress when the cat cries, races to flop 

on the kitchen rug for a belly rub, I carry her 

purring to the cat door, push her through

now I make my Earl Grey, spoon honey

take my pills, twitter at myself, post to Susan

glance at Facebook, read the news

some Perloff, a review of Guest

now the moment arrives — what to do today?

read & write, weed & prune, walk, harvest

vegetables, seed a flat, roast eggplants

& red bell peppers, layer with tomatoes & queso

Jane's for sewing circle @ two — no point 

going to town for meat, the shops empty

even if they’re open until the trucks appear

probably not until tonight, or mañana

we're a long way down the road.

one more footnote from Boully:

156.999 . . . Translator’s Note. — This sentence in the original is obviously meant to illustrate the fault of which it speaks. It does so by the use of a construction very common in the original,‡ but happily unknown in translation∞; however, the fault itself still exists nonetheless, though in different form.

‡ original as in this life.

∞ translation as in the next.

fiscal cliff averted, say what? . . . let it go, the Internet here so f'ing slow

can't load foxnews OR the new york times even if I cared to

Selah: probably a liturgical direction, added to the original text of a psalm. It may mean lift up, either to indicate the lifting up of the voices of the singers in a doxology, or to call for lifted-up instrumental music in an interlude in the singing.

"Am Vladimir" by Deborah Poe, e.g.:

Spoke English

as if unfortunate squirrel.

Am greedy.

@ delirious hem

Peter Gizzi [pic by Robert Seydel]

from Peter Gizzi’s SomeValues of Landscape and Weather (2003):

Add This to the House

Not a still life into which artifice may enter

but a labor to describe the valves

and cordage that entwine this room;

the voltage is enough to kill.

Who in the morning dish-gray light

can fathom the witness parable of waking,

the bed, the cask, the zoned spaces

we pass through. It would be lovely

to say floorboards pose in firelight,

coals are banking down, the room

comes up by degrees. Instead, the day

has begun, shadows dispelled by the clock,

by the promise of work, Clorox,

the phone. I can see you by that metaphor,

the house, the door, the car heading out

to meet the sun, then again hours

later returning, your back to it.

work, Clorox, / the phone. . . . the house, the door, the car . . . your back to it . . . 

Our sewing circle met for the first time today. Jane crocheted, Margaret embroidered, Deirdre quilted, Eris made a felted animal, Kathy sewed, & I began to learn to crochet — much more practice required.