Asterisk

To be small is to be distant
& vice versa.

The asterisk calls.
It leaves a message.

You turn it all the way up:
it sounds like a small fan.

In some parallel universe
all the stars look like this

& books with too many footnotes
collapse into black holes.

Eyecup

The blue plastic eyecup
of my mote-ridden boyhood
still sits on the top shelf
behind the bathroom mirror,
at eye-level now.
I remember how good
cool tap water felt
after the hot tears,
tilting my head all
the way back & willing
my eyelid to open,
& afterwards feeling
the scar & the scare recede
from that bit of grit,
but also a lingering sense
of guilt for letting
all the water dribble
to the floor or sink, how
the eye that tried to take in
a small piece of the earth,
as if mere vision were
no longer enough,
had blinked away the offer
of additional tears—
had refused to drink.

They built it

Hoarded Ordinaries:

This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?

Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.

Moving Poems profiled in Connotation Press

Back in early August, I had a very enjoyable, rambling discussion via Skype with California-based poet Erica Goss, who wanted to interview me for her new monthly column on videopoetry at the online journal Connotation Press. That interview is now up, and it’s coupled with an interview with Motionpoems founder Todd Boss (whose blog I just linked to here yesterday). Check it out.

I especially liked the closing quote from Todd: “To see your poem through the lens of film is to learn a new language about your poem. What could be more instructive than that?” I think this holds equally true for poets who envideo their own poems — or, as often happens, derive poems ekphrastically from film footage, their own or others’: it’s a form of translation. And just like traditional translating, it requires a reading so slow and so close as to amount to reinvention.

I also had a couple thoughts over at the Moving Poems forum, reacting to something Erica wrote: Are poets who make films of their poems self-publishing? And if so, are we risking loss of prestige (versus getting others to envideo our works)? Please go over there to comment on that, if you wish. But first, of course, read Erica’s column.

Peach Pit

Dark & intricately coiled as the brain of a chihuahua, hard knuckle, by what mechanism does it come to inhabit such yielding sweetness & such a velvet skin? Like a rough manuscript that some editor turns into a book with gilt-edged pages, its labyrinth is threaded with a scarlet bookmark. And how is it a pit? If you split it, no tree will grow. If you plant it, the tree won’t grow true & only hornets will burrow into that feral yellow, each of their pits ending where the pit begins. Yet even an unblemished peach, placed alone on a table, betrays something of its hidden, still life.

*

Written in response to a challenge to use three words in a poem: chihuahua, mechanism and manuscript.

Thirty-five rings in the river

Todd Boss:

We poets are used to solitude, and when we publish our work, it’s hardly an event that attracts attention. But this project would be seen by everyone on the riverfront in my home city of Minneapolis, for a whole month. I admit I had more than one sleepless night about this project. Would victims of the collapse be offended? Would the project get criticized in the media? Who was I to speak for my community this way?

Morning refuge

mole:

Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don’t really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don’t is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn’t even look human to me: they looked like masks.

Vagina Dialogue

A college roommate once confessed
he fantasized about growing a vagina
on his shoulder: It would be

so handy, right there
whenever he needed to whisper
in its big wet ear.

John loved redheads & disliked feminists.
One woman informed me
he had “bedroom eyes.”

Where would the uterus go? I asked.
He laughed. It wouldn’t need one—
it would have me.

What about the pillow talk?
It would sing me to sleep, he said,
with its pulse of surf.

*

See Rachel’s photographic response, “Salty.”

Sugar Pill

Is it or isn’t it?
The sugar pill isn’t saying.
The line that bisects it
was intentionally left blank.

It’s a go sign, perhaps,
or a one-bead rosary.
Its zero gives birth
to all other numbers.

Since opposites attract within
bounds of reason & good breeding,
it must be in love
with a salt tablet.

It can be anything
the salt wants,
including another condiment
that cures vagueness.

Who do you say
that it is—
a prophet or the platter
for his savory head?

Like a double agent,
it forgets who it’s working for.
It’s either about to smile
or about to weep.