In the house of night, a blue bear
pores over the screenplay for your dreams.
Somebody’s bad heart wrinkles
like a sack of cheese tied to the rafters.
I dreamed that I was lucid-dreaming,
and then I was.
In the house of night, neither ink
nor midnight oil ever run low.
Bed-time prayers flutter out
through a cross-shaped window,
anachronistic as bats on a winter day.
The mild poison from a house spider bite
spreads a dark delta down one thigh.
In the house of night, every time
a clock stops, some unloved language
or species dies in its sleep.
A nightjar blows its lid
& the bogeyman jumps, an obvious fraud,
under the parchment eaves.
So much of what we see when we follow a trail is the trail itself. Between watching our feet to avoid tripping over rocks or getting bogged down in mud, and keeping an eye out for trail blazes, it’s a wonder we ever manage to notice anything else. Continue reading “On Adirondack trails”
We didn’t get as many submissions of curses for the qarrtsiluni Words of Power issue as I would’ve liked, though we did get a few, and we’ll be running them soon. Here’s a kind of curse I imagine gets muttered a lot these days.
A plague on your unrealestate!
A descent of tent caterpillars, a fleet of mosquitos.
May the neighbors pit-roast goats & ululate.
May the farmer on the far hill
spread liquid manure during your dinner parties.
May termites decimate the fake Tudor half-beams
on your misbegotten horror-scene of a house,
may your drywall get dry rot,
may your lawn turn wild every full moon
& seed the subdivision with beggar-ticks.
May the INS arrest you in broad daylight
for employing undocumented workers
to blow from dawn to dusk
your goddamned leaves.
May you be forced to rake.
One word, it doesn’t matter which,
can be the pebble that sets off
an avalanche. Careful!
We could be buried until spring,
limbs tangled
under the snowy quilt.
One syllable older than language
can shock the snow awake,
recollecting its true nature:
to flow, to flood.
Listen: the brass bell fastened
to the neck of a sheep
has some other sheep’s tooth
for a clapper.
These noises we make
for each other & through each other,
mouth against throat,
broadcast our position
at every trembling step.
Thought I’d try my hand at a love poem for once. Not being in any romantic entanglement actually makes it easier, I think. Hard to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance otherwise.
There’s also an accompanying image at my photoblog. I’m not sure what the species is here, nor why they’re attracted to this bucket in which brushes covered with latex house paint have been cleaned out. If anyone can enlighten me on either score, please leave a comment.
This was shot with my regular digital camera (in the heat of the moment I forgot I had a camcorder), then speeded up to about twice the actual speed. I extracted, cleaned up, and selected a portion of the audio track — annual cicadas in full whine — to combine with my recitation. I dashed off the poem under the influence of alcohol for authenticity’s sake. Here it is, for the benefit of those on dial-up:
This is no moon, my poet friends.
Those are no crickets.
That cloying scent doesn’t come from a flower.
Whatever you’re trying to quench, it isn’t thirst.
From the first fist into
the risen mass, the dough
is a-hiss. To live is
to master a liturgy
of winds — even yeast
knows this. Gas
whispers out through
a thousand pinholes as
I fold & press, fold
& press that limit-
less quilt.
*
Written for the RWP vowel prompt. Other responses may be found here.
After the death of my fierce Nanna, my grandfather, otherwise lucid as ever, began to lose his grip on names. His grandson he called the little fella, his grandaughter the little girl, and nearly every object became the thing. Set the thing on the thing and bring me the thing, he’d say. Which thing? That thing, he’d point. The thing! His stories were even harder to interpret, with no landmarks at hand to aid in navigation. He’d gesture anyway, frowning at his failure to make us follow. When I was head of the research lab at Mobil — he liked to tell us — anyone who seemed to have a good idea, I’d say go ahead, work on that! He’d left the details up to others, and got his name on scores of patents — half the plastics of the age. He’d learned to read organic compounds with almost Talmudic devotion, and had come to understand the importance of thinking big, but not what can happen to small details that don’t fit into an engineer’s tidy equations. How they wash downstream and out to sea. I’m glad he didn’t live to read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It might’ve reduced him to a complete stutter, so many bland things stripped of their thingness by decades of sunlight, his grand inventions converging in submerged islands and ground down into toxic floating sand.
The teachable moment arrives in its dollar-store shoes & hand-me-down corduroys and takes a front-row seat. We properly interred citizens shift uneasily on our plush velvet beds. Why is the blackboard green now? Who hung that Muslim star map over our heads? The teachable moment brings laughter into the classroom, and never wants to do anything but play with the fingerpaints, which are edible now, they say, & taste like corn syrup. Look, a face! Red mouth, open, open. Angry hot grill. But the blue doesn’t taste as good as the others, so pour it on thick: jeering bluejay, jailbait, merchant marine. Swirl the primary colors together until they all turn to mud. Only the corners of the paper stay dry. Teachable in what way, we’d like to know. Comfort in one’s own skin is the mark of a mongrel. We are all strangers & sojourners in the earth; our name is Legion. American Legion. Why can’t the road crews spray that feral patch of prairie against the fence, that growth the plough’s steel scalpel could never reach? What have they done with our cypress spurge, which smelled so much like lilacs in lilac-time? Quickly now, before the paint dries! But the moment is gone. The millipedes go back to their homework, its evil twin.
I’ve been working on this poem for the last three days, thinking I could repurpose some video I shot back in March 2008 and only shared in black-and-white form at the time (see Rabid fox). The story has been simplified slightly, but most of that simplification is a consequence of memory’s alembic — I did not refer to my earlier post before completing the video.
(Transcript)
The gray fox was sitting in the driveway
when we got up. A blessing, we thought,
returning its gaze from the veranda.
To have found a place in the cool regard
of a creature so at home in the forest
& so seldom seen by day — it felt
like a message: that we belong here
on the mountain, that our presence
is acceptable. We were already
rehearsing the story we’d tell about it
as it got to its feet, that lovely animal
the color of ash & flame, & trotted
up past the garage & out of sight.
We’re still basking in the warm glow
of chosenness when later that day
we see it again, wandering in circles
around the stark sunlit field. Now
it wears a beard of bloody foam
& keeps shaking its head as if
something has it by the throat.
We watch through binoculars
as it sinks into the grass & disappears,
then rises again: undead. Rabid.
What we took for friendliness
is instead a violent kind of taming,
the virus robbing it of every wild instinct.
I get close & watch as long as I
can stand to. Its jaw works & works.
Its eyes close for long moments.
If my presence registers at all, I doubt
I’m anything but one more, minor torment.
The brief convulsion after
the bullet shatters its skull is almost
refreshing to watch — a return to
the expected order of things.
I dig a deep grave between the roots
of a wild black cherry, break the brick-
red clods with the back of my shovel
& trickle the soil over that shining coat.
