February 2012
41 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Taking the dog out at 2 am
I’ve just slipped past those guards of sleep who tonight are more like Swedish policemen— well-meaning but complacent—just as happy to let me go on my way as detain me here in this land of the conscious, when you begin your rhapsodic mantra of barking at the door. For this I would like to punish you or at least give a gentle reminder that unlike you, I haven’t been napping most of the day. ...
2 tags
Everything is Waiting For You
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or...
2 tags
Nobody
If you can’t bring yourself to build a snowman or even to clench a snowball or two to fling at the pine tree trunk, at least find some reason to take you out of yourself: scrape a patch of grass clear for the birds maybe; prod at your shrubs so they shake off the weight, straighten up; or just stump about leaving prints of your boots, your breath steaming out. Promise. Don’t let...
1 tag
Recipe for Amnesia
Of every priest, guru, nun and rishi, of every therapist, lama, swami, and saint. Of every drug addict and several strangers on the street, I’ve asked for teachings on forgetfulness, transmissions, rituals for purification, drugs and whiskey, any form of magic for erasing your voice from my mind, your image from my days and nights, your scent of salt and lemons and warm summer rain like a tiny...
1 tag
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more...
1 tag
Don't Say My Name
Skull, axis, kernel of focus, hub of center, genius of crisis, Drain, swaddled in silken tufts, shawl, veil, scarf, majestic loft. Listing, harebrained, keeling, right side up and upside down, one big lonesome brain searching through eternity for eyes, arms, legs, forty acres and a mule, kind neighbors, good luck, faithful lovers. Big, guileless baby of a brain searching through eternity with...
Skúffuskáld
growing-orbits:
is an Icelandic word which describes someone who is secretly a poet. It literally means “drawer poet”, someone who writes poetry but puts it all into a desk drawer instead of sharing it with other people.
(with thanks to icelandiclanguage)
wabi-sabi
asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes—"if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."
1 tag
Cook
Each night you come home with five continents on your hands: garlic, olive oil, saffron, anise, coriander, tea, your fingernails blackened with a marjoram and thyme. Sometimes the zucchini’s flesh seems like a fish-steak, cut into neat filets, or the salt-rubbed eggplant yields not bitter water, but dark mystery. You cut everything into bits. No core, no kernel, no seed is scared: you cut...
1 tag
Bedroom Life with Ceramic Frog
Different from other of my lives but not so different because you are a part of it and them and these and this. We sleep because we love to dream and I talk in my sleep, say I love you with diligence, love like porcupine needles are sharp— that giant space porcupine whose quills the Great Astronaut plucked to weave the needlework of the universe! is how I love you. I’m incomprehensible in...
1 tag
Voluptuosity
The body’s curving comes to the hand like the dry fields rise to rain, like risen bread rounds off in heat, like a pie, baking, rises to the attic must of your grandmother’s house where you and your cousins, winter Sundays, pawed up and pored over treasure. Like a well- made tool, the palmed body docks and snugs, convex to concave, with heft centered and a contouring, wraparound grip....
exit music (for a film)
1 tag
The personal touch
I have fifteen cloud stamps, it says on the back cirrus means curl of hair, altocumulus lenticularis look like UFOs, I have put hair, an alien invasion, on the envelope bearing the letter you’ll read under the sky of your living room, crappy light fixture sky, falling plaster sky, have snugged in the envelope fifteen pictures of my hand holding fifteen stamps beneath the skies from which they...
1 tag
After Us
One day someone will fold our blankets and send them to the cleaners to scrub the last grain of salt from them, will open our letters and sort them out by date instead of by how often they’ve been read. One day someone will rearrange the room’s furniture like chessmen at the start of a new game, will open the old shoe box where we hoard pajama-buttons, not-quite-dead batteries and...
1 tag
Room
After it came in like a dark bird Out of the snow, barely whistling The notes father, mother, child, It was hard to say what made us happiest. Seeing the branches where it had learned To stir the air? The air that opened Without fear? Just the branches And us in a room of wild things? Like a shapeless flame, it flew A dozen times around the room. And, in...
1 tag
Valentine
simplicity say sleep or shall we shower have an apple you are as I need water shall I move? do you dream? shallow snow flesh melt this
Tom Pickard
1 tag
From the Book of Rope
First, there is love. Secondly, the square knot, a perfect binding of two equal loops, useful for fastening gifts to each other or, in the extreme, for closing bandages over wounds, expected or not. The sheet bend hooks unequal partners, originally a rope to the twisted end of a sail, something fastened against wind. The bowline’s loop won’t close, good for saving yourself in...
1 tag
Welcome Morning
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, . in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry “hello there, Anne” each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is...
2 tags
Unable to find
the right way to get out of bed, we watch the shades cut down into thin slices, waver a while, shoulder to shoulder, then join, lazy. Let’s leave this room now: it’s given us all it can, let’s go—it’s Sunday—have breakfast out, find a table for two: two eggs, two toast, two coffees—black. No, nothing plain: latté. We’ll read the...
1 tag
Off in Every Direction
We have said nothing but started anyway. It is not a beginning. On the phone we take solace. In the air we make faces. What does one do with photographs of past lovers? The obvious ones, the enlargements, can be discarded at the other end of anger & a bonfire. Off in every direction movement: bipedal, automotive, locomotive & sound: oral birds whose chipped words do not fit in the human...
1 tag
By Virtue of And
Honey given : Honey taken By virtue of and we divide and separate: branching into palo verde: green stick tree precipitating yellow blossoms: green tree, yellow blossoms: a mind sticks on certain images, certain colors: phone’s ringing interrupts: it’s the neighbor again she wishes: someone would do something about the bees: yellow blossoms delicate, fluted: all the wind...
1 tag
Aubade
I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess. Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust crumbled. You push me back into bed. More “honey” and “baby.” Breath you tell my ear circles inside me, curls a damp wind and runs the circuit of my limbs. I interrogate the air, smell Murphy’s Oil Soap, dog kibble. No rose. No patchouli swelter. And your...
2 tags
Nightsong
Beside you, lying down at dark, my waking fits your sleep. Your turning flares the slow-banked fire between our mingled feet, and there, curved close and warm against the nape of love, held there, who holds your dreaming shape, I match my breathing to your breath; and sightless, keep my hand on your heart’s breast, keep nightwatch on your sleep to prove there is no dark, nor death.
Philip...
4 tags
5 tags
Instrument
The dog pulls at the wing of a dead sparrow and she shoos him off, a small shovel in the other hand already digging for the burial. Bless this mess you have made, O Lord. We’ve been practicing praying lately at dinner, careful not to ask for things (although we ask for things inside)—I’m trying to be more thankful, more blesséd than beast, I’m trying to come to...
2 tags
The Bird Kingdom
after Czeslaw Milosz
Bright, beautiful, warm, and free, your body as if from the bottom of a lake, rises and floats, a golden lure glinting on the surface of my mind, among feathers.
MRB Chelko
1 tag
Going Back to Bed
Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday’s attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when,...
2 tags
Lenox Aubade
for Amy Clampitt
I grew my hair out in a depression. Let it knot into a forum for the birds in my thoughts, sparked into actuality in the wee dark. What wills them awake? An early sentry, then the rest beckoning? Coordinates rising when stars in the lifting night are falling. Letting them nest, I felt their joy accumulate, until I...
2 tags
The Lyric Moment
Because the ground is wet still and the moon small, and because the wildfire smoke tells of summer, we place our shoes on the ground before stepping into the grass and remember a friend telling his students that the lyric moment must be created among them if they are to understand Rilke. Again and again, however we know the landscape of love, the deep scent of...
from Audubon
3
Suppose all the world is a house lit up against the night, and the eye of the bird our only window. If you look through the black air, you just might see a man, a father, say, who takes his broken sleep down the hall to a desk in the distance. He is peering over his heavy glasses to the near at hand, papers that await his signature to put his affairs in order. When he writes, his pen bleeds a...
2 tags
Love Is Not Concerned
love is not concerned with whom you pray or where you slept the night you ran away from home love is concerned that the beating of your heart should kill no one
Alice Walker
Wikipedia: Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. →
1 tag
Buddha in Sunlight
Our old dog lies on the front porch in sunlight. He moves as the sun moves, follows it along the porch, rising slowly, never going further than is necessary to stay within the warm curve of worship. He yawns, scratches, sheer minimalist, conservation of energy. This morning a rabbit hopped into the yard, nibbling clover. He lifted his head, eyed it for a moment, then lowered his head, closed his...
1 tag
Crossroads
The second half of my life will be black to the white rind of the old and fading moon. The second half of my life will be water over the cracked floor of these desert years. I will land on my feet this time, knowing at least two languages and who my friends are. I will dress for the occasion, and my hair shall be whatever color I please. Everyone will go on celebrating the old birthday, counting...
1 tag
[By any measure]
By any measure, it was endless winter. Emulsions with Then circled the lake like This is it. This April will be Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose early, erased for an hour Silk-brush and ax I’d like to think I’m a different person latent image fading around the edges and ears Overall a tighter face now. Is it so hard for you to...
1 tag
1 tag
Midwestern Gothic
That frigid Wichita month hangs in my history like a smoke-darkened painting—all tight-lipped Presbyterians and dormant cornfields frozen beneath the iron gray slab of January. I was trapped in a rusty carbuncle of a travel-trailer stuck like a pimple on someone’s winter field, a landscape slapped flat by God’s hand. Each night my father and his wife belted out ’70s pop standards billed as...
January 2012
39 posts
1 tag
Pseudonarcissus
She’s all arms and legs, a stick in a skirt ambling through the room to the mirror. There’s a hairband on her wrist, as her elbows rise to their reflection and her fingers run through her hair, which shines yellow, then gold, in the low winter sun that streams through the latticed windows.
She tilts back her head, makes taut every strand, and wraps the hairband over itself, as...
1 tag
Once in a While I Gave Up
Once in a while I gave up, and let myself remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s hips were set, the head of the femur which rode, not shallow, not deep, in the socket of the pelvis, wrapped in the iliofemoral and ischiofemoral ligaments, the ball bearings suspended just so to give him that walk. Wooden yokes, in grade-school foreign-country-custom movies, had moved like that, over...
1 tag
Aubade
Scintillas of the anatomical on the vines, buds opening— make me a figure for the woken. On the vines, buds opening— blue, little throats. For the woken, this different tin sky. Blue, little throats speak to me in the right voice. This different tin sky, the playground thawing. Speak to me in the right voice, only clean, sweeter. The playground thawing into its primary colors. Only clean,...
1 tag
The blur between fingers
He buries his face into my hair and inhales. If I live anywhere in his body, I live in his lungs. There are better organs I’m sure, but it’s warm here too, and most of the sound stays away. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up to feel my spine against the wall. I don’t mean to make this all about bodies but we are the sort of people whose faith is Tangibility, and there is little...
2 tags
Séverine in Summer School
Naked for twenty-four of our last thirty-six Hours together, and I mean museum-quality, sex- Shop, God-riddling naked, sapping gold Light from the windows of her hundred-year-old Baltimore dorm, we were hungry for selling Points, like a couple in a showroom. Compelling Arguments were made to close the deal And children were discussed. I kissed her from heel To head in a shower...
1 tag
love poem #3
1 i will put a bee under your bed 2 every day for a year 3 so you do not perceive the increase 4 of bees under your bed 5 and become unconsciously accustomed to their activity 6 which at its culmination a. (364 bees) 7 will be substantial 8 you will lay down over a large, undulating field 9 of meticulous noise a. their dark purr will comfort you b. you will require their delicate sludge to sleep...
1 tag
We Dogs of a Thursday Off
The wine of uncharted days, Their unsteady stance against the working world, The intense intoxication of nothing to be done, A day off, The dance of the big-hearted dog In us, freed into a sudden green, an immense field: Off we go, more run than care, more dance— If a polka could be done not in a room but straight Ahead, into the beautiful distance, the booming Sound of the phonograph weakening,...
1 tag
2 tags
The End
You must have felt it working in your bones. It’s begun: The papers print the same stories over and over, and have you checked the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing when nobody’s home. Between our skins is a necessary friction that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It’s begun: What was once the wind or an...