Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the old feminist notion that the personal is inescapably political, I do try and write about politics mainly through a personal or literary lens. For the rare exceptions, see Rants.
(click on image to enlarge)
Working with severe restrictions made me think of… working with severe restrictions.
Via Shuffle Words, and prompted by a comment from Marja-Leena. Shuffle Words lets you save and link to your work, so feel free to leave links to your own magnetic poems in the comments.
Sometimes, you need a bridge
where there is no river.
The ground falls away
& you need that pique experience —
looking down on everything
without ever having climbed,
sky & water wearing the calm
blue uniform of authority.
Held up by high-strung cables,
speeding through our lives,
we could all use a pause
to adjust our perspective,
get in touch with who
we really are & what
brings us here, dry-
mouthed or sweaty,
death as close
as a sudden, wild leap.
From Pohanginapete, a mediation on what it means to be an artist in a time of slow-motion apocalypse:
The comment reminded me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous remark, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.”
I thought about the justification for comments like these, and my own pessimism about where we’re headed; our apparent failure to convert concern into action. Should we abandon esoteric research; should I stop photographing rocks?
It’s a hard one. It’s tempting to think we “should” act responsibly, but how happy would we be if we insisted on acting responsibly? Sure, some of us would — and do — feel satisfied and happy knowing (or thinking) we’re doing the right thing, but what about the rest of us who, if we sacrificed ourselves for the greater good, would spend our lives feeling thwarted by our sense of duty — in effect, resenting the conscience that denied us the right to pursue what we most wanted? Enough, I guess, to make the world a less happy place than it would otherwise have been.
— The end of the world as we know it
(Please leave any comments you might have over there, not here.)
This hatchet hasn’t bitten
through a neck in twenty years.
When we raised poultry,
it was in weekly use,
& also had regular dates
with the bench grinder:
a grating hiss, & a bright
new smile would open
in century-old rust.
The back of the head flares
into a hammer,
lending heft & balance
to this almost-cross
& making it easy to hang
from a pair of nails.
In a museum in Pittsburgh
I saw a hatchet
that was also a peace pipe
with a bowl opposite the blade
& the handle drilled out:
a two-faced tool for political campaigning.
Whether depriving one’s opponents
of their fleshy skullcaps
or making the circuit
of a smoke-filled room,
its true role was to mime death,
to undergo burial,
should diplomacy demand it,
its windpipe stopped up with dirt
in a grave shallow enough to allow
quick disinterment.
A sacred thing, meant to circle
from role to role.
A hatchet can even carve
its own next body,
the model for which —
as Confucius once pointed out —
is always frighteningly close.
The dirtiest corner is always the one where the brooms are kept.
Prayer, from the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo. Music traditional Tuvan, performed by Ay-Kherel.
A fervent wish: that the water in this ephemeral pond last long enough for the wood frog tadpoles to complete their metamorphosis this year. When I walked up there this afternoon, I found just two egg masses, anchored to sticks near the center of the pond. Many of last autumn’s leaves floating just under the surface had turned green again, thanks to a fresh bloom of algae. I suppose you could take that as a sign of hope if you wanted to.
Click photo to see the full-size image at Visual Soma
As of this morning, the “pond” down in the corner of the field has a single egg mass, and wood frog mating activity seems to be over for the year, so the resident newt will probably make short work of those tadpoles. I have serious doubts about the long-term survival of our wood frog population in Plummer’s Hollow.
*
Speaking of hope — or the lack thereof — somehow I’ve managed to avoid saying anything about the famous people who have driven past the mountain in recent days: NPR’s Linda Wertheimer, Senator Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. It was fascinating that Wertheimer discovered outspoken social conservatives whose views just happened to confirm outsiders’ preconceptions of this part of Pennsylvania… in a local Baptist church. I gritted my teeth to read of Obama’s vocal support for “clean coal” (an oxymoron, since there’s no clean way to extract it) and wind turbines everywhere (the ecological costs of which would outweigh the benefits here in the east, according to a report from the National Academies of Science last year). In fairness, the Clintons also support these environmental shell games.
As far as I know, Jon Stewart hasn’t swung through western Pennsylvania recently, but he must’ve been here at some point, because his one-liner on April 1 captured the essence of the region as well as anything can:
This area best known for its chief exports, coal and sadness.
It is perhaps a measure of his greatness as a comedian that he managed to turn that into a laugh line.
A very tattered question mark Compton tortoise shell butterfly landed on the trail ahead of me as I made my way back to the house.
UPDATED 4/11 to correct the butterfly I.D., thanks to tigerbeetlefreak on Flickr. (See the Massachusetts Butterfly Club page for a side-by-side comparison with other brushfoots.)
Updated 4/9 with a couple more sentences and links on our all-too-brief brush with greatness.
Something feels wrong in my sitting. I reach into my back pocket & find a four-page folded love letter from the government, printed on durable green paper. Legal tender, it says, & E Pluribus Unum. An eye levitates above a pyramid: In God we trust. It all sounds highly irregular. The signatures change from one page to the next, making it clear that these are different notes, bound on different journeys. Two are tattered, and one carries strange markings in purple ink. I am given to understand that desire touches everything it changes. My clothes too once belonged to strangers & were made by strangers — the same as my thoughts. And who knows what tongues these words have been on! I am reminded unaccountably of the last snow still with us on April Fool’s, disguised as soft black mounds under the highway overpass where the borough dumped it, slowly bleeding to death in that forty-year-old desert beside the river.
The first thing you need to know
is that it happens right here,
time & again. And also
that the heavens do not open
because they already gape as wide
as they will go: witness young Iscariot,
those stars in his eyes
about to go nova. He means to see
justice done, because somebody —
Tax collectors? Call girls? —
must pay for this profligacy. Ah,
there he is again, on the front page,
in black & white.
That corrupt bastard
who’s married to his wife. Well,
I’ve always been a straight-shooter,
he thinks, & raises the picture
to his lips.
Sen. Obama spent several minutes going through the music selection and making requests. He finally settled on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Wang Dang Doodle.”
–CBS 11 News Talks With Barack Obama
Ballast of sea water riding through the lake water, filled with an alien and dangerous life. Ballast of rocks. I am on an alternate picnic, partaking of a feast made up of sustenance other than food. I am watching the Daley Show from afar, and dreaming of hog butchers with big shoulders. We’re gonna break out all the windows, we’re gonna kick down all the doors! The drumbeat diminishes as the bandshell sinks below the horizon. Where’s Maxwell Street Jimmy when you need him? Where’s Howlin’ Wolf? When I listen to the radio, even if it’s supposed to be music, it all sounds like talk to me. Everybody’s signifying. The goddamn fog comes in on LOLcat feet. Are we there yet?
I am not done with this one book, and you want me to try a second? The writing is backwards, and corresponds to nothing I know.
Between one page and the next, they launch the fall line of suicide vests with developmentally disabled children as models.
Between one verse and the next, they send a satellite to snap pictures of lakes on a moon of Jupiter.
The words fall softly, like the tolling of bells without clappers. The golden frogs vanish from the green mountain.
The type font bulges at the bottom: tears tattooed on a gang member’s face in remembrance of each his victims.
The letter kills, the Word makes whole, and the whole makes a mishmash of identities.
The Amish bishop says of the communion wine: If one berry remains whole, it has no share in the whole.
Oh War, my War, save us from this quagmire of holiness.